Shakespeare Double Bill, Propeller, Hampstead Theatre

As further proof that Shakespeare plays come these days not as single spies but in battalions, the London leg of the all-male Propeller ensemble's lengthy tour has pitched up in the capital in time to deliver their Richard III within days of Kevin Spacey's debut in that very role at the Old Vic. Think of it as the battle for supremacy over the Bard's second-longest play or not, one thing seems clear: you're unlikely to find as abundantly bloody and brutal an account of this particular Shakespearean horror show for some while to come. Is director Edward Hall bidding to become the British theatre's very own Tobe Hooper? On the dazzling evidence of his Richard, that would appear to be the case.

The production is running in rep with Hall's Comedy of Errors, but I doubt I'm the only one for whom that show upon reflection seems a frantic also-ran to the fury that propels this Richard across the better part of three hurtling, hurtful hours. It's not easy to mint afresh a play, and part, that can easily descend into funny voices and camp and all manner of posturing as Richard's vaulting ambition leads him toward the abyss. But Hall's response is very simply to give grim flesh to the violence in the text and let the resonances fall where they may, which is to say that I'm not sure I'd want to encounter any of these actors (sweet though I'm sure they are) outside a football ground. Or on a night bus home.

After all, what places humanity amidst a landscape in which the eponymous Duke of Gloucester is referred to as practically every species on earth (hedgehog, dog, boar, "bottled spider", to name but a few) except a human being? Here's a miscreant who arouses not even pity ("there is no creature loves me", he acknowledges, truthful right up to the end) who thinks nothing of snapping the neck of a short-lived wife (Jon Trenchard's sad-eyed Lady Anne) and gnawing her finger in the process. Is it any surprise that Hall's production references not just The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but A Clockwork Orange by way of Sweeney Todd? There's precious little room for onstage decorousness as the foul deeds mount, and the hushed crowd spoke to an audience alive to every fearsome stop on Richard's way to hell. (So, by the way, did their ovation at the end.)

The abiding strength of Richard Clothier's malformed Richard lies in his comparatively no-nonsense approach to a role that lends itself to scenery-chomping and worse, whereas Clothier's incipient monarch is a silver-haired logician who has long ago clocked the extent to which language exists to help him on his envenomed way. You sense the relish taken in the arguments that win round the various widows in his midst even as an occasional wince or grunt testify to the physical distress of a man seen to be both missing a left hand and walking with a brace on his right leg.

One of Shakespeare's most self-evidently English plays (Holborn, of all places, gets cited in passing), the world here presented is a charnel house rife with bodily fluids, ominous portents, and the feel of a hospital-ward-turned-abattoir marked out by sliding screens that allow one or another atrocity to be swiftly despatched. (In an apt touch as grimly funny as it is horrific, we witness a gross-out evisceration minutes before Robert Hands's Richmond makes mention of "the bowels of the land".)

There's a gallows humour to some of the musical choices, which are often jauntiest following moments of greatest cruelty, but it's impossible to separate out the affect of Hall's staging from a soundscape that includes the intermittent ticking of a clock alongside various hymns, carols and folk songs, each more definably British than the next. Is the pile-up of gore not borderline facetious, just a touch too much? Amazingly not, as Hall and his superlative ensemble confront head-on a play that quite literally welcomes in "destruction, death and massacre" only to invigorate all three points of that toxic triangle anew. You may look away when the electric drill comes out - what will Hall do for an encore as and when he gets round to staging King Lear? - but it's near-impossible not to be mesmerised by the intensity of a collective vision that gives death back its sting.

Propeller's Comedy of Errors, by contrast, is a Latin American knees-up that folds Ronaldinho and the Keystone Kops into the same absurdist environment, the Syracusan Antipholus's mention of "time's deformed hand" just one of the unexpected ways in which these two early plays of Shakespeare are conjoined. (Another is the death-flecked gravitas with which Comedy begins, its shift in tone the inverse of the ability of Richard III to leave us on occasion choking on our own laughter.)

If I found the show more strenuous than inspired, that's in part because farce invokes the most personal of responses, and many will cheer the incorporation of Camden Borough Council, cat-hating societal nutcases and Pringles into the time-honored high jinks. That said, Hands (pictured above in full maquillage) couples his tellingly white-clad Richmond (no blood on this arriviste's shoulders, yet) with an extravagantly made-up Adriana suggestive of a Forties movie goddess run riot, and Dominic Tighe adroitly shifts from a thickly accented, baton-wielding officer in Comedy to a teary, shaken Elizabeth in a Richard peopled by cast members who line the aisles post-interval with sticks and clubs.

And perhaps you need to hear in one play of "the mountain of mad flesh" before you see that image in front of you in the other. Let's just say that Hall's Comedy works double-time to generate the gathering insanity that his Richard so scarily and unforgettably breathes.

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