A Summer of Olympian Theatrics, Too Simon Annand/Royal Shakespeare Company Emily Taaffe as Miranda in ""The Tempest,"" part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's ""Shipwreck Trilogy"" at the Roundhouse in London and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. LONDON - Remember when a play was just a play? When you saw a show containing an intermission or two, or maybe none at all, and the evening was rendered complete? Well, that onetime theatrical norm is looking more like the exception these days amid a summer lineup here marked by marathons, triptychs and all manner of special occasions. Who said the Olympics pertained exclusively to sports? The mother of these theatrical immersions has now finished, alas. I'm referring to the Globe to Globe project at Shakespeare's Globe, which allowed playgoers to sample the Bard's 37-play output in as many languages, not all of them spoken: British Sign Language was the chosen conduit for "Love's Labour's Lost," a fascinating pairing given that Shakespeare's defining comedy about male abstinence is also his most verbally knotted. I missed that production, which lives on in reports of a curtain call of ecstatic waves from the house. But I did see a sizable chunk of the output, from a feral "Troilus and Cressida" from New Zealand performed in Maori to an utterly mad, sometimes madcap Lithuanian "Hamlet" at the Thames-side venue on the day that a flotilla of ships took to the river to fete the queen's diamond jubilee. But just when it seemed that the last planeload of Shakespeare-minded foreigners had returned home, along comes the Royal Shakespeare Company to pick up at least some of the slack. Returning to the Roundhouse, the north London theater that it has inhabited on previous occasions, the troupe is performing three plays ("The Comedy of Errors," "Twelfth Night" and "The Tempest") under the banner title "The Shipwreck Trilogy." The point is to call attention to a trio of offerings from different points on the Bardic spectrum, all of which move from watery, storm-tossed beginnings to tell of reconciliation, reunion, and/or release. I have yet to catch the Palestinian director Amir Nizar Zuabi's take on "The Comedy of Errors," but I can heartily commend the R.S.C. associate director David Farr's productions of the two later plays, especially for those keen to chart the ascent through the company's ranks of Jonathan Slinger, an erstwhile Richard II and Richard III who can also lay claim this season to the most startling Malvolio in my experience as well as one of the most affecting Prosperos. All three plays run in repertory through July 5 in London before returning to the company's home base in Stratford-upon-Avon, where they continue at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre through Oct. 7. Malvolio is "Twelfth Night's" ever-priggish malcontent, the steward of the lovesick Countess Olivia and a posturer doomed by play's end to call for revenge even as the celebrants in his midst make hay, none too mindful of the rage that has been permitted to fester on their watch. But admitting midway through to a happiness that will not remain his for long, Mr. Slinger allows for glimpses of genuine rapture from the cold fish that we usually take to be Malvolio, which in turn makes the character's humiliation both in and out of yellow stockings funny to start with and then doubly cruel. (Is so officious a man a candidate for electroshock therapy? On the evidence of this staging, it would seem so.) And Mr. Slinger strikes deeply resonant notes of fury as well as tenderness in Mr. Farr's beautiful reading of "The Tempest," which on this occasion works as a play about personal and political tyranny as well as the feelings of a "vexed" father, Prospero, toward the daughter, Miranda, whom he knows he must surrender, in much the same way that this shaman of sorts offers up his art. The way the darkly attired Mr. Slinger wears Prospero's clothes - nattily or not - reveals much about a troubled parent and ruler striving to feel comfortable within his own skin.