The Donmar has a penchant for staging musicals where the generic upbeat grins and glitz come with an edgy, dark side. It’s not a Sondheim show this time round, but designer Christopher Oram still lets us know it’s going to be glamorous and grim. Hunter’s scenes with her are full of a profound tenderness that is yoked, in the end, with a violent desperation which leaves you choked with shock and grief.Quitting rural Ireland, we fly to 1920s Berlin and Grand Hotel, directed by Michael Grandage. Her young daughter – who is torn between her parents and eventually dies in her mother’s arms – isplayed by Kate Costello with lovely naturalness. MacDonald’s physical struggles with Hunter switch between potent bitterness and longing.

It can also be Irish Twee, with Catwoman’s habit of drinking milk from a saucer definitely tilting into the whimsical. Hunter’s Irish accent can go askew, too, so she occasionally sounds as if she’s from Louisiana and struggling with false teeth.Still, this production does become gripping thanks to the actress’s visceral intensity. All scrawny sinews, with long matted hair, Hunter looks both worryingly underfed and dangerous. She is unforgettably feral, gnawing at a handful of wedding cake from the festivities where her ex-lover, Gordon MacDonald’s Carthage Kilbride, is marrying a rich girl. Even as Hunter’s ragged Hester lugs the bird towards her gypsy caravan, she sees a stranger in a funereal topper who says he’s a ghost-fancier, has followed her for a while, and will return at dusk.
It must be said the portents are laid on with a trowel – as Hester then runs into Br?Brennan’s Catwoman, a blind crone who can see the future and bodes at length about the devastation this day will bring if Hester doesn’t decamp as the land-owning villagers are demanding During its weakest scenes, By the Bog.. is stuck in a Yeatsian Celtic twilight full of hokum.

Dominic Cooke’s ultimately harrowing production is set in a ghostly impressionistic landscape where a grey lake of ice stretches away to a gloomy forest. ‘Bamboo Dream’: Barbican, London EC2 (0845 120 7550), tonight. Then they give us the Marilyn treatment, splaying their skirts as the men lie at their feet directing the fans at their knickers. Is this an in-joke about Taiwan’s home-electricals exports? It certainly feels as if the rug has been pulled. By the time the stage crew arrives to remove the (obvious to us now) plastic bamboo canes from their metal slots, the whole thing is shown to be a sham, poetry and all. jenny.gilbert independent.co.uk’ma’: QEH, London SE1 (08703 800 400), tonight.