Sam Mendes, the director of both productions from the Donmar Warehouse of London, is tipping us off that the plays are united by the common theme of love-unstated, disguised, thwarted, maddening love. (Until, that is, the happy end of Twelfth Night .) He's packaging the productions and the message for us in a pretty bow-very adept he is at it, too. But the truth beneath the stylish surface of things is that Twelfth Night has nothing in common with Vanya at all. For the one is a romantic comedy about the mystery of identity, gender and fate, while the other is a tragedy of self-delusion and despair.

To be sure, Twelfth Night has its troubling, sour undertone. Shakespeare gave the play a subtitle, "What You Will." (Implying "What You Make Of It," as well as the jolly in-joke, "What You Will Shakespeare.") It's the last of the romantic comedies and the bridge to the great tragedies, beginning with Hamlet . It's a revel, then, that takes place in a fairy-tale land, Illyria. Yet a darker, surprisingly colder note is struck in the unnecessary, cruel humiliation of this pompous fellow, Malvolio, killjoy steward to Olivia. Who does him in? Unhappy, middle-aged, feckless drunks in league with an abusive "gentlewoman." It's as if they've nothing better to do.

When all is said and done-when the dawn breaks on blinding hangovers and the cakes and ale are gone-"the madly used Malvolio" has been jailed, straitjacketed and blindfolded in a hovel as an outcast madman. And Feste, the clown, the "allowed fool," is no barrel of laughs, either, with his melancholy, rainy songs of golden youth and romance never-lasting:

In delay there lies no plenty;

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

Youth's a stuff will not endure.

But Mr. Mendes' version is an atmospheric romp, a Twelfth Night lite. I failed to warm to designer Mark Thompson's emblem for the Vanya production-a dominating, 30-foot-long dining-room table. With Twelfth Night , it's a huge picture frame center stage, and I'm afraid I'm none the wiser. Why the empty frame? The stage is also decorated enchantingly with candles and lanterns. There's no hint of the ocean that almost drowned Viola "after our ship did split." Mr. Mendes has her entering magic Illyria carrying a suitcase like a wide-eyed ingenue in the big city about to ask, "Which way to Broadway?" Fortunately, Viola is played by Emily Watson, who is magic.

But that intrusive picture frame is just an arty effect. Characters sometimes pose in it pictorially before entering, or Mr. Mendes will leave someone framed in it for a while-creating blatant dramatic ironies. The straitjacketed Malvolio, usually unseen, thus sits silently in the picture frame lest we forget about him as the surrounding comedy continues merrily on as usual. But the last thing Twelfth Night ought to suggest is a tableau vivant or still life. It's a play that's constantly mutating and on the move.

O learn to read what silent love hath writ:

To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

The complete couplet from Sonnet 23 suggests that we read between the lines. But Mr. Mendes, underlining all before us, gives us no lines to read between. Mystery is imposed and true enchantment absent. Orsino, Duke of Illyria, finds himself strangely attracted to Viola, who's disguised as a young man, and Viola falls madly, secretively in love with him. In Elizabethan times, women were played by guys, of course. So it would have been Duke attracted to boy, who's really a girl, who's really a boy. The fun and gender games need an innocent dawn of erotic attraction. But Mr. Mendes spells it out by soon having the two of them in a passionate kiss (followed by knowing embarrassment).

It takes the illicit romance out of things (as well as the Shakespearean). The black-veiled Olivia, officially mourning the loss of her brother, falls in love at calamitous first sight with Viola, thinking she's a man: "How now! Even so quickly may one catch the plague?" But Helen McCrory's coarse Olivia makes her intentions too eagerly clear from the outset. Desperate for Viola's love, she later throws off her dress for "him," stripping down to reveal her little black panties. It's less Twelfth Night , more West End sex comedy. But Ms. McCrory's Olivia is what the English call "a goer." She and the smirking Sebastian (Viola's twin brother) therefore go to bed immediately, reappearing wrapped in bedsheets rather than the innocent "wonder that enwraps."

Simon Russell Beale first appears as a showily comic Malvolio, playing him like a fastidious, campy butler. Mr. Beale is seen to be acting, going for laughs (and getting them). His Uncle Vanya is pathetic rather than tragic; so Malvolio goes. Some of us prefer a Malvolio who isn't in the least bit funny, as pompous pricks are fatally humorless. But he makes him an innate figure of fun. We don't pity Malvolio as we should, though his mad scene is as hard as nails in a cross.

In fact, Malvolio appears in relatively few scenes, as Shylock does in Merchant of Venice . Yet, like Shylock, he should dominate and trouble our memory. Mr. Beale's portrait amounts to an affectionate parody of the Puritan rudely awoken in his hair net by Sir Toby Belch and Co. He looks unusually chic in the yellow-stocking scene. But if Malvolio possesses no genuine dignity in the first place, he has no dignity to lose-no lofty height of maligned seriousness from which to fall into tragic public contempt.

Alas, Mark Strong as the narcissistic Orsino, like his flat Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya, is technically accomplished, but unexciting. He's too much the same in both productions. So, too, Ms. McCrory's actressy Yelena and Olivia. I thought Selina Cadell overplayed Vanya's crone of a mother, but she's a fine, spiky Maria here. Anthony O'Donnell, good and self-effacing in the cameo role of Ilya Telegin, makes a first-rate, dangerous Feste and looks the part, as if he were born in that raggedy costume of his. The Sebastian of Gyuri Sarossy is too fey (but for a change, Sebastian actually looks like his twin). Skillful David Bradley, the burnt-out Professor Serebryakov in Vanya , plays that old fool Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Paul Jesson makes a traditionally blustery, low-comedy Sir Toby Belch, who might also be renamed Sir Toby Fart.

Emily Watson's Viola saves the day! As Sonya, lapdog to Astrov in Uncle Vanya, she touches the heart. Ms. Watson herself was never plain, but her Sonya believes herself to be, which is the important thing. Her Viola is memorable and naturally poetic, her unfussy intelligence and seriousness very alive, her sense of wonder just lovely. Some prefer their Violas on the butch side, but Viola's appeal is found in her mercurial femininity. Ms. Watson speaks the lines as if saying them spontaneously for the first time. When you've seen Twelfth Night once, or twice, or three or four times-and you will-to hear it made fresh and renewed is some kind of enchantment.

Temper Tantrum in Chekhov's Vanya

Chekhov is such a lovely writer, isn't he? Is there anyone who "gets" us better? Is there any dramatist who better reveals commonplace, laughable life? With all his plays, and particularly Uncle Vanya , tears and laughter are always close, even inseparable. It is within Chekhov's Russianness that life can seem so absurd and tragic. He was also a doctor, of course, and we can imagine his bedside manner-as humane as his plays, certainly, compassionate rather than sentimental, amusing, truthful, meticulous, detached. You would want him as your doctor, though he can offer no cure for unhappiness.

Chekhov, the most contemporary of dramatists, says to us purely and simply: This is how we are. His plays aren't "like life." They are life! This man Vanya is wasted and furious; that woman's a vapid, idle beauty; this one's a disillusioned idealist; he's become an intellectual buffoon; and she believes with all her heart that we shall find peace. "And you and I, Uncle dear, shall behold a life which is bright and beautiful and splendid," Sonya comforts Uncle Vanya with utter poetic naturalness. "We shall rejoice and look back on our present misfortunes with feelings of tenderness, with a smile. And we shall find peace. We shall, Uncle, I believe it with all my heart and soul. We shall find peace."

Is there a character in Uncle Vanya who hasn't already lost their life? Sonya-plain, unloved Sonya-endures a life of drudgery alone, and nothing will change. Vanya hasn't even lived. His love for beautiful Yelena is an absurd dream. Astrov, the crusading conservationist who bitterly sees through everyone, including himself, is en route to becoming a disillusioned drunk. His love for Yelena-for the superficial!-is a lost cause, too, a final throw of the dice. And spoilt, indolent Yelena is trapped overvirtuously in her unhappy marriage to the aging professor, who wishes he were dead anyway. Beneath the surface of their lives lived out in lassitude and routine is crushing isolation and failure.

Uncle Vanya is about the dawning of self-knowledge or acceptance. The mystery is its title. What could seem more cozily banal than a play about an uncle! Uncle Vanya, like Auntie Mame, doesn't suggest a tragedy. Chekhov based the play on his youthful The Wood Demon , switching the melodramatic focus from the brooding Dr. Astrov to Vanya. I've written before that I'm indebted to a learned footnote by Eric Bentley, who pointed out in a fine essay on Chekhov that the Russian name Vanya, which sounds exotic to us, is the commonplace equivalent of Jack. It changes everything.

Uncle Jack! Tortured, self-pitying, ordinary Uncle Jack is Chekhov's Everyman, in a sense. He's the family member to whom we're all related, even in his transparent, tragic absurdity. Alas, in Sam Mendes' production of Uncle Vanya , which comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music via the Donmar Warehouse of London, Simon Russell Beale gives us Vanya's absurdity without the tragedy. Let it be said that many of my colleagues rave over the British star as well as the production. But if this is Chekhov, it's a pity.

It surprised me a great deal, for expectations were high. The new production actually comes uncomfortably close to a pastiche of the great play. Chekhov's naturalistic dramas hover between the apparently mundane and the lyrical, between an everyday life of tedium and self-deception and one eternally striving for fulfillment and happiness. Life corrodes as it passes. "How odd we meet, and then must part forever," Astrov says in his farewell to Yelena. Everything hangs in the precarious, delicate balance. But too much of the self-consciously "Chekhovian" and you're lost; too little an authentic sense of time and place, and the center cannot hold. Yet from the outset, Mr. Mendes has placed the action of his Uncle Vanya in no man's land.

We have no sense of place, no Russia. Where are we? The director and his designer, Anthony Ward, wishing to avoid the traditional approach, give us a neutral open set basically dominated by a dining table some 30 feet long, with various chairs. The room backs onto a vista of what looks like overgrown, heavily symbolic grass. (But symbolic of what, exactly?) As usual, the old nanny sits knitting beside a samovar; Astrov strides up and down. But they now appear to be indoors, whereas Chekhov's opening scene takes place in a garden with its winding path, ancient poplar tree and evocative swing. The rhythm and halftones of a hot summer day-the atmosphere of lives in flux-are vital to setting the right mood.

Details were always crucial to Chekhov himself. But there's no sense of overheated claustrophobia, indoors or out. A character says, "Open a window, It's stifling." But the set is completely open, looking airily onto the grass vista beyond. The length of the table separates characters from each other in stagy symbolism. But when the burnt-out Professor Serebryakov gathers the entire household for his talk, everyone seats themselves at the table facing him in a long line, like an ersatz tableau of The Last Supper .

Nothing is natural about any of this. There's a self-consciousness instead. In the opening scene, Marina, the nanny, takes an age to pour from the samovar; Astrov speaks with deliberation; others enter-but from where?-and there's a grand entrance by Yelena in an agonizingly slow, languid vamp across the stage (which gets easy laughs). Nanny is being Russian, Astrov is being tortured, and Yelena is being languid .

In time, that table will prove too much of a temptation for actors. Mark Strong's Astrov will suddenly leap onto it in swashbuckling mood, which is plain wrong for anyone except a musketeer, and Simon Russell Beale's Vanya will even curl up on it in a fetal position, which is plain wrong for anyone who's marginally sane. We know that Vanya's upset. But when was the last time you saw an adult curl up like a big baba on a dining-room table?

Is Mr. Beale possibly overacting? He is not an easily embarrassed actor. He's the only Hamlet I've seen let out an endearing "Ouch!" during the fight scene. Laertes must have accidentally whacked him with the flat of his blade, and thus Hamlet went "Ouch!" Mr. Beale's portly prince wasn't for me. He's less the romantic hero, more a character actor (which, in England, is the best kind of actor to be). He uses his short, bulky stature well; he flaunts it in a cuddlesome way. But his Vanya craves our sympathy too much.

He flings himself groveling on the floor before Yelena; sometimes he's showily on all fours. The British critic Katherine Duncan-Jones compared his Vanya to a needy spaniel hoping someone will love him enough to tickle his tummy. The lady has a point: Mr. Beale has infantilized the role, making Vanya "adorable." Give me a thin Vanya! As with Derek Jacobi's tubby version a few seasons ago, you cannot take a man seriously who looks as if he's pining for a sticky bun.

Though Vanya's on the verge of middle age, he can be seen as the first modern Angry Young Man. He's furious with life and sunk in self-hatred. He loathes himself. He announces ludicrously that he "might have been a Schopenhauer or a Dostoyevsky," and Mr. Beale conveys his pathetic comic absurdity with ease. But there's a canyon between the pathetic and the tragic. Uncle Vanya is a dark, tortured soul, not petulant and foot-stomping. He's tortured by his own failure, he's not merely upset or throwing a tantrum. Vanya's useless, unfulfilled life is falling apart. But Mr. Beale's weak, flinching version has taken the gravitas away.

As a whole, it's a broadly played production with little subtext. Vanya's silly mother, Marya, is a woman who reads books and pamphlets but doesn't understand them. She doesn't understand her son, either. But she's played like an evil old crone, bent almost double while exiting theatrically to the clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp of her cane. I found Mark Strong's Astrov (the role originally played by Stanislavsky) too measured, and Helen McCrory's Yelena too knowing. There was great pleasure in Emily Watson's honest, unaffected performance as Sonya. She handled her eternal, heart-breaking speech to enduring hope and redemption that closes the play beautifully.

But then, Brian Friel's loose new adaptation has made some surprising changes, including the closing, immortal speech. That Mr. Friel is a fine dramatist goes without saying. But why mess with Mr. Chekhov? Why trouble to expand the cameo role of Ilya Telegin, the impoverished landowner, when Chekhov's miniaturist portrait tells us all we need to know? Why have Vanya comment on Yelena like a cliché of pseudo-Chekhovian scholarship, "Such languor, such languishing, such ennui …. "

Above all, why did Mr. Friel prune Sonya's last lament of its six renowned invocations of "we shall rest." Chekhov's choice was clearly very deliberate: " … we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle, I have a burning and passionate faith ... ( Wearily ) We shall rest! We shall rest! We shall hear the angels; we shall see the sky all dressed in diamonds; we shall see all the world's evil and all our sufferings drown in the mercy that will fill the earth; and our life will become as quiet and gentle and sweet as a caress. I have faith, I have faith .... Poor Uncle Vanya, poor Uncle Vanya, you're crying. You've never known joy in all your life, but you wait, Uncle Vanya, you wait .... We shall rest .... We shall rest! We shall rest!"

They are like the dying notes of a chamber piece and should never be cut. They are the resigned and ecstatic pleas for whom the bells toll.

Uncle Vanya is in repertory with Twelfth Night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music until March 9. John Heilpern reviews Twelfth Night next week .

I must say, with regrets, that I found the Royal National Theatre production of

Hamlet a very poor one, indeed. It

shall henceforth be known as "The Suitcase Hamlet ."

The motif of John Caird's long, literal, murky production-the bewilderingly

lame idea behind his entire conception of the play-is a suitcase.

The set is dominated by suitcases and trunks of various

shapes and sizes that are moved about like building blocks in the Stygian

gloom. Eyes, and therefore souls, are not deceived. They are strained. Why a

suitcase? That is the question. Why are we looking at a castle of suitcases all

night long? I ask you in all candor: When we think of Hamlet , when we try to grapple anew with its tragic vastness and

meaning, does the image of a suitcase spring to mind? And if sprung, does it

stay?

I can only assume the director, Mr. Caird, and his set

designer, Tim Hatley, were agonizing one day over a brave new concept best

suited to the most produced great play in history, and they thought, and they

thought, and they cried out to the heavens: "Got it! Let's do suitcases!"

And so it was. I'm afraid there was time enough to ponder

their meaning. The evening began at 7:30 p.m. and ended at 11:15. Why a

suitcase? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-and Hamlet, too-wouldn't need 20 of them

for their fateful journey to England. They are not Elizabeth Taylor. Besides,

the suitcases are in every scene. Could they, by any chance, be a symbol ?

Voilà! We have it!

Hamlet is a young man who must travel from adolescence to manhood, from thinker

to assassin. He's on a journey . Hence

the suitcases! Whether that's an illuminating new concept of Hamlet , I leave to you. If it were left

to me, I'd leave on the next train. Except that Mr. Caird's suitcases aren't

going anywhere. We're stuck with them all night, squinting at them through the

near-permanent darkness of the stage. Suitcase = travel; darkness = tragic

foreboding.

Mr. Caird recently adapted and co-directed Jane Eyre , the musical, which also takes

place in darkness. (Tragic foreboding = Jane Eyre; clippety-clop = sound of

horses.) And we've seen those blessed suitcases before! They were piled up all

those years ago in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Nicholas Nickleby , which Mr. Caird

co-directed with Trevor Nunn.

There's nothing particularly fresh or startling about the

big, conventional production. It meanders in its rhythm and length; the choices

are simple-minded (Gertrude fondling her wedding dress in her bedchamber) or

they're peculiar(anunkingly Claudius with earring and pony tail; a bimbette

Ophelia). The churchy background music milks the cosmos, providing a

faux-celestial "otherness" and "mystery." From the opening, most unthrilling

ghost scene to the last, hackneyed image of a cross, all is not well. The

political aspects of the drama have been cut (no loss), but the production as a

whole remains an average one, in spite of the lauded performance of Simon Russell

Beale.

Mr. Beale is a fine actor, though a portly prince. It's been

said that his short, pudgy physique is of no consequence. But it's been said

too often, including by a defensive Mr. Beale. Acting is acting who you aren't;

acting itself is a glorious illusion. No, it isn't that Mr. Beale looks

mournfully as if he'd like to console himself occasionally with a bag of sticky

buns. It's more that as a mature 40-year-old actor-his beard flecked with gray,

his grief worn like a shroud of long suffering-his markedly adolescent Hamlet

is a stretch. I never acutely sensed the tragic youth, more an acted version of

it.

It is director Caird's notion that Hamlet is about goodness compromised or gone rotten. Maybe so, but

too goody-goody: Is Claudius a good man who lapsed, as he seems to be here?

After all, he usurped the throne, murdered the King, married the Queen two

months later and would have Hamlet assassinated. A good guy? And what of

Hamlet? Was Hamlet born good? Mr.

Beale suggests he was born nice ,

which is less than good. The fire of inner rage and madness doesn't burn in his

performance. There's little or no sense of frightening bitterness or vengeance

thwarted. He's a sweet prince. The readiness is all. But one fears that Mr.

Beale's good-natured Hamlet will never be ready.

He is too much the confused student, too little the would-be

assassin. He delivers the soliloquies tenderly and beautifully, an innate

intelligence in support. Elsewhere, his voice as fine-tuned musical instrument

surprisingly forgets itself, lacking range. His performance is characterized by

a soft romanticism rather than the tragic greatness that has been thrust upon

it. Violent emotion isn't in Mr. Beale here; tears are. They encourage the

sentimental sense of a wounded Everyman, and the star isn't above milking it

the old-fashioned way. As the curtain descended slowly at the end of Act I as

if we were attending a grand opera, the theatrical sobs coming from Mr. Beale's

weepy Hamlet were loud enough to awaken Yorick.

Then again, the ghost was a good old declamatory

19th-century ghost, emoting to the rooftops. Polonius was a bore, as usual; the

gravedigger scene is clownishly so-so, as usual. We had an Ophelia without

poetry (and a pro forma singsong

madness scene). The cowardly, goading Claudius, and the ferocious, compelling

Gertrude who could have eaten him alive for breakfast, were played by the

veteran Shakespeareans Peter McEnery and Sara Kestelmen, and it was good to see

these veteran Shakespeareans again.

I've avoided mentioning the Peter Brook Hamlet that was in Brooklyn only a month ago. If I have a bias in

favor of Mr. Brook's imaginative simplicity, don't forgive me. It's a bias I'm

happy to have. The point I would like to make is only to observe that the two Hamlet productions are found on two

different planets. The Royal National Theatre production is big state theater

on display in the Opera House in Brooklyn. Save for just one of its actors, the

cast is all white. The Brook production is innovatory theater with a multicultural

cast of eight that played in B.A.M.'s intimate second theater. The one

continues a Shakespearean tradition, now grown predictable, growing weaker,

slowly dying. The other reexplores Shakespeare in order to invigorate the

classical theater and renew it. Which of them is truly alive? Which is the way?

I know the road I would sooner follow. The one without the

baggage of the past, the one without the suitcase.