Three Sisters, Playhouse, London <br></br>Pericles, NT Olivier, London <br></br>A Reckoning, Soho, London

Passion and principles, elegantly decaying

Kristin Scott Thomas's Masha is whistling softly as sunlight floods through the drawing-room window. Her younger sibling Irina (sweet, warm Madeleine Worrall) stands in a white-lace Edwardian – or should I say pre-Bolshevik? – frock, arranging flowers. Soon their guests – mainly chaps from the garrison – start drifting in, smiling and bearing gifts for Irina's name-day party.

But a cage can be seen behind them. In Michael Blakemore's strongly-cast production of Chekhov's Three Sisters, the backdrop is a giant steel grille. Designed by Robin Don, this is peculiarly ugly – especially in the closing act when the Prozorov family move into the garden to wave goodbye to the departing soldiers. The mesh is then plastered with what looks like industrial quantities of green phlegm – supposedly representing the foliage of silver birch trees. Obviously, the grille symbolises and magnifies the siblings' feelings of pent-up frustration as they yearn to leave provincial Russia and return to their native Moscow, to escape dull marriages and their property-grabbing, coarse sister-in-law, Natasha (Susannah Wise). But Don has missed the point that in Chekhov, you discern all this from the minutiae of human behaviour.

No matter, much of the acting is excellent. Scott Thomas, making her West End debut with heaps of screen but little stage-work on her CV, proves a riveting and subtle star-player. Her gaunt, elegant Masha is sharply observed and surprisingly funny – she complains about rude locals yet because she's nursing bitter disappointment, is outrageously brusque herself. She regards herself as an intellectual but is actually obsessed with her emotional life, so that she's transformed into a smitten, beaming and flirtatious girl by her affair with Robert Bathurst's Vershinin. Masha is blind to the fact he's only an affable bore.

James Fleet as her gangly husband Kulygin reminds you how poignant Chekhov's laughably pedantic schoolmaster is in his persistent, forgiving devotion. Tom Beard's socially flailing Solyony is notably pitiful as well as dangerously brooding. And Douglas Hodge as the sisters' once-academically promising brother, Andrei, starts out like a hopelessly cowed schoolboy – plump and flinching – before progressing to moral shabbiness and self-protective pomposity. Blakemore's company strikingly conveys the sorry decay of our early passions and ideals with a gathering sense of bleakness and some heartily amusing moments – not least the name-day photograph where everyone suddenly adopts sultry or heroically erect poses round the dinner table.

Distinctly awkward and under-worked patches do crop up in this production: I'd give it a couple of weeks to become more polished. Kate Burton as the eldest sister, Olga, could be more tense and exhausted, especially in Act Three where a fire rages in the town and heated rows break out. Also, only Tobias Menzies, as Tufenbach, philosophises with real zest. Christopher Hampton's new translation includes a few intrusive anachronisms, but mostly it's fresh and frank. Well worth seeing.

We move on, in Pericles, to alarmingly intimate and then painfully separated fathers and daughters. The guru-director Yukio Ninagawa's Japanese production of Shakespeare's late romance rolled spectacularly into the Olivier for just a week. This staging was a feast for the eyes, certainly, as we followed Prince Pericles on his journey through life – crossing oceans and riding the highs and lows of Fortune en route.

Long-haired and robed in Samurai-style leather skirts, Masaaki Uchino is a handsome and canny Pericles as he deciphers the incestuous truth about his intended bride and royal father-in-law. Anthiochus is a fat, menacing king who swishes round in layers of jade and gold silk – like some luxuriously padded, predatory double-bed. His child is more delicately sinister – tinkling like a chandelier in an elaborate silver head-dress, with a powder-white face.

Years later – after Pericles has won a saintly bride, Thaisa, but then lost her at sea – their daughter Marina is prey to jealous Queen Dionyza and a hard-nosed bawd. Kayoko Shiraishi, doubling as both these wicked witches, is nightmarish and broadly comical. Tiptoeing about in platformed flip-flops and sporting a headscarf like a ballooning black wart, she smiles insinuatingly.

Aurally, the guttural Japanese dialogue can be electrifying too. Pericles – gaining a silvered beard – utters formidable growls before he's reunited with Marina. The ancient narrator, Gower, is also split into a wizened male-female double act here, with voices like singing rasps.

However, the English surtitles deny Shakespeare his poetry, with iambics misaligned as prose. Playing both Thaisa and Marina, Yuko Tanaka hardly seems to exude these characters' miraculous, restorative powers. She isn't helped by the far-from-magical hydraulics involved when Thaisa rises from her coffin.

Sometimes this performance is tacky and you may wonder if the Ninagawa's mix of Western with Noh and Kabuki traditions is trying to be internationally crowd-pleasing. The gushing orchestral soundtrack – switched on at every potentially tear-jerking moment – is cringe-worthy. The appended chorus of ragged, weeping beggars – seen reaching for the stars amid machine gun fire – is also spurious and sentimentalised.

You may gauge at the start of A Reckoning that you're in for another shrink play about dubious "recovered" memories of sex abuse. Wesley Moore's new US drama could have just been Mike Cullen's play, Anna Weiss rejigged, when the screwed-up, twentysomething Irene storms into the slick offices of her estranged architect-father, Spencer – with her psychiatrist waiting outside.

Thankfully, Moore steers us into the more troublingly hazy terrain of emotional abuse. It must be said you never really believe Jonathan Pryce's quietly-spoken, shocked Spencer has done anything criminal, as Flora Montgomery's angry and shaky Irene threatens him with court proceedings. It is she who is surely ruining his life. But the legal power games he's prepared to play are just disturbing enough to destabilise your sympathies. There are one or two corny lines and A Reckoning, you suspect, may have started life as a screenplay. But Richard Seyd's production valiantly copes with multiple San Francisco settings, using two mini-revolves. And Montgomery and Pryce are intriguing, tightly containing their complex emotions, pain and rage.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Three Sisters': Playhouse, London WC2 (020 7369 1785), to 18 May; 'A Reckoning': Soho, London W1 (020 7478 0100), to 3 May