Hamlet, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds<br></br>Romeo and Juliet: The Musical, Picadilly Theatre, London<br></br>Measure for Measure Malaya, Riverside, Oxford<br></br>Eden, Arts Theatre, London

From bard to a great deal worse

Shakespeare seemed to be beckoning from almost every theatrical nook and cranny this week. Firstly, Ian Brown has got off to an impressive start as the new artistic director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, drafting in the film and TV star Christopher Eccleston (of Shallow Grave and Our Friends in the North fame) to play the skull-clutching Prince of Denmark. Brown's take on Hamlet is visually lean and solidly intelligent.

Elsinore is a vast bare fortress of dark wood, superbly designed by Angela Davies. The palace guard patrol way up on its battlements while, down below, rows of identical doors suggest Denmark really is a prison or a bad dream. You get a strong sense of the whole nation being gloomy and fearful, with distant sounds of pulsing engines and ships' hooters out at sea. The courtiers' vintage, tweedy suits suggest a stifling atmosphere, while Tim Mitchell's lighting is eerie – with dim shafts slanting in from unseen corridors and with Old Hamlet initially appearing as just a gigantic shadow.

Thereby Brown implies this patriarch's vengeful ghost could be an illusion proceeding from the beholder's fevered imagination. Later Brown also, strikingly, makes the dumb show from The Murder of Gonzago into a gothic silent movie – another flickering play of light and dark on the same wall. Indeed, this production constantly explores the boundaries between fact and evanescent fictions, between actuality and acting.

On one level, Eccleston's intensely sarcastic, shorn-headed Hamlet refuses to join in false shows of domestic harmony. He doesn't just scoff at "the actions that a man might play". He pointedly steps off the raised platform where Claudius holds sway, to stand level with the audience. But then again, he isn't wholly naturalistic. There's a trace of self-conscious choreography about Eccleston's sinuous gestures – swaying like a cobra. The stylisation is, I presume, deliberate and Eccleston's curious mix of effeminacy and thuggish bullying certainly keeps you on your toes. Take the moment when he's mocking Kevin McMonagle's blathering Polonius and arcs backwards, doing an impression of camp histrionics but with the potential to launch into a headbutt.

The problem is this production never quite reaches out to touch you emotionally. When jesting, Eccleston is brusque and acerbic, never appealingly witty. Moreover, though he intellectually grasps Hamlet's suicidal philosophising, his verse-speaking can be peculiarly phrased. In fact, many of the cast almost sing their speeches on one note – with either too few or too many pauses. Maxine Peake, after a promising start as an affectionate and wry Ophelia, becomes boringly angry when mad. Brigit Forsyth's Gertrude – vaguely impersonating our own Queen – is very stiff.

Still, Malcolm Scates proves a startlingly guilt-frenzied Claudius, Patrick Bridgman is a quietly droll Gravedigger and, in Act V, Eccleston's new-found belief that "The readiness is all" creates a moment of great serenity as he stares death in the face.

Moving now to London's West End, "To be or not to be?" unfortunately proved a pertinent question on both sides of the footlights during Romeo And Juliet: The Musical. For, by midway through this dire pop-rock fiasco, the evening had become a race between the doomed lovers and me. And I reckoned I was definitely ahead in the "losing the will to live" stakes.

This show, shabbily directed and co-written by David Freeman with the lyricist Don Black, sees Verona reduced to an ahistorical shambles. Against a Giottoesque backdrop of medieval villas, the Montagues and Capulets are wheeled around on industrial scaffolding like perversely overdressed builders. If they are meant to be menacing contemporary gangs, they should stop dancing like Pan's People.

Frankly, instead of bellowing about law and order, the Prince (Michael Cormick) just needs to call in the fashion police and save us all from the tat of sub-Versace silk gowns and sequined jeans. The masked ball is also so gobsmackingly tacky, with sprayed shop dummies for gold statues, that you wonder if the vizards are merely keeping the guests dropping jaws in place.

To be fair, Lorna Want – playing Juliet – has adolescent sweetness and, at just 15, is very assured. But her singing voice needs to mellow and Andrew Bevis's floppy-haired Romeo is pretty bland. Generally the acting is laughably melodramatic as is Gérard Presgurvic's derivative score – think the theme tune of Neighbours with frightful gusts of orchestral grandiosity. Sévan Stephan's Friar Lawrence – having a high-decibel crisis of faith – wasn't the only one to ask: "How much more can we go through?"

Oh for West Side Story's catchier numbers and for Shakespeare's original poetry. Black and Freeman's paraphrases are risibly crass. Did I really hear Romeo saying– by way of his last farewell to Juliet – "It was the night of my life. Thanks"? Bevis and Want commit joint suicide at top speed – in under two hours – and who can blame them? This show, by rights, should be dead in the water by next week.

Measure For Measure Malaya is a more interesting, off-West End colonial interpretation of Shakespeare's problem play about moral fundamentalists, power and corruption.

Director Phil Willmott translates the action to the titular British outpost in the 1930s, where we find governmental offices looking faintly shabby and exotic with broken shutters and tropical creepers. Andy de la Tour's Duke is a decadent High Commissioner, swilling cognac with a cynical expression before prowling around disguised in a priest's dog collar. David Partridge's Lucio (actually a conflation of several characters) is a laddish soldier making free with native prostitutes, while Richard Dillane's Angelo is a strict, buttoned up District Officer who – while poring over regulations – is clearly feeling the heat. He ends up imperiously abusing the devout Asian nun, Lourdes Faberes' Isabella, who comes pleading for judicial mercy.

The race relations – with nasty presumptions lurking behind paternalism - add to this play's sexual tensions. Unfortunately though, the acting is very uneven. You never quite believe Dillane's Angelo is obsessed with Christian ethics, and Faberes' meek Isabella needs more intellectual vigour to fire him up when they wrestle over theological doctrines.

Finally, the innocence of young love has been lost in Eden. This new play by Eugene O'Brien (transferring from the Abbey Theatre, Dublin) is a two-hander that intercuts lonely monologues by a dissolute husband and his disappointed wife. Their reminiscences chart one boozy evening in small town Southern Ireland. Billy (Don Wycherley) recalls reeling round a night-club, obsessively imagining he's going to lay a young babe. By contrast, Breda (Catherine Walsh) hopes for a while to rekindle their marital romance.

O'Brien can be a humorous, humane and vividly descriptive storyteller but the plot seems terribly slow moving. The acting is quiet and sharply observed, directed by Conor McPherson. However, if you've seen McPherson's own superb intertwined monologues like The Weir and Port Authority, you can't help feeling this is a pale imitation.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Hamlet': West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds (0113 213 7700) to 30 Nov; 'Romeo And Juliet: The Musical': Piccadilly, London W1 (020 7369 1734) to 22 Feb; 'Measure For Measure Malaya': Riverside, London W6 (020 8237 1111) to 30 Nov; 'Eden': Arts Theatre, London WC2 (020 7836 3334) to 11 Jan