Theatre - Sheridan Morley enjoys new productions of two old favourites

Among recent discussions of changeovers at London's theatre companies, rather too little attention has been paid to those which are staying unchanged. In recent years, at the Lyric Hammersmith, Neil Bartlett has done some major rediscovery work on Somerset Maugham and Pierre Marivaux, while looking for the poison in the champagne, the smile that kills. Indeed, one of his own plays, Night After Night, looks into the footlights of the postwar British theatre with a wondrous mix of nostalgia and horror. Of all our writer-directors, he is the most unashamedly theatrical at a time when we have rashly decided to abandon that particular style of staging.

Sooner or later, therefore, he had to get around to Camille, the Alexandre Dumas classic that everyone from Greta Garbo to Pam Gems seems to have rebuilt (and you don't get two architects more different). But by drawing on the novel rather than the play, Bartlett has triumphed. La Dame aux Camelias was always a much darker work than either the play, Camille, or the opera, La Traviata, which followed.

At the dark, chill heart of Bartlett's new adaptation, directed with considerable style by the renowned opera director David McVicar in his drama debut, is the idea that what we have in the real-life Marie Duplessis, who died in 1847, is half myth and half mistress. By the time Dickens attended her funeral, the TB martyr and working tart was already well on the way towards Garbo and the silver screen: less than a century later La Dame had become Camille. All we need now is the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about another phantom from France who refuses to die.

In the lead role of Marguerite Garnier, Daniela Nardini manages the feminist rather better than the legendary courtesan, while Elliot Cowan's Armand is also out of his period. It is left to Paul Shelley as the old Count to bring the necessary air of suppressed melodrama to proceedings, which begin suitably enough with the auction of Marguerite's belongings after her death from consumption. Not since the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby has a novel been brought to the stage in all its rich complexity. Bartlett has realised Dumas was not writing about love but about money, power and obsessive sex among people who have to sell their own bodies.

Nothing in Bill Kenwright's joyous new production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is as fascinating as the theatre where it now finds itself. The New London Theatre is extraordinary: you enter the stalls by going up a steep, store-type escalator, and the original design, by the radical set designer Sean Kavanagh, allows the front eight rows of stalls to revolve around the stage. This is just about the only conjuring trick that Kenwright, here acting as director as well as producer, has missed.

Of all the Lloyd Webber/Rice scores, this is the only one that has always given top billing to Sir Tim rather than Sir Andrew, and rightly so, since it is lyric-led. Joseph started out in 1968 as a pop cantata, and was the first stage musical to unite Rice and Lloyd Webber (albeit one only ever intended as an end-of-term school play for the Colet Court School in London).

It was the late, great agent David Land who recognised the potential of both the show and its writers, as well as naming his own theatrical management company Hope & Glory (so that he could answer his phone: "Land of Hope and Glory"). In the intervening three decades, Joseph has been the most revived of all the Rice/Webber scores, for several reasons: rock stars like to play the title role (here we get Stephen Gately from Boyzone); it works as a school play because those not cast in character roles can still form a chorus; and, most importantly, because for every child on-stage (here a mere 25), you can reckon to sell a minimum of two parental tickets.

I seem to have spent most of my critical life watching Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, but I had never noticed the remarkable way in which Rice and Lloyd Webber display their talents. The score contains not just the Elvis satire, but Carmen Miranda references, parodies of Oklahoma!, an Edith Piaf lament on the banks of the Seine, while through it all runs Rice's magnificent sub-Noel Coward patter ("All these things you saw in your pyjamas/Are a long-range forecast for your farmers").

The show is still looking strong, despite years on the road here and all over the world, and if the current cast is a little uncharismatic, a largely school-age audience seemed to have no trouble in recognising the most accessible and enjoyable family outing since Peter Pan.

Camille is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 (0870 050 0511) until 12 April

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is at the New London Theatre, London WC2 (0870 890 0141) until February 2004

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