A director hasn’t knocked around a blond actress this much since Hitchcock. In the Flemish director Ivo van Hove’s radically deconstructed “A Streetcar Named Desire” a few seasons back, Elizabeth Marvel was dunked in a bathtub to the apparent point of drowning. Now, in his “Hedda Gabler,” the indignities multiply. She gets hurled against walls and doused with V-8. On Monday night, she returned to the stage after intermission with a Band-Aid on her shoulder.

Playing the title role (and playing it exceptionally well), Ms. Marvel takes more abuse than anybody else, but there’s plenty to go around. As Mrs. Elvsted, Ana Reeder (another blonde – natch) gets roughed up on the couch, hard words shouted in her face. Ms. Marvel can dish it, too, pounding on the chest of Glenn Fitzgerald, who plays Eilert Lovborg, the man she’s going to destroy.

You won’t find much anxious seething under Victorian corsets here. Mr. van Hove goes part way to turning Ibsen’s play inside out. The stage and audience of New York Theatre Workshop – normally a workaday red-brick building – have been surrounded by unpainted sheets of drywall, nearly floor to ceiling. This signifies, presumably, how the fierce and lively Hedda is imprisoned in her new marriage to wishy-washy academic George Tesman. Also production designer Jan Versweyveld probably thought it just looked cool. (It does look cool.)

Here and elsewhere, the production has visual flair to match its brutality. The costume designer, Kevin Guyer, has spent two decades working at Chanel, Valentino, and Giorgio Armani, and it shows. The men wear exquisite suits; Ms. Marvel sports a flimsy pink nightie, unless company is expected, in which case she slips on red heels. Mr. van Hove is setting Hedda up as a kind of totem of female power, particularly sexual. Ms. Marvel – statuesque, low-voiced, magnetic – could convey this in sack cloth.

That’s the wisdom of Mr. van Hove’s production, and its limitation. He does a fair job of conveying the unsettling power of Ibsen’s play, but it’s as much in spite of his innovations as because of them. Early in the play, he has Hedda ritualistically hurl handfuls of flowers at the walls. (Ms. Marvel somehow got enough velocity on one throw to lodge the stem of a flower in the drywall, where it hung perpendicular until intermission: Do not mess with this woman.)

It’s a striking moment, as Hedda gives vent to her frustration as her energy is trapped in a bad marriage (which is really Ibsen’s way of saying that energetic people get trapped by society more generally). But it robs the play of the sense of slow, subtle accretion that, only at the end, drives Hedda to her act of self-destruction.

The scales tip in the production’s favor because of its remarkably gifted cast. Ms. Marvel has power and charm to spare, with a voice and face that seem capable of anything. Mr. Fitzgerald has played a series of awkward youths; here he comes up with the steel the wayward Eilert Lovborg requires. Jason Butler Harner imbues the academic Tesman with a hint of the playboy (again, the costumes help).

The real counterweight to Ms. Marvel’s Hedda is John Douglas Thompson’s Judge Brack. Bald, goateed, and physically imposing, he finds the right balance of style and strength, and has an unexpectedly delicate voice. The next time somebody stages “Faust,” he deserves a crack at Mephistopheles.

***

Ed Hall is so predictable. In “Rose Rage,” which opened this week at the Duke Theatre, he relies on many of the same techniques he used in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at BAM earlier this year. He uses all male actors, with lots of double-casting. There’s one fixed set, and the props and scenery are mostly implied. There are no external sound cues: All the music is sung by the actors, all the effects created live. It’s just another inventive, entertaining, occasionally sensational show by one of the best directors around.

“Rose Rage” doesn’t match the glories of “Midsummer.” The source for the show (Shakespeare’s three “Henry VI” plays, condensed to four hours of stage time) can’t rival one of the finest comedies in the language. Nor does this show’s cast, from the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, boast the same wall-to-wall prowess as the Propeller company that played Puck, Bottom, and the rest. This makes Mr. Hall’s achievement all the more remarkable. The show lacks some nuance, and strains its conceit, but mostly succeeds.

The “Henry VI” plays trace the decline of England from Henry V’s death to the loss of France and the War of the Roses. There are no ideological stakes here, only personal jealousies and vendettas. The country tears itself apart, and so Mr. Hall sets the show in a butcher shop. Butchers in white smocks and masks linger around the action; when a noble is killed (which happens often), a pile of fresh meat gets cleaved, or a head of red cabbage gets chopped.

Mr. Hall thrives because he understands that “serving the text,” that old cliche, doesn’t supersede the director’s obligation to serve the text to the audience. His productions are richly theatrical, never employing a CD or a stagehand where an actor would do. All this may make him sound like a ringmaster, a deviser of clever stage business. But there’s a real sense of esprit de corps that comes through in every scene.

The show is full of stylish touches. The sons of York (including the future Richard III, played with sneering fury by Jay Whittaker) dress and act like Dick Tracy villains. The rebel rabblerouser Jack Cade (the intense Joe Forbrich) sounds like Southie’s answer to Travis Bickle. Characters get signature weapons: Queen Margaret (the wily, venomous Scott Parkinson) brandishes what look like lethal tuning forks. It gives the show the giddy, lurid air of playing “Mortal Kombat.”

But it’s not all splatter and gore: “Rose Rage” isn’t “Kill Bill.” Even as Mr. Hall buoys you with his theatrics, he sobers you with the dark themes of Shakespeare’s histories. The sensitive, ineffectual Henry VI resembles his deposed great-uncle, Richard II. “I’ll leave my sons virtuous deeds,” he says, wishing for the same clean start his grandfather tried, and failed, to leave his father. The show ends by nodding to wards the start of “Richard III” – a trick no less exciting for being old. It feels almost decadent: A play so fixated on history’s concussive foulness shouldn’t be this much fun.