Ed Hall's new Macbeth at the Albery is a bitter, black and bloody triumph. It takes its mood from that of its star, Sean Bean, a brooding, dispossessed figure wonderfully in touch with his young audience and superbly able to convert his contemporary screen presence to prehistoric Scotland. True, the accent is more Sheffield than Scots, but what he and Hall have realised is that Macbeth is best suited of all Shakespeare's plays to being treated as a modern movie of madness and mayhem.
We also get Moneypenny herself, Samantha Bond, as a sexy, sympathetic Lady Macbeth, and Julian Glover bringing some classic RSC dignity to the role of the doomed King, and then, astonishingly, within seconds doubling up as the old vaudeville Porter. Anyone who remembers Hall's sequence of the History plays, Rose Rage, will know what to expect here: as a director, he moves swiftly and surely, editing the text where necessary and bringing the whole drama in well under the usual time.
I have long been suggesting that Hall junior is by far the best classical director of his thirtysomething generation: he has a superb sense of the sweep of Shakespearean drama, and brings it to a modern audience without ever being condescending or betraying the text. Above all, he draws out of a young and often inexperienced company performances of real vigour.
Three gorgeous young women, not averse to taking Macbeth into their bed, replace the usual old-crone witches, the cast dress as for the First World War in this fiery, frantic, furious and flamboyant account of the most timeless of all classic thrillers. In a bad month for the monarchy, we are here reminded that kingship has always been a dodgy business.
The dinner party from hell has been a tried and tested theatrical format since Titus Andronicus, I guess, or possibly Timon of Athens. In the Sixties, it was also a standby for French movies about the collapse of civilisation as represented by its eating habits; but now, in the National's Loft Theatre (carved out of the Lyttelton), we have yet another return to the knives and forks and the literally dumb waiter.
Moira Buffini's Dinner, directed by her sister Fiona, starts promisingly: a wealthy Home Counties hostess, clearly bored with her elegant life and crumbling marriage, has a quartet of friends round to celebrate the publication of her husband's new book - not that any of them has actually managed to read it.
We should be warned: the menu consists of Primordial Soup, Apocalypse of Lobster and Frozen Waste, this last the nastiest of all the courses, consisting as it does of highlights of the trash can frozen into a dessert and, yes, we do get the old joke about just desserts.
Not so much well-written as well-recalled from all the other plays about nightmare dinner parties, Dinner adds little to the genre. It seems to be striving after some kind of impossible metaphor for the way we live now.
Apart from the glacial hostess, who seems to have wandered in from Noel Coward, there is her disenchanted, faithless husband, the requisite mysterious stranger who crashes in after a car crash, a hippy artist, a scientist and a television newscaster. But from Pinter to Neil Simon (remember Murder by Death?), we have been here before, and even J B Priestley seems to be lurking around in the background, not to mention the butler from the Addams Family.
Buffini appears to be undecided about whether she wants to serve us a satire, a searing survey of 21st-century morality or a black comedy: even Yasmina Reza would have done all this better, and by the time we get to a dead body and the police inadvertently alerted, we seem to be into a thriller somewhere halfway from The Mousetrap to Sleuth.
A brilliant cast led by Harriet Walter as the hostess and Nicholas Farrell as her disenchanted husband do what they can to create some sort of stylistic coherence, but, like her menu, Buffini's play is ultimately a sickly stew of all the right ingredients in all the wrong combinations, and well past their sell-by date.
Into the Jermyn Street Theatre for only a week, but due back there for longer in January, is Ancestral Voices, a brilliant staging by Hugh Massingberd of the diaries of James Lees-Milne, played with a wondrous mixture of wit and waspishness by Moray Watson. Somewhere halfway from Cecil Beaton to Alan Clark, Lees-Milne was one of the greatest of all 20th-century diarists This is an epitaph for an era.
Macbeth is at the Albery Theatre, London WC2 (020 7369 1740), until 1 February 2003
Dinner is at the National's Loft Theatre, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), until 14 December
