The Winter's Tale

Sam Mendes's Bridge Project, which arrives at the Old Vic via a world tour, gets off to a flying start with this Shakespeare/Chekhov double bill. With the notable exception of Ethan Hawke, the Brits are the heavy hitters in Mendes's first transatlantic ensemble: old hand Simon Russell Beale is horribly good as Shakespeare's jealous King Leontes, while up-and-comer Rebecca Hall is both piteous and authoritative as his abused wife, Hermione. 'The Winter's Tale' is the pick of the productions too.

Both plays came late in their writers' lives and are wrapped up in the past - unrecoverable in Chekhov's doomed 'Cherry Orchard' and reborn in a magical spring in Shakespeare's 'Winter's Tale'. Shakespeare's psychological fable bends all rules of time and likelihood to assert the transcendent power of grace: 16 years pass in the interval and King Leontes is forgiven for the death of his son and abandonment of his daughter by the 'statue' of his reputedly dead wife, which comes to life when their lost girl is found. Mendes's staging captures the extraordinary magic and the intense domestic horror of this unlikely yet deeply moving play.

Russell Beale shows the viciousness but also the helplessness of the jealous fantasies that prompt Leontes to condemn his heavily pregnant young wife for adultery. In her ensuing show trial, Hall's Hermione, brought straight from childbed to hear her baby's death sentence, shows all the physical fragility and moral valour that this tear-jerking scene requires. Its climax is a message from Apollo's oracle proclaiming her innocence and, here, delivered by a quill which writes without human assistance, placing them all in the thrall of a world where no one is fully responsible or beyond forgiveness.

Mendes manages the difficult switch to pastoral comedy by going all country and western for the next generation. The music, as sung by Hawke's charismatic master of disguises and all-round charlatan Autolycus, has that generic combination of wholesomness and raunchiness. It's perfect for the rustic regeneration that Hermione's lost teenage daughter Perdita, raised by a shepherd, represents. Hawke is again unrecognisable but equally impressive in 'The Cherry Orchard', as the straight-laced and consumptive 'eternal student', Trofimov, in whose ideals one hears the heavy oncoming tread of Russia's twentieth century.

In Chekhov's ensemble piece about a group of aristocrats and their dependents who are slowly crushed between the past and the future, the 'pig in the parlour' is Lophakin (an aptly flat-voweled and flat-footed Russell Beale). He's the self-made peasant who buys and axes the orchard of the family who owned his grandparents, despite his callow admiration for their glamorous dowager Ranevskaya (Sinéad Cusack) whose feckless extravagance drags her daughters down. The unnevenness of the ensemble matters more in Chekhov, where every character adds his own note to the tragic refrain: this is a good production that lacks the subtle emotional harmonies and lyricism that can make you feel the pathos of the characters more than their awful idleness.