Rose Rage, Theatre Royal Haymarket, London

Truncated Shakespeare is a cut too far

This much-compressed version of the Henry VI trilogy (two plays, two hours each) will be compared, of course, with the Royal Shakespeare Company's recent, magnificent, uncut production. But I was reminded, as well, of a musical – not surprising, giving the frequency with which the cast sing church music. The musical was a Cameron Mackintosh production of Moby Dick, set in a girls' school, with a predictable gap between theme and execution. Rose Rage also seems to take place at a single-sex boarding establishment, one where only 12 chaps have bothered to turn out for the drama society. This down-at-heel school doesn't even have an auditorium – the show is put on in a room lined with cage-like metal lockers so filthy that the white operating-theatre masks the actors wear are grey with soot.

Hygiene standards are certainly low, considering that the other influence on Edward Hall's production is seems to have been cooking programmes, as shown by the string of garlic and red and green peppers that hangs over centre stage all evening – or at least that's what I thought it was. It turned out, of course, to be the rosebush where the two royal houses choose up sides.

Whenever some poor Yorkist or Lancastrian is due for the chop, he kneels, and the headsman cleaves a cabbage symbolically in two – or, if the victim is particularly hateful, keeps chopping vengefully until his brains are halfway to coleslaw. When Jack Cade commands, after much vegetable mayhem, "burn down the inns of Savoy!'' one hardly wonders that his men have to go in search of more cabbages.

Since Hall and his collaborator, Roger Warren, lack actresses, one of the young men takes the part of Queen Margaret, but in a costume that exposes her son to the undeniable charge "Your mother wears army boots''. With a broad headband over his short hair, rouge, pearls, and a white, fluffy stole above the waist, regulation trews below, the actor looks like a stocky Beatrice Lillie.

Cade sends the commoners into the audience to inquire, "How you doin', mate?'' or, more aggressively, "Are you a lawyer?'' Nothing comes of these menaces, however, as the show clearly knows there is a line it cannot cross – when nasty Richard of York has Clifford at his mercy, he takes a drags on a cigarette and exhales in front of him, but not so close as to make Clifford a victim of passive smoking.

The audience and Shakespeare, however, are afforded less protection against being, in the former case, depressed, and, in the latter, eviscerated. At the end of 12 hours at the RSC, I would have happily seen the whole exciting trilogy all over again; at the end of Rose Rage, I felt I'd been there that long already.

To 21 July (020-7930 8800)