Titus is not very often produced and for good reasons. As being particularly hideous it has some difficult technical challenges and there is the awkward problem of deciding how gruesome to make the gruesome bits. Michael Fentiman treads a middle course. There isn’t a lot of blood (perhaps not enough to make a decent gravy for the human flesh pies) and the stumps from the amputations are quickly done up in nifty leather contraptions. Cleverly, Fentiman extracts what black humour he can from a bleak text and so the audience members have the chance of distancing themselves from the horror.

Motivation and psychologically accurate, complex reflection are not strong points of this, one of Shakespare’s earliest texts, and so audience engagement with the characters and their situations is very sketchy. The play consists of revenge and events rather than dilemmas and reflections. It is a history play rather than a tragedy. The text invites a loud and shouty approach. There is some of that. John Hopkins’s Saturnius is loud and dominant but his character is established clearly in the first few seconds and never wavers throughout; it is a well controlled performance. Richard Durden gives Marcus Andronicus some range of human sympathy; Marcus treads awkwardly throughout the play, torn between keeping his head and showing some human loyalty and values. Durden also gives him some vocal variety which keeps the audience interested. Playing Lavinia, Rose Reynolds does some lovely dumb show work once Lavinia’s tongue has been cut out and once her face has been wiped up from the blood. We never get to know what she thinks, though – not that Shakespeare (or Peele or whoever) has much interest in exploring this. I thought Stephen Boxer did a splendid job with Titus. It’s a thankless task because Shakespare doesn’t give him an ‘inner Titus’ to reveal, but Boxer is lovely to watch and to listen to. One of the surprises and pleasures for me was the performance of the underwritten Lucius, played by Mark Needham.  He gave the character dignity and, unusually in my experience, a character to empathise with to some degree at the end of the play. In some ways I’m reluctant to reveal what I thought was the best performance among these experienced RSC actors. For me it was George David’s Young Lucius. He was very strong in The Merry Wives of Windsor but here is superb: balanced, superbly concentrated and concentrating and drawing considerable range from a small part. I loved watching him.

The story is told very clearly – no mean feat in this play. There is also a feast of visual variety. The use of traps, platforms, group scenes, military shows, drum parades all gives the audience something intersting to look at. The production was extremely slick, even at so early a preview. The costumes are lovely, too. Colin Richmond does not go for a particular time or place. There is delightful variety of texture and colour, suggesting the universality of some the situations in the play. Katy Stephens as Tamora wears a remarkable variety of striking outfits which never fail to please the eye.

There are also some interesting and effective decisions. The play opens in a hospital mortuary with nuns (why on earth nuns?). The depiction of Goths as tatooed gives rise to an ending to the first part of the play which gives the audience something other than horror to talk about.  Lavinia writes what has happened to her in salt. Very clever and mush less cumbersome than Shakespeare’s (or whoever’s)  idea in the text. Titus dresses up in drag as a maid at his final banquet which becomes a kind of Keystone Cops horror event. The play ends not with Lucius’s long speech but with a mime asking the audience to consider what may happen in the future. In these ways the audience is left to reflect. It is a better ending to the play.

I had a quibble about the RSC’s current fashion for covering speech with music. It made some passages hard to hear. It took Kevin Harvey at this preview quite some time to settle on an accent for his Aaron, with the result that I understood almost nothing of his long initial speech and only began to hear what he said when the Liverpudlian accent came to the fore. Lavinia and Tamora were also drowned out by music early on.  No doubt these were preview problems which will be resolved in time.

It seems perverse to say that I enjoyed watching this performance of such a nasty play. It is full of stagecraft and is well worth the trip to Stratford to see it, particularly if you haven’t seen a production of this play before. You won’t have any difficulty following it.

Why not make it an overnight stay in Stratford and see one of the other plays in the same trip? And come and stay at Moss Cottage, rated number 3 on Trip Advisor at the moment for B and Bs to  stay at in Stratford. You will have the warmest of welcomes.

Ostensibly the play examines Queen Victoria’s relationship with India, a country she never visited but was interested in. It is unusual and refreshing to see a play where Queen Victoria is the liberal, struggling against a conservative and possibly racist male government. I was reminded of the shock I got on visiting Osborne House on the Isle of Wight to discover that Victoria and Albert had furnished the house in completely contemporary fashion, becoming patrons of bang up to date designers, artists and furniture makers. The play is set long after Albert’s death and owes something small to  Mrs Brown in that Victoria champions her Indian servant Abdul Karim, promoting him to the position of Munshi, teacher to the Queen, much to the disgust of the prejudiced government and court. But there is a crucial difference. There is none of the teasing of the movie that there are sexual undertones between Victoria and Brown. Here Tony Jayawardena plays Abdul Karim as far from a sexual predator; he is self-interested, he is concerned to further his own prospects, but he is a loyal servant to the Queen and serves her as such: a genuine teacher. There are no sexual vibrations from Victoria either; splendidly played by Beatie Edney, she is incredulous that her entourage is racist, suspicious and dirty-minded.

At the same time, interwoven with this chronological narrative, is the story of Rani Das, an ayah employed to look after the children of one of the English rulers in India returning to Britain. She is raped by her employer, bears his child, is discarded in London, becomes impoverished and destitute, is sheltered by Lascar Sally in the East End, makes her way in life by her own efforts and is eventually reconciled with her first love, Hari.

There are some touching scenes. Hari, played by Ray Pantahaki, and Rani, played by Anneika Rose, are thoroughly engaging and captivating. The children are beautifully played by clothes, evoking all the magic that puppetry at its best can evoke.

This is a play which celebrates cultural difference. It explores the difficulties of inter-cultural interactions but it shows women (Victoria and Lascar Sally) as exempla of modern thinking. If Queen Victoria in her old age can embrace cultural diversity as enriching then so can we.

The show is very beautifully blocked. The music by Stu Barker and Sheema Mukherjee is stunning but not overbearing. There are many lovely visual images, from the cardboard cut out of London near the beginning to the burning lotus flowers at the end. Curtains and projections are used judiciously and effectively throughout. The singing is wonderful; Dom Coyote and Japjit Kaur are delightful to listen to.

I loved this show. It isn’t particularly profound but it is beautifully done.

See it before its ridiculously short run ends. And stay at Moss Cottage while you do, one of the highest rated Bed and Breakfasts in Stratford on Trip Advisor.

Despite looking considerably older than Hamlet’s thirty years, Jonathan Slinger does a good job with Hamlet. Despite his absurdly pompous (and erroneous) claim in The Guardian that nobody has ever portrayed a psychologically understandable Hamlet, this Hamlet is believable. Although physically Slinger could have applied more carefully Hamlet’s injunctions about playing, vocally he is excellent. You can hear every word and the soliloquies are rarely done in the way you expect them to be done, with the result that, however well you know them, you listen to them. No mean feat.  At the beginning he looks like a rather physically dishevelled middle-aged boy. In the middle of the play he wears a fencing outfit which looks like a partly donned straightjacket so he is constantly physically lopsided and awkward, in contrast to the physically poised Horatio and Laertes. Transformed in Act V, he enters in a suit, spectacles discarded and body balanced. Madness, assumed or not, has been left behind, although irrationally explosive rage is still there in his reaction to Laertes.

I didn’t really understand why the lovely Pippa Nixon was made to look so dowdy in her earlier scenes. I also didn’t really understand why she behaved like a sex mad tart at the beginning of her first scene with Hamlet. She is certainly badly treated: Polonius orders her about by clicking his fingers and Laertes, behaving sententiously just like his father, ignores any feelings she might have. Hamlet is vile and violent to her in the nunnery scene.  Nixon is wonderful, though, in her mad scenes – delicate, tender, aetherial and vocally subdued. Overall, though, it is not clear what we are to make of her relationship with Hamlet (and vice versa).

Charlotte Cornwell’s Gertrude is played really interestingly. You don’t quite know what to make of her in the early scenes – very faithful to the text. But her shock in the bedroom scene leaves her devastated and her repentance is clear. Gertrude appears to heed the lesson Hamlet gives her at the end of the bedroom scene. Her relationship with Claudius is symbolised by the physical distance between them during the rest of the play. Gertrude’s gorgeously stylish mourning dress in Act V accentuated her isolation.

Greg’s Hicks’s Claudius is chilling when we first encounter him. Her continues to get colder and colder as the play continues. Slim, elegant and lacking in human feeling, he cares for no one except himself.  Playing the Ghost of Old Hamlet, too, Hicks is completely audible. Less so with Claudius when you often have to strain to hear him, lest, perhaps, we hear too easily how nasty he really is. The decision to have him completely ingore the dying Gertrude was the climax to the cold horror which surrounded him.

Despite losing his best speeches as Horatio (and Shakespeare doesn’t give him many anyway), Alex Waldman is poised, balanced and above all real as Horatio. Luke Norris is similarly unflashy and convincing as Laertes. David Fielder’s First Gravedigger is delightful in what remains of his part and Polonius is well played by Robin Soans – commanding, extremely brisk and politically astute. It is the speed of delivery which makes the characterisation so interesting. Polonius knows exactly what he is doing and there is not an iota of dotage in this portrayal.

I didn’t warm to Oliver Ryan’s Rosencrantz or Nicolas Tennant’s Guildenstern. Presumably Hamlet was right not to trust them. They and Hamlet appeared to have come from Denmark’s Birkbeck College, London – a university for mature students. This was a decision I didn’t think added anything useful to the play.

I don’t want to say a great deal about The Mousetrap. It was rivetting – full of decisions and surprises – beautifully done and a fine end to the first half of the play. Bits of the text are modernised but not spoilt.  I won’t spoil it for you by mentioning details.

I felt that in The Winter’s Tale there was much splendid acting, despite a silly and distracting set. Perhaps 2013 is going to be the year of stupid sets in the main theatre, though I hope not.  Why on earth Hamlet should be set in the main hall of a church hall ot school, acting both as theatre and gym I have no idea. It’s a give-away that the setting was described in The Guardian as ‘a run-down public school fencing gym’. Is Denamrk a public school? Why? How can you tell it’s a public school? Careless and sloppy  decision making as well as stupid and distracting.  I could find no useful link between the setting and the action that we were witnessing. At least the stuff was minimal and at least the RSC was showing off neither the fly tower nor the understage for the sake of it this time. Small mercies. The set did take on some character from the Fortinbras scene onwards, though. Fortinbras’s soldiers partly demolished the stage floor, reminding me of the much better set dismantling that went on in a production of As You Like It decades ago at the point when the action moved from court to country. A sketchy backdrop with a lone tree replaces the back of the hall stage and the floor mostly disappears to leave a fencing strip and earth round it. Nature (human, presumably, and psychological) begins to return. This results in a transformation in Act V as the play moves effectively to ritual and symbolism, perhaps to a more adult environment. What happened to the set in the end shows that Jon Bauser knows how to design. Next time I see one of his designs I hope he will have thought about the whole play and not just a bit of it.

This is the tragedy of Hamlet. The cut ending means that the audience is left thinking about the characters and their fate and not about the succession and the aftermath of Hamlet’s death. It is an appropriate way to end a twenty-first century production.

This production is well worth seeing. Come and stay at Moss Cottage and enjoy a special night or two away.

Confessions first. I read Brecht’s plays many decades ago (because I had to) and didn’t much enjoy them. I have seen several productions of Brecht’s plays and haven’t enjoyed them much. I saw one production of A Life of Galileo a long time ago and didn’t think much of it. I saw Mark Ravenhill’s RSC production of Troilus and Cressida a year ago which I thought was so awful, pretentious and incomprehensible that I vowed to avoid his work in future. When I saw that Ian McDiarmid was playing Galileo I was ambivalent. He is hugely important in modern British drama and his work as Joint Artistic Director of the Almeida in London was outstanding in the development of late twentieth century British drama, but I had found his acting before 1990 to be rather mannered and I was not particularly looking forward to it.

It’s good for the soul to be forced to eat humble pie (not the umble pie now demonstrated at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage!) because I was so utterly wrong. I have been converted. I think this is a really fine play. I loved the production when I saw it earlier in the week. I think that Ravenhill’s translation is a brilliant theatrical text (I don’t know German so can’t comment on that). McDiarmid is brilliant – not in the slightest mannered either physically or vocally. His acting conveys truth. His Galileo is real, vibrant, complex, moving. And like the scene in Written on the Heart I wrote about, and the scene in The Orphan of Zhao,there is a glorious scene here, too, between a young and an older man – McDiarmid’s Galileo and Matthew Aubrey’s Andrea, which I found exquisitely acted and breathtakingly beautiful.

Maybe I should just leave it there. This is another production not to be missed. Like The Orphan of Zhao. The three plays together are stunning: far more interesting than they would be on their own, and even more so when joined to last year’s outstanding Written on the Heart.

If you haven’t seen Galileo or Zhao or Godunov or any of the three, you should. They are all in the Swan. Don’t miss them. Come and stay at Moss Cottage and treat yourselves.

In an article in the programme Lucy Bailey explains the concepts that she and William Dudley worked on together. The main one is a good one – “that Leontes’s court is at the top of an ivory tower, surrounded by sea and sky, with no clue as to the actual, real world down below”. The lush, richly coloured fabrics on which the characters lounge in a kind of middle eastern pleasure palace establishes this nicely. As things get worse the colours begin to transform into black and white. So far, excellent. Lucy Bailey also says “Bohemia is on the rough rocks at the bottom of the tower. You could say that the hard labour of those at the bottom of the tower has provided for those up top”. Fine. The blocking at the beginning of the sheep shearing mirrors that of the opening at Bohemia’s court. The Sicilian actors double as those of Bohemia and the point is clearly established.

As with many good ideas, however, relentless embellishment detracts rather than enhances. Bohemia is the northwest coast of Industrial England. Leontes’s ivory tower is an enormous metallic erection which rises from the deep pit once we are in Bohemia. The Bohemians at the sheep shearing are on the beach in Lancashire Wakes Week. Tiresomely literal, I thought. Placing Leontes at the top of the ivory tower during the Bohemia scenes, getting up from time to time, was maybe meant to remind us of the character driving the plot. Might we have forgotten otherwise?

William Dudley is one of Britain’s greatest theatre designers but I didn’t think this was one of his best efforts. The backdrop displays endless (almost) pictures of moving waves. Looking at them nearly did my head in. I wanted to watch the play but was constantly distracted. The bear which kills Antigonus rises out of the sea in the video, strides behind the “ivory” tower and disappears video left just before we hear that it has killed Antigonus. I needed an actor in a costume, not a pop video.

Still, design aspects apart this is a very good production. If you can avoid the distractions and watch the actors instead, there is much to admire and to move. I think Polixenes is a very tricky part to play but Adam Levy does a great job – he’s lively, sexy, honest, charming –  and appropriately gets infected by Leontes’s jealousy in his dealings with Florizel. Florizel is more convincing than Florizels usually are. Nick Holder creates a funny, completely convincing Young Shepherd (no shepherd in sight of course, though, in this production, but that’s not his fault). I thought David Shaw-Parker was outstanding as Archidamus and the Old Shepherd; his acting was varied and very subtle. His Old Shepherd was understated and beautiful, even moving, to watch. Tara Fitzgerald’s Hermione is also complex and also understated. The statue scene is beautifully done. It is very still, beautifully blocked.  Even the stupid video of the sea stops so that one can watch the acting and start to feel something.  I greatly admired Jo Stone-Fewings’s Leontes. Vocally and physically he was delightful to watch.

Significant changes were made after the previews, all improvements. Half an hour was cut. The dry ice which had ruined the statue scene was cut. A shame about the video backdrop and the tower.

We had unnecessary goalposts in Merry Wives. We have a “ivory” tower and video here. Let’s hope when it comes to Hamlet that someone forgets to include technical gimmicks. You don’t have to do something just because you can.

The production is well worth seeing, though, particularly because of the acting. Come and see it before it goes on tour and enjoy a night at Moss Cottage, too.

I have already waxed lyrical about The Orphan of Zhao, a not-to-be-missed production. Both plays deal with a similar political area. Zhao looks at the political legitimacy of a ruler based on heredity. Godunov posits an antithetical view – that it doesn’t mater who rules as long as he can take and maintain power and this is why the programme notes comment on resonances with contemporary Russia and Putin in particular.

However, it is for its dramatic and theatrical qualities that you should see this play. It is very energetic and physical, with some beautiful visual moments. The weapons for the splendid battle scenes are coats; the delightful fountain is created by watering cans and buckets; a dead “horse” becomes a pillow. The whole production is overlaid with the central metaphor of clothing. Before the action begins the audience sees racks of costumes and these are donned throughout the production as actors change characters, nationalities, social class and status. It works brilliantly as a cohesive device, as one character changes into another, as one repressive ideology (state or church) transforms into another and as one unthinking crowd in one place turns into the same somewhere else (there is no difference between the common people of Moscow and the Polish artistocracy except their clothes). Most dramatic, perhaps,  is the visual awareness that the military hero Kurbsky is no different from a soldier’s horse. Both fall and are forgotten. Pushkin uses Shakespeare’s idea of the fickle multitude throughout but his cynicism of organised religion seems to be even greater than Shakespeare’s.

The best feature of the production, though, is the ensemble playing. In my fifty years of RSC-going I have almost always been pained by some weak playing of minor parts. This is not so here. As in Zhao, actors with very few lines,  such as Martin Turner or Chris Lew Kum Hoi (who was, incidentally, brilliant as the Orphan in the understudies performance of Zhao), or Joan Iyiola, command the attention of the audience as much as those playing major roles.

As well as the ensemble playing, there are some fine individual performances. Lucy Briggs-Owen is again brilliant. Her face and fingers are a treat to watch and her characterisation is solidly textually based on the idea that despite Maryna’s beauty her eyes and mouth are like marble. Watch out for the one moment towards the end when they soften. Wonderful. So is Graham Turner in all his parts. Patrick Romer’s cameo role at the beginning is beautiful to listen to and to watch, as is Sadie Shimmin’s as the Hostess. Philip Whitchurch and Joe Dixon (using quite a different register from his role in Zhao) are also outstandingly good.

I didn’t find Boris Godunov as emotionally powerful as The Orphan of Zhao, but then I wasn’t meant to. Perhaps Michael Boyd saw it as a transition to the alientation techniques which we may get in A Life of Galileo. I found a great deal to admire, though, and the two hour production is all the better for being played without an interval. There is also quite a lot of comedy. I think it was Michael Boyd who said that while there was much comedy the play is wholly serious. There is also some audience involvement. If you sit in the front row, you might be asked to hold something for a bit.

Lovers of fine theatre will want to see both plays. Why not come and stay at Moss Cottage while you see them?

The Orphan of Zhao is the firsat in a trilogy of plays, completed by Boris Godunov and The Life of Galileo, played by the same ensemble. It is a play about dynastic succession, political skulduggery, rule by terror and the triumph of righteousness. It is also a play which raises issues about human sacrifice, the limits of moral obligation and the need for trickery, subterfuge and even ritual suicide if good is to triumph.

The story is very easy to follow, mainly because James Fenton’s adaptation (possibly following Chinese tradition) makes sure that the audience knows exactly who is who. Characters introduce themselves and some of their characteristics to the audience when they enter, before they take part in the action. Sometimes this is so memorable that households (like mine) are still ringing with ‘I am Tu’An Gu’ weeks after having seen the production. Fenton’s text is most unusual, taking history and legend and turning it into myth. The nearest dramatic genre I could relate it to was the late nineteenth century Irish plays of Yeats et al. There is an incantatory, ritualistic feel to it which got right under my skin. And there are interesting allusions to Shakespeare’s plays, such as the eighteen year gap reminding one of the fourteen years in A Winter’s Tale, and the Bible.

There are many fine performances. I thought Graham Turner as Dr Cheng Ying was magnificent. The almost static scene where he is writing the story of the Orphan’s life was extremely beautiful and his final scene where he visitis the scene of his son’s grave extraordinarily moving in its underplayed simplicity. Joe Dixon’s voice and physicality were perfect for Tu’An Gu. Dixon used mainly the lower part of his register to create an intimidating intensity but in his final scene revealed this character’s loss of power by a subtle and extremely effective vocal relaxation. Lucy Briggs-Owen created a multi-faceted Princess simply and effectively. It is hard to imagine better performances than these, even at the RSC. But it wasn’t just the major players who were effective. Chris Lew Kum Hoi and Siu Hun Li, amongst the many parts they played, created baby noises with touching subtlety and quietness in a brilliantly imaginative scene.

As always Doran’s blocking and stagecraft were impeccable. There were beautiful tableaux and wonderfully executed crowd scenes. Doran clearly expects complete concentration and focus from his actors, and achieved it even during the previews. The actors create a world which is almost entirely credible. It is a remarkable technical achievement. Doran’s direction, Will Tuckett’s movement and Niki Turner’s design create a plethora of memorable moments, not least poppies floating down from the flies over the dead towards the end of the play.

This wonderful production should be playing to packed houses. Indeed, it’s one of those rare things where tickets should be impossible to get. But somehow something has gone wrong. Perhaps the British theatregoing public has not caught on to the fact that a Doran production is to die for these days. Perhaps a really complex text, interpreted with imagination at every moment is not so attractive as a farcical version of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Perhaps RSC goers won’t fork out for something new and unfamiliar. It can’t be the reviews; they have been excellent. But of all the plays on at the moment this is the one to see. Book for it. And stay at Moss Cottage to make a memorable visit to Stratford complete.

It is a real ensemble production with most actors playing several parts and with some of them playing instruments, too, to complement the band playing on stage left which is from time to time incorporated into the action. There are vast numbers of props, extra costumes, objects flown onto stage, a ladder to climb , lots of flying sequences and constantly changing pictures aided by a large revolve. There are beautiful lighting effects, too, created by Paul Anderson.

Lots of cuteness appeals both to the kids and the adults: Elephant’s propulsion is by means of roller skates; the enormous and charming mouse ears; parrot’s multi-coloured costume; the lovely tableau at the beginning of a clockwork family; a unicycle…. There is a lot of rough and tumble and a splendid ‘caterpiller’ sequence.

There is also a plot of sorts. Two tin mice are taken to a toyshop, are bought as Christmas presents, get broken and thrown out, go on a adventure, meet Mannie, an evil engineering rat, get dropped into a lake, are rescued and find their way back home, to the toyshop. I have to admit to finding the plot challenging, although the brighter people I went with had no problem in identifying all the characters and working out what was going on. It was clearly a problem I had with the surrealist genre.

I had no problem with the Beckettian ideas, though. This is a children’s story about identity and purpose. The tin mice’s quest to be self-winding is a straightforward twentieth century metaphor and Mannie’s manipulation of them gives it a political as well as personal and social dimension. I’m almost ashamed to say that this thematic exploration gained my attention much more than the visual and aural razzle-dazzle, but this says more about me than it does about the production. However, director Paul Hunter has not been shy in making sure that some of Hoban’s more intellectual concerns are included and developed.

The first preview was certainly audience-ready. The production will become tigher and slicker as the run develops. I recommend it.

The chase scenes inside Ford’s house were slick and funny and timing was generally good. This production is about the two wives tricking Falstaff and about Ford’s irrational and hyberbolically expressed jealousy. Nan’s marriage was downplayed. Slender’s function is to do silly walks and Caius’s to say ‘bugger’ tiresomely often. Fenton is feeble. No one cares who marries Nan. Indeed none of the play’s more serious issues are highlighted.

There is some excellent acting. Desmond Barrit is wonderful as Falstaff, Anita Dobson lively and skilful as Mistress Quickly and Sylvestra le Touzel and Alexandra Gilbreath both splendid as Mrs Page and Mrs Ford. Scenes involving these characters always held my attention. The children are all convincing, with David George as William Page and Leon Finnan as Robin and Bede particularly enjoyable to watch.

I heard some of what David Charles as Sir Hugh Evans said and a tiny bit of what Bart David Soroczynski as Dr Caius said. It was good that what I missed didn’t amount to very much.

Sylvestra le Touzel said in an interview in the programme that the production was set in Windsor in 2012. I didn’t get this. It seemed more like the 1970s to me in terms of style, materials, fittings and clothes.

Not everything worked for me. I didn’t understand who bought the underage Nan Page’s cigarettes for her and I certainly didn’t get the impression that Fenton was of too high a social class for her. I didn’t think either of them knew what they were doing in the play. Perhaps Phillip Breen was just not interested in them. I wasn’t. But I missed their verse which was just thrown away.

What Shakespeare was on when he wrote Act V I cannot imagine. It makes some sense for Anne Page to be the Fairy Queen; it makes none at all to me for Mistress Quickly  to take that role. All I could think was that Breen wanted Anita Dobson to have more to do and that he wanted to marginalise Anne Page.

This production is good fun. If you like farce you will love it. I have to confess that I don’t and I didn’t. Most audience members were delighted by it.

My heart sank when I read in one of the articles in the programme that the play includes ‘a dignified debate about euthanasia’ but mercifully this is a play which shows, not tells. We got used to plays in the seventies and eighties which gave us ‘dignified debates’ about various social and moral issues, but I don’t want any more. The article is wrong. There is no debate. Juliet decides to kill herself and we witness her being helped by Romeo. It is powerful, understated and moving. Far more moving than a ‘debate’ would have been.

The actors are Richard McCabe and Kathryn Hunter. I have to admit prejudice here. I will never forget Kathryn Hunter in The Skriker, as King Lear and in Kafka’s Monkey. Scenes from these productions run through my head in vivid detail. So do some more recent RSC productions  – her teenage boy and old woman in The Grain Store, her Cleopatra and her extraordinary Fool in King Lear where one look at Lear before the Fool’s disappearance made me gasp and made me reconsider the play. For me she possesses the most extraordinary physical and vocal virtuosity and the most extraordinary emotional intelligence.

I was not disappointed. She is mesmerising. There is extraordinary depth to the love she conveys and, needless to say (because it is her) Juliet’s physical decline is brilliantly conveyed. Her eyes before Juliet’s death convey the most powerful of emotions and connections to Romeo. But McCabe is also wonderful. The performance is full of subtlety, physical, vocal, emotional.

The set is apporopriately simple with two chairs, a bed which moves up and down stage centre, a doorway, a backdrop and a screen. A projection of the moving sea created by Jaacques Collin gradually encroaches. At the beginning it is confined to the backdrop. By the end it has engulfed the whole of the stage floor. Simple but stunning. John Woolf’s music, too, is powerfully complementary without being obtrusive or sentimental.

Perhaps the best thing about this production by Helena Kaut-Howson is its apparent simplicity. Although the set is unrealistic the movements are wonderfully controlled. The dancing sequences which move into dream memories are beautiful – not so slick that they look stagey, but tangible expressions of a deep relationship.

This is another production featuring Kathryn Hunter which I shall never forget. You should see it before it ends at the end of October.