The Man of Mode Olivier, London SE1
As You Like It Crucible, Sheffield
The Dumb Waiter Trafalgar Studios, London SE1
He's been good before, but at the National this week he delivers the comic performance of the year. As Sir Fopling Flutter in Nicholas Hytner's modern-dress (and somewhat modern-language) production of The Man of Mode, Rory Kinnear raises the satirical temperature as soon as he trips on to the stage.
He enters issuing a flurry of 'ciao' and 'tais-toi' into his mobile, waggling - 'woo, woo' - his fingers at his companions, mimicking the uncorking of a champagne bottle. Names - 'I knew a French count so like you' - drop from him like clouds of scent; he displays the tassels on his jeans, sleeves and shirt as if he were showing off prize pets. Both gullible and deeply uneasy, he gives a truly Restoration performance in which each flourish of words is embellished by a gesture. He proves again that George Etherege was the most theatrical of writers; his dandy dialogue can be savoured on the page but comes to life only in action. It has been missing from the stage for too long.
Hytner's production is part of a big and welcome project: that of wiring the London plays of the past into the present. He made The Alchemist look as if Ben Jonson belonged to the 21st century but has a harder job with Etherege's sceptical, scabrous and gorgeously worded play which hides its steeliness behind orchidaceous phrasing. Stripping it of patches and periwigs, as well as some intricate locutions, what Hytner offers is an ingenious translation.
Townley's house, a central meeting place, is turned into Townley's bar, and Mrs Loveit's establishment into a boutique. A match-making father and mother become the heads of two Indian families whose sprogs get off on imitating their elders in Goodness Gracious Me accents. The chief rake, supposedly based on the lascivious and gifted Earl of Rochester, is first glimpsed in a glossy magazine: a tattooed (and too often semaphoring) Tom Hardy plays him with insufficient languor, though his threatening, shoulder-rolling scorn makes you long to see him in Pinter.
Hardy is one of an exceptional young cast which includes Hayley Atwell, Nancy Carroll and Bertie Carvel, who slyly suggests a Peter Mandelson-style crony. Speeding along, with stylised dances (including a bum-bag one) between scenes, they provide an evening of sparky moments - but where, in Vicki Mortimer's bland set, is the London so much referred to? And where, really, is the danger in mocking conspicuous consumption? This is a blunter instrument than the lethal 1676 original.
There's more updating at Sheffield, where Samuel West - in his last (a pity, that) production as artistic director - alights on the theatrical elements in As You Like It. Daniel Weyman's graceful, moving Jacques - tottering on high heels, with grasses sprouting from his hat - opens the evening with a transplanted fragment of his later 'All the world's a stage'. Katrina Lindsay's acidly lit design - with a cut-out tree and giant balloon for a sun - looks as if it's been ordered from Paperchase. A series of hats, charmed by a piper out of the ground, are stuck on stalks to provide different outfits: Rosalind plucks a glittery topper when she comes to deliver her epilogue.
It's a cool rather than a rousing version, but it catches the essence - what Jacques calls 'a most humorous sadness' - of Shakespeare's greatest comedy. It's not only the characters (including a whole court got up as rustics) that wear disguises here. The entire play is made up of false leads, feints and contradictions. The most rousing songs are bitter. Minor personages occasion some of the greatest speeches. The seven ages of humankind are solemnly listed as being entirely male, and yet the most vibrant and varied person on stage is a woman.
Rosalind defines an actress's particular talent. Vanessa Redgrave first showed her liquid physicality in the role; on this same Crucible stage, Victoria Hamilton created an urchin who went straight to the heart. Eve Best remakes the character again: she's droll, agile, elegant. She indicates her boy-girl changes with a drop or lilt of her voice. She argues Orlando into love like a lawyer, and gasps like a teenager at the thrill of being near him. She's like Portia with a sense of humour. And she's given a lovely extra dimension by Lisa Dillon - who had her first big break at Sheffield only four years ago and has since memorably appeared alongside Best in Hedda Gabler. Dillon not only gives juice to dullish (she's such a girl) Celia: she acts as a tacit commentary on her cousin's actions: just watch her goggle when Rosalind, disguised as a boy, snogs Orlando.
Harold Pinter wrote The Dumb Waiter in 1957, a year after Look Back in Anger was first staged: it now appears infinitely more prescient than Osborne's supposed theatrical turning point. The popular draw of Harry Burton's production lies in the casting of Jason Isaacs (of Harry Potter and much besides) and stand-up Lee Evans as the two hitmen summoned to a toilet-like dive to carry out an unknown job. Isaacs is efficiently callous, and Evans is riveting in the silent bits of anxious business (there's a long sequence at the beginning when he excavates the contents of his shoes like a man engaged on a mystery tour). But both are as yet too unwilling to admit casualness as well as tension and let this pungent thriller grow as it should. It's missing that Pinter trademark: the easy roll of desultoriness into disaster.
Still, the staging is spot-on, with grubbiness seeping from every crevice. Peter McKintosh's crumbling tiled walls are lit by Simon Mills with low-slung strip lights of the kind that blare brightly away without illuminating anything. Matt McKenzie has created a terrific soundscape, with an unpredictable lavatory cistern growling away at one side of the stage and the dumb waiter of the title slamming down into the centre of the action, bearing its banal commands for sago and scampi. It's a perfect example of how being in period doesn't mean being dated.