At its best, Shakespearean theatre is a happy marriage between actors and audience. But what if you feel there's a third person around, preventing the course of true love from running smooth?

I don't want to knock stage designers; when they get it right, their work can be genuinely transformative and brilliant. But I don't like it when they jump up and down behind the arras like Polonius in Hamlet, trying to distract my attention from the poor old actors.

Some of the best productions of Shakespeare I've seen in the last few years have followed the maxim of less is more. Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory did a brilliant Richard II in Bristol last year, with John Heffernan playing the unhappy monarch, without any set design at all. The Donmar likewise managed a wonderful pared-down Othello, for which Chiwetel Ejiofor won an Olivier award. And when Declan Donnellan's Cheek By Jowl company performs Shakespeare, the focus is always on the acting, not on Nick Ormerod's understated sets.

More recently, the issue of stage design has been thrown into sharp focus by productions at Shakespeare's Globe from countries including South Sudan and Afghanistan. In the Globe to Globe season, it was the actors who performed with the bare minimum in the way of a set who came up trumps.

While more sophisticated companies from Europe struggled to adapt to the Globe's demanding space, lightly equipped groups from South Sudan, Kenya and Zimbabwe seemed instantly at home. They were the ones who knew how to open up a channel to the audience. As the great chef Escoffier used to say, "Faites simple."

It might seem counterintuitive to suggest there's a useful recipe in Escoffier's maxim for our big subsidised theatre companies. But after seeing the disappointing and overdesigned Twelfth Night and The Tempest by the RSC at the Roundhouse this month, I now have a modest proposal.

I suggest that the RSC's new boss, Greg Doran, send all the company's stage designers, engineers and set builders off to a desert island on an enforced sabbatical for a year, just to see what can be achieved in their absence.

I am not arguing against all elaborate stage designs in Shakespeare. I have greatly admired Doran's work, and I loved Rupert Goold's high-concept production of The Merchant of Venice last year, which set the play in Las Vegas casino land, designed by Tom Scutt. I also raved about the Young Vic's Hamlet with Michael Sheen, set in Jeremy Herbert's re-creation of a psychiatric prison.

In both these productions, the stage design seemed to have grown naturally out of the director's vision for the play; at no point did the design get in the way of the actors. But in other RSC productions, an overdesigned set has seemed to cramp the actors' movements and relegate them to almost marginal status. I think part of the problem, as at the National Theatre, is that set designs have to be finalised long before the actors get into rehearsal.

The result, often, is an over-rigid framework that can't be changed. In the RSC Twelfth Night, designer Jon Bausor's set includes a swimming pool, a hotel front desk, a double bed, a revolving door, a grand piano and a working lift – everything but the kitchen sink. None of these devices seems to have any real dramatic function, remaining purely decorative. Bausor's programme note refers to "scenic elements" and his use of fluorescent lighting "exposing the artefacts beneath like in a laboratory or greenhouse". Hmm.

The same problem of an elaborate set handicapping the actors often occurs at the National when it throws its huge design resources at Shakespeare or other classics; the current production of Sophocles's Antigone is a good example.

Shakespeare's Globe, while generally exemplifying the tradition of what Peter Brook called "rough theatre", has also on occasions branched out into elaborate set design, with, to my mind, diminishing returns. I didn't like Lucy Bailey's grand-guignol version of Titus Andronicus, or her equally ketchup-smothered Macbeth, which covered the groundlings' arena with black nets to create a reductive vision of hell.

Like Prospero, great stage designers are magicians. But I'm increasingly of the view that, as in Shakespeare's day, it's much better, as the Chorus tells us in Henry V, to let our "imaginary forces" work instead.