Nearly all the favourites to win this year’s £50000 Man Booker Prize have fallen at the penultimate fence after the judges chose one of

Nearly all the favourites to win this year’s £50,000 Man Booker Prize have fallen at the penultimate fence after the judges chose one of the youngest and most eclectic shortlists in years. A superstitious Indian tobacconist is palmed off with wacky feng shui; a public school hooray who fancies himself as an angry young man becomes a hopelessly amateur cool-dude rapper. Sir Epicure Mammon is well-played by Ian Richardson as a mild, melancholic gent and here brings a delectably pedantic note to the knight’s pornographic fantasies.I never properly understood the geography of the set and the updating does few favours to the relationship between the scam and the returning master. Likewise, Russell Beale’s Face shape-shifts hilariously – now a limping loon from the Low Countries as the goggled furnace-tender “Lungs”; now a model of probity in a daft toupee as the “Captain”.

Deliciously signalling the bitchy power games, reciprocal testing and shared private jokes that continue even when they are jointly bamboozling the dupes, they make a great double act.The production finds some neat contemporary equivalents for the concocted solutions. Tailoring his act to each victim, Jennings dazzlingly shuffles identities that range from a Haight-Asbury-style hippy to a pious New Age guru and a fluting Scot. Playing together for the first time in their distinguished careers, Alex Jennings and Simon Russell Beale are a joy as Subtle and Face, the mutually resentful duo who, with sidekick-whore Dol Common (excellent Lesley Manville), turn the house that Face is looking after in his master’s absence into a crazy dream factory. The humdrum wishes of the dupes who are lured to the Blackfriars house are converted into fantastical aspirations by the hoaxers who know how to exploit the clients’ dream picture of themselves.
Quick-change artistry is the kind of transformation at which the charlatans are genuinely adept. The gullible believe they can solve the problems of existence via a wonder-diet, or by getting through a heat on The X Factor. So it’s smart of Nick Hytner to transpose The Alchemist, Ben Jonson’s brilliant Jacobean satire about the dubiousness of transformation to the present day in his fresh, inventively funny production in the Olivier’s Travelex £10 season.

The play’s trio of fraudsters operate the scam of pretending to know the secret of turning base metal to gold, a con trick that involves blinding the victims with bogus science But alchemy also has a metaphoric dimension in the play. We live in the age of the supposedly miracle makeover and all the misplaced faith and quackery that that entails. Two women, side by side, stomped on the spot, with the liveliness of a Charleston. Chris Rook, too, partnered with easy grace.In All End In Tears (The Wardrobe Piece), Alex Broadie and Chris Evans acted out a childish rivalry, with Broadie emerging from a wardrobe to squabble with Evans. This physical theatre piece lost focus, but was deftly observed.Chem’s Soul, by Anh Ngoc Nguyen, started with artful posing, but moved on to quick, sharp dancing.

Alina Lagoas dived around two men, lines bold and strong, then fluttered from pose to pose Movement was sleek. Jane Mason, dancing Come on Sun, stomped with energy, but her choreography slipped into airy-fairyness.The Place Prize runs until 30 September (020-7121 1100). Fernanda Prata made her entrance from under one, worming her way out. It was a striking stage picture, and there was one terrific image in the piece, but the dancing meandered, full of winding moves.Freddie Opoku Addaie won the audience vote, including mine. Silence Speaks Volumes had some lovely dancing, with silky torsos and stamping feet.