The Magician's Elephant (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon)

Verdict: Plot goes on safari  

Rating:

There are two elephants in the Royal Shakespeare Company's big new autumn musical starring Summer Strallen and Forbes Masson. 

One is the elephant on the stage; the other is the elephant in the room.

The former is a terrific life-sized puppet, right up there with Joey in War Horse.

The metaphorical one 'in the room' is the plot, which seems to have gone on safari.

Based on Kate DiCamillo's 2009 fantasy novel, the story does pick up after the interval but, for the first half at least, Nancy Harris and Marc Teitler's adaptation is all dressed up with no place to go.

There is an excess of angst and paradox as our young hero, Peter, struggles to make sense of life in the gloomy, dystopian town of Baltese in the aftermath of a war.

He is promised that 'profound and difficult questions' will be answered inside a circus tent, and his tormented opening number runs: 'If this is true, then everything's a lie.'

Manning up, he pins his hopes on a memory of being separated at birth from a sister; and he is advised by a fortune-teller that to find her, he needs to follow an elephant that has been accidentally conjured up by an over-eager magician.

As a set-up, it's somewhat strained; and little else happens in the first hour — apart from townsfolk singing about the elephant and a petulant Countess (Strallen) feeling threatened by the animal's growing celebrity.

Mercifully, things start to shift in the second half, thanks to the introduction of the missing sister, Adele: a big-hearted, frustrated adventurer shut away in a convent orphanage.

Peter also finally gets to meet the elephant he has been dreaming of and, realising it's sick, embarks on a mission to find the magician and return it to Africa.

Sarah Tipple's production packs spectacle and it's acted and sung with verve and commitment. 

Really, though, it needs a love story, or a more potent point of emotional connection.

Steeped in yellow lighting, the set's stained ironwork has the look of a Victorian underground station. 

And although clearly inspired by the work of tortured post-World War I German expressionist painter Otto Dix, the monochrome suits, thickly buttoned greatcoats and elephant prostheses worn by the excited townsfolk are also reminiscent of a Tim Burton film. 

The best feature by far is the lumbering elephant made with armoured plates, with its cloth ears and doleful eyes.

But Teitler's music never really settles.

It works through styles from Kurt Weill dissonance to Sondheim-ish rumination, with touches of comic jazz. 

In the end, it tries to salvage some Disney-style redemption with the string-drenched Anything Could Happen.

Jack Wolfe, as Peter, looks a great prospect, bringing vulnerability and resolve to the oddly isolated role of the ragged-trousered waif. 

And as his sister Adele, Miriam Nyarko brings much-needed vitality to the sometimes morose music.

There are broad comic turns, too, from Strallen as the shrill, spoilt brat Countess; and Sam Harrison as her downtrodden husband, The Count Who Doesn't Count.

Masson lays it on thick as a pink-faced, twitching, Herbert Lom-style police chief whose truncheon doubles as a hip flask. 

But none of these comic grotesques, or the sincerity of our leads, are a substitute for a good yarn.

What we really want is not triumph through hardship — we've been there and got the jab — but a burst of winter sunshine. 

Drowning in motherhood

Mum (Soho Theatre, London)

Verdict: Mother of all battles

Rating:

A Woman serenely strokes her baby bump on the seashore, dipping her toes into gently lapping waves. 

Seconds later, limbs flailing, Nina is overwhelmed by the tsunami (she calls it a poo-nami) of childbirth and the 'soft torture' that is motherhood.

She is not waving but drowning.

Having left baby Ben in the charge of his father, David, for the first time ever, a frazzled, febrile, frantic Nina offloads to her best friend, Jackie.

'I didn't know I could both love and hate so fully, with my whole body,' she says, confessing that she now realises why people shake their sleepless babies. 

Such is the intensity and darkness of Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's play that it must surely be added to the list of things to avoid during pregnancy.

Sophie Melville's almost unbearably raw performance as the tortured Nina suggests a gaping wound, seeping with tears, simultaneously tender and toxic.

Occasionally — and brilliantly — Nina slips out of control, in what appears to be an out-of-body experience, as she hurls herself around the stage. 

It is this that makes it impossible to know if she might, unintentionally, be responsible for Ben's bruises and fractures.

Nina is quite literally in court here, wholly unsupported because Jackie, a health worker, michaelkorshandbagsoutlet is wearing her professional, objective hat.

The team behind this is Francesca Moody Productions, best known for Fleabag, which perhaps accounts for its fearless, unflinching approach.

Brace yourself. 

GEORGINA BROWN 

The Lemon Table (Crucible, Sheffield, and touring)

Verdict: Refreshingly tart

Rating:

Snowy-topped Ian McDiarmid, best known as Star Wars' Emperor Palpatine, has adapted two rueful Julian Barnes short stories about late life agonies. 

One is about a grumpy old concert goer; the other about the Finnish composer Sibelius, in his twilight years.

Both are directed by Michael Grandage.

The first piece, Vigilance, is reminiscent of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads. Our concert goer is a fusspot, obsessed with people spoiling his pleasure in Mozart with their coughing, rustling and scratching. 

He glares, he hands out cough sweets, he prods — he even challenges people in the interval.

He also dreams of turning a spotlight on malefactors, and even electrocuting their chairs.

(In a classic case of life imitating art, I found myself distracted by a woman nearby who, clearly not getting the message, was enthusiastically crinkling her crisp packet while flicking through her phone.)

In the Sibelius story, The Silence, we find the composer in epic self-pitying mode, struggling with his Eighth Symphony.

He looks back on a life he claims to have sacrificed to his art. 

But is his neurosis the cause or effect of this sacrifice?

Will his love of whisky get the better of his work, as it has of his marriage? Will cranes ever fly past his home again?

As Sibelius, McDiarmid deploys a less nasally, more resonant voice than his first, more fastidious character.

Grandage and co-director Titas Halder see to it that the actor's movement is tightly orchestrated, too. 

At first, he steps carefully about the stage like a haughty pigeon, before mounting an antique table to pose like a statue and orate before a sweeping grey curtain.

It's impeccably and tastefully done, but this is very bespoke salon theatre, dealing (wryly) with very specialist hand wringing.

For tour details visit michaelgrandagecompany.com