Eschewing the emotional chiaroscuro of more contemplative, claustrophobic visions, this Henry IV 1 is a rollicking paean to the mythology of wild prince Hal. In the Boar’s Head tavern (presided over by a tart Barbara Marten and the beatifically placid William Gaunt), Jamie Parker’s sunny prince disports himself, displaying a most un-regal knack for tumbling, penny-whistle playing and flirting with (delighted) groundlings. Not a whit the Machiavellian dissembler, this is a Hal who morphs from loveable madcap to charismatic martial hero with unselfconscious ease, leaving others to marvel at the suddenness and subtlety of the transformation.

Altogether less blithe is Roger Allam’s Falstaff; a shrewd old soldier, disreputable but far from daft, whose determinedly economic engagement with life’s actualités is a charade accomplished enough to fool everyone but himself. It’s he, and not his easygoing protégé, who broods, bleary-eyed on an uncertain future. But, a showman to his fingertips, he buries this more-sombre-self under a welter of affectionate buffoonery, and the imperturbable facade of habitual vice.

This is a production more concerned with the fate of mates than that of nations. By contrast with the laid-back fellowship of East Cheap, the highly-strung, wasp-stung Hotspur of Sam Crane is a self-regarding liability, callowly fumbling each chance to make his peace with Lorna Stuart’s alert, politic and queenly Kate.

The company’s repertoire of ballads and drinking songs veers tipsily between booze-fuelled jollity and morning-after melancholy, and their air of easy camaraderie suits the show’s unpretentious, blokeish charm. Part 2 is due at the start of July (so watch this space for further news …), but even without its climactic sequel this is a roguishly appealing, stand-alone historical romp.

Electric Hotel is an outdoor performance in a prefab tawdy looking American hotel building for seven dancers, where the audience are invited to listen in through a set of headphones, guided by sound. With four floors and full-length windows, the hotel encapsulates the lives of seven characters, connected by a mysterious blue box and a piercing scream. Directed by Shunt co-founder David Rosenberg, choreographed by Frauke Requardt, designed by Borkur Jonsson and with composition and sound design by Ben and Max Ringham, the performance is a truly collaborative piece that grants its audience the possibility of gazing as deep as they wish into the lives of the people before them.

Structured in loops of movement that develop and accentuate different links between the characters with each repetition, Electric Hotel places the audience in the position of the voyeur, guiding their gaze inside rooms, in amongst bodies and relationships. With each loop the sound reveals different details, suggesting narrative connections and supporting the strong symbolism of the precise and evocative choreography.

Highly reminiscent of David Lynch’s Californian films such as Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, Electric Hotel creates its tension by turning the daily lives of its inhabitants into an emotional hotbed, in which personal tragedy and the hotel’s dark underworld are brought to the fore. From the opening scenes in which we are invited to observe habits, relationships and day to day life, the performance progresses to express the inner being of its protagonists underpinned by a sense of broiling violence, isolation and unfulfilled desire.

Electric Hotel is both a dark tale of loss and a beautiful celebration of the gaze. It feels like the culmination of a brewing desire to experience what happens on the other side of bricks, windows and shadows. Yet the performance toys with voyeurism, creating a world of mad tensions, dark desires and lost dreams in a beautifully symbolic and cinematic auditory and visual experience.

Angela Davies cunningly sub-divides the stage (using nothing more sophisticated than some lengths of carpet) so that private spaces nestle precariously within the public arena of professional politicking. In the resulting Chinese-box of a court, the passionate rhetoric of a collapsing marriage spills from room to room in the manner of many a domestic row. And Rosenblatt exploits these spatial arrangements to choreograph cinematically-precise sequences of simultaneous action, uniting victor and victim within a single, exacting, narrative of historical necessity.

Round every corner lurks Ian McNeice’s Wolsey, a benevolent scarlet Vice of unbounded stomach, whose inordinate ability to run up expenses turns out to be his undoing. Dominic Rowan makes a powerful and charismatic Henry, torn between his (only marginally self-regarding) sense of kingly rectitude and Miranda Raison’s pensive Ann Bullen. But the real reasons to see this show are the gripping performances of Kate Duchêne and Amanda Lawrence.

Duchêne maps Queen Katherine’s collapse from flirtatious self-confidence to inarticulate panic with assurance, capturing her unequal struggle to mask both fury and terror behind a pious facade of compliant wifeliness. Watching her agonised disintegration, it’s suddenly obvious what Sarah Siddons saw in the role. Lawrence meanwhile, balances this solemnity with a peevish (and sometimes frankly lewd) stream of alarmingly pertinent wittering, casting a jaundiced eye over the bartering of bodies and hearts.

As history demands, Henry gets his way, and his wife of choice (at least for the moment). The sumptuous finale is a riot of gold, with a tiny infant Elizabeth, amid a joyous clamour of choir-boys, provoking prophecies of glory for the realm. It’s a triumph of Jacobethan myth-making. And, what’s more, it’s an absolute triumph for the Globe.

David Greig’s new version for the National Theatre of Scotland aims to repatriate J.M. Barrie’s classic tale to Edinburgh, strategically roughening the play’s edges in the process. So these Darling children are subjected to an educational viewing of a work-in-progress Forth Bridge, where a tribe of ragged boys swagger and swoop among the ironwork , while their engineer father fumes over each second wasted (tick tock, tick tock).

Laura Hopkins’ design splashes lurid, fantastical sunsets against the steely lattice of the unfinished bridge, effortlessly showing what Greig’s script laboriously strives to explain. Her wondrous transformation of this imposing silhouette makes Neverland an anarchic, shadowy subversion of stifling Victorian industriousness, where a lichen-covered stone beehive (with some distinctly magical properties) banishes all hankerings after tradition’s prim Wendy house.

The show also teems with traditional music, work-songs and sea-shanties and hauntingly sad lullabies, a melancholy sound-scape (arranged by Davey Anderson) in sombre contrast to the young cast’s apparently boundless energy. A gasp-inducing Tinker Bell (reincarnated as a bad-tempered ball of fire), Peter’s casual defiance of gravity and some viscerally exciting flying all make a pretty strong case for believing in fairies – though it sometimes seems that the author would prefer it if we didn’t.

Greig’s rewriting of Barrie’s insouciant prose seems determined to spell out what the older play left unspoken, but too often only manages to replace shimmering sentimentality with well-intentioned banality. His re-imagining of Wendy as a stroppy proto-feminist (shades of Pirates of the Caribbean) is occasionally wince-inducing, and making loveable Smee into a gauntly laconic fiddle-player leaves Cal MacAninch’s Hook (a tattooed, kilted hard-man, who definitely didn’t go to Eton) with nobody much to talk to.

Thank goodness Wendy’s last bedtime story survives more or less intact, along with Peter’s tragically un-punctual return to the nursery. The old play’s magic flickers intermittently, but grafting a social conscience onto Barrie’s blithely heartless hero apparently isn’t as easy as re-attaching lost shadows.

The couple scream, joke, kiss, piss, smile, sleep, pass out and cry in an undulating rhythm of ups and downs. Deprived of food and water, their energy weakens over time, and their only connection with the outside world – a mobile phone – proves useless. From a neutral space, filled with irony and humour, the lift gradually takes on an aggressive character as time ticks away.

Under Rachel Parish’s direction, the performance maintains a strong rhythmic dynamic but gets lost in its lack of cultural specificity. Despite an eloquent and evocative translation by Cristina Catalina that skilfully unearths the subtext to this generational paradox, the anglicization of Elevator substitutes clear cultural traits for a diluted attempt at universality.

The play is as much about being trapped as it is about feeling trapped, and it is no accident that its main protagonists are teenagers. Talking about imported American pumps carries a completely different meaning in the West. In a play in which the context, language and characters are so deeply Romanian, relocating the story to a Stockwell estate, rather than the abandoned factory with a cargo lift in an unnamed Romanian city, removes a crucial layer of the play’s meta commentary.

The relationship between freedom and limitation that underpins the text comes to life more in its original cultural context, and the translation would benefit were that relationship maintained. It prompts the question, how do you reconcile the specificity of culture with the pressure of ‘exporting’ one of Romania’s best playwrights to a wider cultural audience?

Still, Elevator is a strong, enjoyable, realist drama about a generation lost in the euphoria of freedom yet stalked by a darker cultural history. A promising start for this new London venue.

Hanna Berrigan’s production of Slowly for The Wrestling School is taut and intense, its drearness undercut with splashes of muted hilarity. Howard Barker’s four funereal madonnas, weeping and wrathful, debate with furious pedantry the manner and meaning of their self-inflicted extinction. But the terrible sophistication of their self-communing is threatened by the very acuteness of their discourse. What will happen if someone dare challenge the premise that pipes the measure for their determined dance of death?

Vanessa Ackerman, Suzy Cooper, Megan Hall and Penelope McGhie flesh out the drama’s bitter abstractions with painstaking care and unfathomable pity. White-faced and wary, their uniform weeds and sculptural formality makes meaningful the smallest physical deviation or twitch, their knotted fingers and wide open eyes silently screaming with tension.

Slowly broods mercilessly on the unseemly slippage between compassion and capitulation, the basest denominators of survival, and the emotional terrorism of willed victimhood. The play is unblinkingly cruel about the place of women in the world and in war (a woman can get by with just three words, one sister tutors another). And it scrupulously declines to judge between the variant duties and desires which consume the four women, briefly, unexpectedly shocked into painful liberty by the violent dissolution of every protocol they’ve ever known.

Short, sour and stinging, Slowly pits the seductive rituals of conformity against the risk and indignity of freedom. Impartially baleful, it makes no promises of happy endings for anyone. The only certainty is that the barbarians, infinitely slowly, continue their advance.

Three actors walk on stage and take turns describing, and at key moments enacting, scenes from Ali Zaidi’s action-packed life. Behind the actors are three large video screens onto which images are projected throughout the evening. Images which at times comment on what has just been said or at others help to illustrate an important point. Such is the case of the beautiful stills taken from Zaidi’s father's films .

As a renowned director in India’s flourishing film industry, Zaidi’s father encouraged his son’s early love of cinema by getting him to appear in many of his films. This idyllic childhood was shattered though when Zaidi’s father took the family on a mysterious picnic – a picnic which only ended once the family had arrived in Pakistan. This was perhaps a journey that his father felt compelled to make as a Muslim living in India.

The play then jumps forward to show a teenage Zaidi, a boy constantly testing the limits of his family’s patience. Zaidi playfully describes his younger self as “the one with horns”, an expression used to describe a child who could be seen as presenting a challenge to his parents. The biggest challenge though, comes after emigrating to England and returning home with his male lover. One of the most moving moments in the piece comes when the young adult Ali addesses his uncomprehending father. The father is played by Zaidi himself and is shown only as an image projected on the wall. What makes this conversation so moving is that it not only highlights his father’s inability to completely understand his son but also his desire to continue to try to find a way through this seemingly impossible impasse. Throughout the evening delicious Indian delicacies are served, created from Zaidi’s own recipes.

The piece concludes with an account of a recent incident which took place in India when Zaidi returned for a brief visit. A taxi driver, unaware that Zaidi is Muslim, cheerfully recounts attacking Muslims in a recent upsurge of secrtarian violence. Once Zaidi reveals to the driver his religious persuasion, the man is stunned. When they arrive at his destination the driver refuses to take Zaidi’s tip, but instead gets out of the taxi and to Zaidi’s surprise embraces him. In many ways this single act ecapsulates the central theme of the play: the most important journey any of us can make is the the journey to love those around us.

A feast for all the senses, Journeys of Love could prove to be the company’s most outstanding show to date.

The play’s focus is split between a thematic tour of an imagined Borges and the daily travails of young members in a present-day book club. The Argentine author is brought to life through a series of visual metaphors, frantically intercut with stark, film-like transitions. Among the vignettes are a wonderful torch and coat-made tiger, a book-built aeroplane fit for a Little Prince, and in one of several nods to Complicite, a flight of paper birds. David Luke steps in and out of slow-motion movement pieces as a silent, foreboding Borges, meeting the audience head-on, while audio excerpts from key works add a secondary, philosophical layer to this bioplay.

The recurrent book club scenes, with their comedic and vernacular tone, are staged in a brightly lit semicircle that purposely disrupts the play’s poetic flow. It allows the group to tackle the Borgesian thematic from the point of view of the club members. Thus, Nick (Nick Pitt) falls in love with Sophie (Sophie Cullen) who soon after begins to lose her sight, placing a well-delivered, sombre slant on the hitherto unquestioned act and meaning of reading. Meanwhile Kate (Kate Stanley) is busy preparing for a life-changing job at the prestigious Bodleian library and uses the group as a sounding board for her trepidations.

The company’s strength is without doubt its tightly coordinated manipulation of space. The ability to transform a tiny, empty square into a detailed, textured and low-tech landscape of the imaginary, bodes well for future work with greater resources. Ambition and ideas are clearly not in short supply here. Where the production suffers is in its dealings with the literary legacy of Borges, which to me is of greater excitement and complexity than the well-noted biographical ‘truths’. This abundance of fertile, provocative writings, many of which have found new resonance in the Internet age, take an unsatisfying background stance in Borges and I.

‘The library’, writes Borges, ‘exists ab aeterno’ and defines ‘the future eternity of the world’. Eternity in an hour is asking the impossible, but a riskier, more intrepid journey into the matrix of a literary mind, his short stories for example, would certainly not go amiss. Watch out for Idle Motion Theatre this summer with their new show, The Vanishing Horizon.

Ruby in the Dust’s re-staging of Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, follows Dorian’s character in his shift from a shy and vulnerable young man to a veritable Narcissus figure. We watch his downfall unfold amid songs of love and murder as Dorian becomes increasingly trapped in high society by the likes of his tempter, Lord Henry; by Basil Hallward, the portrait artist consumed by Dorian’s beauty; and by his lover, actress Sibyl Vane.

The show uses cabaret elements to drive the plot and enhance dramatic action and there are some fine performances from the six-strong cast. Cabaret artist Tamsin Shasha radiates with raunchy stage presence, and Kate Colebrook works well as Sybil and Leaf, as does Henry Maynard as Lord Henry himself. Recurring visual motifs are woven into the scenes, most notably the frame of Dorian’s portrait, which serves as a lens through which we scrutinize parts of the performance. The live musical sequences are wonderfully atmospheric and thoroughly enjoyable; so much so that they upstage the recorded sound which feels distracting and inappropriate by comparison.

Our relationship with Dorian, however, remains underdeveloped. It is only in the final scene that we begin to understand whence the social pressures that drive Dorian to such vanity emerge. It is a moment in which we are hopeful and aware of the tragedy at the same time. Yet throughout the evening we follow a different character with every scene, a different perspective in every moment. As a result, the directing becomes too concerned with atmospherics, with adjectives, not focused enough on the story, the action.

Despite its clever interweaving of theatrical elements and its sumptuous and satisfyingly dark content, the production fails to convey dramatic tension. It is a great exercise in atmosphere, but an adaptation with too little concern for its story.

When Jack Pratchard is killed in his village, he has to travel across the ocean to the City of the Dead where the first person who ever died rules as Queen. She is searching for her husband in every dead soul that enters her grand palace. Meanwhile, on the shores of the living, a curious old man claims to have a secret under his hat. A great theatrical spectacle is underway, and jack Pratchard arrives there just in time to discover why the sea has been filling up with dead souls.

Storey’s narration is imbued with a surrealist sense of humour and delivered with heavy tone of voice; it’s clear that he enjoys his characters while still being able to keep a degree of narrative distance. He weaves in a number of literary references that bring an archaic quality to the construction of the tale, including a nod to the Greek myth of Charon, the boatman who guards the gates of the underworld and the space between the dead and the living; and Jack Pratchard’s reaction to his own death is reminiscent of Gogol’s satirical and fate-bound character Kovalylov in The Nose, both characters stand detached from and in awe of their predicaments.

The finely illustrated backdrops and characters give the piece a timeless, magical atmosphere. Moments of dramatic tension are marked by breaks from the stage frame. The living husband dances around the town square and out into the space of the theatre, laughing and giggling to conceal the secret behind his hat, guided by the narrator’s hands.

Dark magic and comedic allure aside, the narrative thread unravels in places. When images slide in and out of our field of vision, they do so with elegance but not always with intent. The beauty of the illustrations all too often fades into the wooden easel; they are at their most convincing when used outside the boundaries of the stage, not bogged down by technicalities or logistics.

Overall, Jack Pratchard is a brilliant feat of storytelling, with a timeless feel and an imaginative use of theatrical medium. Storey’s dedication to the story is impressive and the show falters only on the few occasions when it breaks with its own logic or over-confines itself to unnecessary boundaries.