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Another adaptation that works like gangbusters is Patrick Barlow's raucous treatment of The 39 Steps at the Criterion, which is based on Alfred Hitchcock's extremely loose 1935 film version of the John Buchan novel. Barlow sticks closely to the heart-palpitating Hitchcock plot, but recasts it as a camp comedy. Charles Edwards as Richard Hannay -- who's trying to track down a spy cove -- repeatedly gives the audience his tilted-chin profile. The appropriately named Rachel Pickup stylishly plays the three women Hannay picks up. All the other parts are enacted by Rupert Degas and Simon Gregor, two masters of every imaginable British dialect. The fast-and-furious farrago is directed by Maria Aitken, who did this same sort of effervescent entertainment some years back with Charles Ludlum's Mystery of Irma Vep.

Over at the National, a more traditional adaptation is Nicholas Wright's go at Thérèse Raquin, which Emile Zola fashioned in 1873 from his hot-on-the-charts novel. On a vast and cold-looking set designed by Hildegard Bechtler, Therese (Charlotte Emmerson) plots the death of her husband Camille (Patrick Kennedy) with her lover Laurent (Ben Daniels). Where Wright differs from previous takes on this gloomy tragedy is that he underplays the Therese-Laurent passion and works to the hilt their subsequent innards-consuming guilt. The tormented lovers go at each other so violently that fight director Alison de Burgh has to be called in for a wowee contribution. Meanwhile, for sheer brilliance of adaptation at the National, there's the just-about-to-close Waves, the radio play-cum-cameras-and-wraparound-sound effects opus that director Katie Mitchell and an indefatigable eight-actor company have made from Virginia Woolf's cinematic novel of the same name.

Also at the National, Fiona Shaw, is bringing as much color as anyone ever has to the role of Winnie in Samuel Beckett's marvelously pessimistic Happy Days at the National. Buried to her waist in the short first act of this virtual monologue (Tim Potter is barely seen and never heard as Willie) and buried to the chin in the shorter second act, Shaw's face is a kaleidoscope as Winnie tries to pretend all is well but slowly loses faith in her perspective.

Shaw has been directed exceedingly well by long-time collaborator Deborah Warner, but Warner has miscalculated by commissioning Tom Pye's set, which takes up the entire Lyttleton stage and is chockablock with slabs of fallen wall. It's as if Winnie has just survived a major catastrophe, when what Beckett is after is a look at Winnie trying to survive life itself.

Another great leading lady, Felicity Kendal, has avoided saccharine touches in a revival of David Hare's Amy's View, directed by Sir Peter Hall. She invigorates this realistic -- not to say depressing -- study of a mother-daughter resentment that festers and finally undoes. The last of the play's four scenes is some of Hare's finest work, and so beautifully executed here that the breath is held and then taken away.

Imelda Staunton and Eileen Atkins
in There Came a Gypsy Riding
(© John Haynes)

Much better is Frank McGuinness' There Came a Gypsy Riding at the Almeida. Again, the primary attraction is the cast, headed by the can-do-no-wrong Dame Eileen Atkins and the equally reliable and versatile Imelda Staunton. The former plays to hilarious effect a plain-spoken (and therefore provocative) West Coast Ireland woman called Bridget, and the latter is trenchant and touching as Margaret, who's come to Bridget's rocky part of the world with her husband, son, and daughter to recover from another son's relatively recent suicide. The lack of a suicide note is a big factor in this portrait of a dysfunctional family attempting to right itself. It's an intriguing situation, but the prolific McGuinness' script is marred by familiar bickering sequences and a sentimental resolution.