Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy: pure theatre gold

Or (as I wanted to put in the title but found it too long) 'the best six and a half hours you'll ever spend in a theatre'. That's not including the two-hour-plus breaks in between last Saturday's run. Who would have thought that the 11am Julius Caesar, Henry IV (Part One with three scenes from Part Two) at 3.30pm and The Tempest at 8 could have been linked together so pertinently, or that Phyllida Lloyd's concept of setting them all in a women's prison with an all-female cast could really be sustained? Well, I had an inkling when I went to the first run of Henry IV at the Donmar's main Covent Garden venue. But of course this was always going to be something extra-special, starting with the buzz in the excellent temporary venue just beyond King's Cross Station.

Below was the scene - a big patch of blue prisoners call the sky, plus plane, above the structure - just before 11am on a crisp winter day,

this the return for Henry IV after I'd made an excursion into the West End to buy a full score of Ligeti's Le grand macabre for my Monday Opera in Depth class and came back for a mosey around the British Library's magnificent free exhibition of most treasured manuscripts

and this the front of the theatre, illuminated by the pavilion structure just beyond, following a good supper in Kings Place.

Harriet Walter is the big name around which the three plays have developed - I'm not ever going to stop going on about how she played Schoenberg's Moses as well as the Marschallin, Prima Donna and Brünnhilde for me up in Birmingham, one of the proudest days of my professional life - and her Prospero (pictured below in the second of many excellent production images by Helen Maybanks) was always going to be central. And indeed, hers is the most moving portrayal by far I've ever seen on stage.

But she would be the first to admit it's not mainly about her. Lloyd has developed one of the best ensembles, sex regardless, I've ever seen in a theatre. We've come a long way since Kathryn Hunter played Richard III and 'shrew' Katherine, Janet McTeer Petruchio, in the Globe's all-women ventures; the supporting casts were sometimes barely that, and left quite a lot to be desired.

Not so anyone here. It's difficult to know how to go about a form of reviewing: should it be 'the play's the thing', and one by one, or a highlighting of individual performances which are not entirely the point? Nevertheless the standouts were many, and so, having dispensed with the prison roll calls that begin and end the first two plays by this one typical image,

let's salute the specific excellences of performances which can only leave one the more amazed given that every participant had at least one different role in each play. No one figure dominates Julius Caesar; the personal and political volatility is too central for that. My first experiences of it were studying the text for O-level (which fortunately didn't destroy my admiration for it), playing the role of Cassius - although, as my English master put it in his review for the school magazine I had to edit, some of my 'sensitive cadences...only reached the front few rows of the audience', I did have the one virtue of never needed a prompt - and seeing the National Theatre production with Gielgud in one of his last performances as Caesar.

Jackie Clune's Emperor is central at the start, a lively opening prison scene substituting for Shakespeare's I.i. Then we're off into the dialogues of Cassius and Brutus. Admirable from the start the way Lloyd gets her actors to express occasionally complicated sense with the precision of their hand gestures; that made Cassius' first long speech - which I've forgotten bar the 'colossus' bit - very urgent in the hands and voice of the excellent Martina Laird, pictured with Walter.

Walter's Brutus seems fine and sensitive, and of course a bit ridiculous when trying to justify the bloodiness of the assassination.

The difference between him and Caesar is highlighted by the respective scenes with the wives; Brutus's Portia (Clare Dunne, pictured with Walter above) is his equal, Caesar's Calpurnia (Zainab Hasan) is not.

The conspiracy gathers pace towards the first climax (pictured above); Karen Dunbar, top left, almost steals the show as Casca, turning out to be a genius of a comedian later as a dim Bardolph and a rollicking Trinculo. Would love to have seen her open the Commonwealth Games. Lloyd's clean lines make you appreciate the symmetry, or rather the rapid change after the murder and the descent into bloody internecine quarrels accompanied by all the abuses of war. Jade Anouka was, when I first saw her, and still is the most compelling Henry IV Hotspur, played as a wired young black man full of macho postures when the reality is a vulnerable kid, gifted and with no proper outlet for his energies.

She's hardly less remarkable as Mark Antony, progressing in the oratorical fulcrum from a nervously improvising, cornered friend of Caesar

into a dominant orator; that made the big speech more compelling than ever. Anouka's final triumph was as a Puckish Ariel, with some fine rapping thrown in for good measure.

Battle scenes in Shakespeare can make the later stages pall; the brilliance of Lloyd's sets in the first two plays was to make the combats and even the toy prison props similar yet different: warriors as boys with toys, as The Guardian's Lyn Gardner shrewdly put it. Henry IV Part I is more perilous as the combats proliferate, but there was no sense of let-down here. Even so, it was better to return to this production's perfect poise between the Falstaff/Hal scenes and the king's speeches as well as his confrontations with a seemingly feckless son (Walter and Dunne below),

with Hotspur as the earlier third point of a perfect triangle.

Sophie Stanton has been a theatrical idol of mine since her superlative role as the Mama Cass-loving girl in the first run of Beautiful Thing (in which my good friend Simon's partner Patricia got to know her, playing no less superbly then). Stanton was a more consistently funny Falstaff than her predecessor from the Donmar original; even if we lost the sleep-babbling fear of burst balloons behind the arras, we got far more seeming ad libs. The central Eastcheap scene served as the central intermezzo of the day, played at the highest level from all concerned. For other touches, see my original thoughts; just need to add how superbly it was adapted for the gym pitch surrounded by seats on all sides. The only thing missing from the production pics is the audience, that crucial third dimension to add to playwright and players. Everyone in a healthily mixed crowd seemed gripped through each two-hours-plus, including a couple of young girls on the edge of their seats throughout.

Would The Tempest bring the redemption of romance, given the setting? Not only that; its context gave it extra poignancy. Prospero is played by 'Hannah' (Walter), a prisoner for life who drove a getaway car for a political organisation and would not plead for any mitigation of her sentence. Her huge imagination guides the action. Again, the kind of props the prison girls would use create magic. As in the other two plays, no gag or idea outstays its welcome; in that respect Lloyd is classically pitch-perfect.

The acting pleasures here were too numerous to mention, but apart from Walter's mesmerising speeches, there was the magic of true young love between Leah Harvey's Miranda and Sheila Atim's Ferdinand (pictured above) - their scenes usually ruined by mannered young thesps. Nor have I ever laughed so much at Caliban's romps with Stefano (Clune) and Trinculo (Dunbar, pictured with Stanton below).

Had expected perhaps a bit more from Joan Armatrading's specially composed Tempest score, but the music-making throughout, and the use of popular songs, was always apt and impressive (fine singing, consummate instrumentalists).

Here, of course, tears came to the eyes - predictably so at Caliban's 'the isle is full of noises', elsewhere not always when expected. There was magic in one of Prospero's last natural summons, when the lights went down and we all turned on the little torches we'd been given, like hundreds of glow-worms, and the ultimate heartbreak as Hannah hears the voices of all the girls thanking her on their releases and settles down to another night in prison. I get emotional just writing about it and just realised I haven't even begun to discuss the connections forged between the plays. Enough already. Try and get a ticket - if you live in or near New York, you stand a better chance after Christmas. Though Americans, who will find this the right sort of sustenance in a difficult January, won't get the full works, yet at any rate. One of the masterpieces of theatre; it will never be forgotten.

Coming soon: two mythic giants

Which is a way of advertising six classes of the new Opera in Depth season on Mozart's Don Giovanni and my forthcoming BBC Radio 3 Building a Library on Elgar's Falstaff (broadcast date 8 October). Let's get the basic info down for the first, since it starts on Monday 26 September. Runs for ten weeks, Mondays 2.30-4.30pm, at the wonderful Frontline Club in Paddington. We devote the first five weeks to Don G before moving on to Shostakovich's The Nose (covering two or three weeks) and Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (one or two). Mark Wigglesworth is down to return on 14 November, having by then moved on to Berg's Lulu at ENO. If you're interested in joining, try this email: david.nice@theartsdesk.com

While it's hard to love the Don Juan of Tirso de Molina and the Don Giovanni of Mozart, who could not have more complex feelings about Shakespeare's greatest (semi)comic creation? Elgar understood his dualities and wrote the most perceptive 'analytical essay' for the Musical Times of September 1913. Novello helpfully reprinted it as a little booklet, which I treasure.

As this most magnificent of tone-poems illustrates, Elgar had no time for what he saw as the 'caricature' of The Merry Wives of Windsor but couldn't praise too highly the creation of Henry IV Parts One and Two, whose death is described so vividly by Mistress Quickly in Henry V. Thus part of Elgar's second paragraph, using Professor Dowden and Maurice Morgann to speak for him:

The real 'Sir John Falstaff is a conception hardly less wonderful than that of Hamlet.' This complexity has been summed up by Morgann as follows: 'He is a character made up by Shakespeare wholly of incongruities; - a man at once young and old, enterprizing [sic] and fat [not sure what the duality is there, mind you], a dupe and a wit, harmless and wicked, weak in principle and resolute by constitution, cowardly by appearance and brave in reality; a knave without malice, a lyar without deceit; and a knight, a gentleman and a soldier, without either dignity, decency, or honour.'

Dare I say the opposing qualities would have appealed to a typical Geminian like Elgar? They account for why in part Falstaff is also a self-portrait (cue this surprising photo which Graham Rickson sent me today).

Everything is in perfect balance - the humour and extroversion versus the introspection of the dreamer, darkness and light, programme music and pure symphonism. The climaxes of the Gadshill exploit, battle and aggressive coronation march sit well around and between the heartbreaking dream interludes - and if those don't have the right degree of inwardness, any recording is going to fail. That helped me to make distinctions and to jettison half-good performances at key points. But more I cannot say, of course, until the programme's aired.

Some years ago I was asked to give a talk comparing Falstaff with Strauss's Don Quixote. There are so many points of correspondence between the man Strauss hailed as 'the first English progressivist' and the Bavarian tragicomedian (another Gemini, of course). I had a wonderful time on Wednesday evening hearing the English Concert in two Quixote-related works; should have got to know Telemann's Le Burlesque de Quichotte long ago, but what a light-footed charmer it is, made all the richer by Danann McAleer's reading of what turned out to be the poetically archaic Victorian translation of Cervantes by John Ormsby. Maybe that's the version I should turn to next - for like War and Peace, Don Quixote should be revisited at least every 10 years.

It's in fact been nine years since I last covered Mozart's Don Giovanni in what was then my Opera in Focus class. Now we coincide with the first and last fling of what ought to be a perfect partnership, Mark Wigglesworth conducting and Richard Jones directing a new production at English National Opera (oh, what wouldn't we all have given for the original plan that the duo should share The Gondoliers, a work Carlos Kleiber in all seriousness would have conducted at ENO if they'd taken him at his word). I look forward to all the film references Richard revealed in a special-preview ENO talk with Christine Rice and myself, bearing in mind that he had given each of the cast members a special DVD. Clive Bayley, the Leporello, got The King of Comedy.

Which made me buy a copy and watch it for the first time. What a masterpiece of discomfiture and a prophecy of the insane pitch celebrity culture has already reached. Astonishing performances from De Niro as the man who won't let go, Jerry Lewis as the man without humour - and Sandra Bernhard as the fan from hell, getting her big break from Scorsese.

Hoping that Richard will come along again to the Opera in Depth course. Looks likely, but he's usually elusive until closer to the time, and of course totally preoccupied with Don G at the moment.

Great guests

'Great' is a term I hope I don't splash about too much, but it's always good to know who or what truly stands out, especially in the musical and operatic world where standards are generally so high already (one can't make the same generalisation about theatre).  I stick by the publicity blurb I wrote for the flyer to advertise Sioned Williams's lecture-recital at St Andrew's Fulham Fields: she IS one of the world's great harpists. And Graham Vick enters the pantheon of top directors - not that it's overstocked, in my opinion - above all for his pioneering work on opera involving the community in Birmingham. As chronicled here and on a BBC Radio 3 chat with Tom Service, I went for the first time this year, to see the Big Top Khovanskygate, and it was certainly up there with the most extraordinary operatic experiences of my life. A total immersive experience, on our feet for three hours plus and no compromises - full CBSO, no miking, quality singers, chorus bolstered by professionals.

Actually I also owe Graham a debt for introducing me to Britten's Billy Budd and tackling the crucial gay issues in it back in the 1980s. When we talked together at the Opera in Depth class the other week, I said it had such an impact because it was the first time I saw it. 'And do you not think that might have been because my production was actually rather good?', he said, not boastfully but with a secure sense of his own worth (it was; only Tim Albery's since has come close).

Sioned first, anyway. She came with harp to St Andrew's Fulham Fields, where I'm running monthly classes linked to the BBC Symphony Orchestra courses as before, chiefly because after the City Lit debacle I still very much wanted to cover the Nielsen symphonies Sakari Oramo is conducting this season. Some of the players also volunteered to make appearances as before: cellist Michael Atkinson is getting the Merchant Quartet back together to work on Sibelius's great Voces Intimae Quartet, possibly a Nielsen too. And Sioned wanted both to make up for the fact that when she'd last come to the City Lit, it was at the end of a serious illness and she hadn't the strength to bring the harp too, and to reflect on her brilliant Purcell Room concert of six new works for harp commissioned by herself (read the Arts Desk rave - which is absolutely not because I know and like her).

So this time we brave few got the benefit of her insights into the differing virtues of the commissions. The harp is perhaps the trickiest of all instruments for a composer to know the strengths and limitations thereof; Paul Patterson, who came along as stalwart supporter again, and perfectionist Michael Finnissy are masters of the art, where one of the other works had asked the impossible and impractical and a great deal of collaboration was necessary.

We heard movements and selections again, often with an illuminating running commentary on what was going on pedal and string-wise; and the biggest triumph was to get screen and sound working - if only you knew how brinksmanlike that was - for Dominic Murcott's Domestica. I found it even richer second time around, knowing now that the domestic sights and sounds were filmed, oh so artistically, by Magali Charier in Sioned's and Ali's home, and that the ticking clock slows down (you don't sense this, or at least I didn't, at the premiere, though you do feel that the harp contributions become more introspective and poetic).And, small in number though the audience was this time, St Andrew's turns out to be a wonderful venue for subtlety and magic.

Graham's visit to my Opera in Depth course at the Frontline Club has trailed a host of wondering messages from the students which have left me in no doubt of his special connection. He spoke very movingly on the sense of change since he first directed Prokofiev's War and Peace at the Kirov, as it then was, when he was still a relative youngster full of romantic idealism back in 1991 (thanks to Peter Maniura, that first visit when Leningrad was turning back into Petersburg proved a bridge for me to devoting middle life to great Sergey Sergeyevich).

Now he wonders at how modern the music is, and was keen to redress weaknesses he'd felt in the characterisation of Prince Andrey (this time played by Ukrainian Andrey Bondarenko, his Glyndebourne Onegin and the one singer on whom he actually insisted). He wanted to refer back to Austerlitz and to keep the war in the peace sequence, and the private scenes more prominent in the war half.

The second collaboration with Gergiev originated in a mad idea to do the opera on the Edinburgh Tattoo parade ground during the Festival. 'And just as when you have to think a low note when you sing a high one, or sit if necessary on stage as if you were rising up, I wanted to make it about three people.' The project failed for lack of money, but Gergiev was insistent on Vick coming back to the Mariinsky for his roughly ten-year reassessment of Prokofiev's opera (with Andrey Konchalovsky's beautifully realised but heavily cut version in between). Graham says he was surprised at Gergiev's request for an openly gay director with a track record of controversial productions.

And yet Gergiev gave him total carte blanche. Going for the contemporary meant endless meetings with lawyers about what could and couldn't be represented on the Russian stage, but Vick says he fought tooth and claw, and succeeded in nearly everything. Even, note, in the slipped-in yellow, white and blue of the screens above, played out to the choral ode in the New Year's Eve ball scene, and returning in the 'war' sequence spattered with blood.

Anyway, it all happened; he hadn't heard from Gergiev what he thought - according to Caroline of the Mariinsky Friends, he was delighted - because the conductor only appeared for the final rehearsal. Even so, Vick thinks that things have now gone so far in Russia that he would have to think twice about returning. I can't wait to see the whole thing at the Frontline on Monday week.

The other great personage who's been keeping us company through the ten two-hour classes on War and Peace - for we've been following Graham's 1991 production on DVD alongside Francesca Zambello's Paris Opera show - has been Dame Harriet Walter (seen above in the first of Helen Maybanks' photos for the Donmar Henry IV). As you'll have read if you've been following the blog, she consented to my amazement to read those chapters or sequences of Tolstoy's novel which parallel Prokofiev's more or less faithful setting of them, and she's done it beautifully. I was especially moved the other week, recording Pierre's confrontation with Natasha after the failed elopement and Natasha's encounter with the dying Andrey, to find her stopping, going back and finding a depth in the speeches that was moving to tears. We reach the last two scenes on Monday so I'm looking forward to editing her last contribution for that.

Since we would meet in the break between Saturday matinees and evening performances of Henry IV at the Donmar, I was very conscious of that background. Not that I'd have missed Phyllida Lloyd's production for the world, but I pushed that little bit harder to get tickets and finally saw it the other Saturday. Folk have been split down the middle about it, but I found it electrifying - perhaps all the more so since I hadn't seen, more fool me, the Julius Caesar also set in a women's prison; but the use of simple props and the evocation of the background seemed to me utterly fresh and always pertinent.

This was true ensemble work, rather unconventionally so since there were beautiful verse-speakers like Harriet's King, Jackie Clunes's Owen Glendower and the fabulous Ann Ogbomo as Worcester, seen here in confab with the 'enemy'

alongside new talent, in one way less experienced but in another thrillingly immediate. I couldn't get it out of my head that  Jade Anouka's Hotspur - even with an arm in plaster - wasn't some hyperactive, gifted but undirected black teenager from South London.

She was heartbreaking, especially so in the scenes with Sharon Rooney's Lady Percy, That's not a role that usually makes a huge impact, but as young, stressed, poor mother, the characterisation went straight to the heart- with an astonishing touch of physical knockabout added to the mix.

For me, there were no false notes. Falstaff, maybe, should be posh, but since he was being played by a prison inmate the take still worked in conjuring him as a sarf London wideboy; I laughed a lot not only at the fear of a burst balloon in the Gadshill episode, but the muttered remembrance of it as nightmare when Falstaff dozes behind the arras. The music was superbly placed and apt, the company routines brilliant, the whole thing pacy and vibrant. And the inclusion of two key scenes from Part Two added on to a fairly complete Part One was a fair compromise, short of having both in two performances - which I'll be seeing when the RSC production arrives at the Barbican, though I don't expect it to communicate quite as well as this.

A guest who will certainly be great has been staying with us in two spells. Eszter Bránya from Kecskemet, Hungary, Kitty Lambton's former classmate when the family spent a year out there, celebrated her 19th birthday here with a delicious cardamomy cake from the Swedish bakery Bagariet complete with a Carluccio's firework candle. Our young violinist came first for consultation lessons and then for auditions at the Guildhall and the Royal College of Music - successful in the first, waiting to hear about the second, though she went straight through to the scholarship second round - and all I'll say for now is that her tone is dark and powerful, from hearing her practise, her attitude incredibly quick and responsive, her dedication that of a serious artist. She'll go far, no doubt about that.

Tonight I have a great guest for 10 minutes of my 6pm talk before the BBC Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by one of the best, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, at the Barbican. He'll be presenting together the revolutionary Part Two of Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette,  Prokofiev's shattering Third Symphony and Dramatis personae by the BBCSO's Artist in Residence Brett Dean (pictured above). Brett will be joining me hot off the plane from Australia; I look forward hugely to meeting him. 

'O's of blood, tears and delight

As in wooden O for Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and fairground circle for Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, though neither the Globe nor the splendid new(ish) Arcola Theatre in Dalston were quite as I'd seen them before.

William Dudley's splendid designs for a space I thought had thrown at us all the magic it could over the years - how could I have missed this bloody shocker first time round? - swathed the stage and its pillars in black, making characters almost ghost-like as they retreated from the incense-smoked sunbeams that pierced us Groundlings on a hot summer afternoon, and strung black banners from a kind of oculus, half Rome Pantheon, half Colosseum (which I read sometimes appeared to the ancient Roman public similarly festooned).

Further north the company Morphic Graffiti achieved the impossible: staged a spectacular musical which begins with a waltz to accompany that object of childhood wonder, the carousel, by inscribing a circle in the most intimate of spaces. They stinted neither on the choruses - doubling as circus acts - nor on the dancing: imagine it, that whole Agnes de Mille fantasy ballet in Act Two complete. It may have seemed as old fashioned to us as the 'sometimes when a man punches a woman it can feel like a kiss' line (I paraphrase), but neither was passed over. Odd of me to claim delight in both cases, too, but since Shakespeare's violence is almost as strip-cartoony as Tarantino's, there was an element of ridiculous fun to it. Production photos by Simon Kane for Shakespeare's Globe and QNQ Creative for the Arcola.

Both casts were excellent, the Titus team perhaps more variably so despite obviously superlative direction by the dependable Lucy Bailey. Obi Abili as Aaron, the dodgily black-of-face, black-of-heart Moor, didn't send shivers at first with threats of what he might do, but the whole semi-farce of saving the baby Tamara has produced with him

was powerfully undercut by his hideous murder of the Nurse to shut her mouth. I can imagine a few Groundlings swooning at that. One passed out in the first half, at the point if I remember correctly when Titus chops one of his hands off, on the afternoon we went, but there weren't as many faintings as the advertised average. Me, I just looked away when I knew violence was coming and let Django Bates's use of scary percussion do its worst. Bates's score is superb, brilliantly executed by musicians wielding a range of pagan brass instruments - stunning hunt scene - and never more original than in the weirdly off-kilter banquet music, jolly-sickly-doomy, when of course we know what, or rather who, is coming to Tamora baked in a pie.

The women (Indira Varma as Tamora, pictured above right, and Flora Spencer-Longhurst as the grotesquely mutilated Lavinia) both had bags of character, and Matthew Needham carried off the feat of freezing the laughter on our lips as a capricious, half-crazed Emperor (on the left above). But William Houston dominated, as he always has ever since I saw him as a spunky young Henry V for the RSC. Dare I say he's aged rather rapidly? But then roles like Titus now become him.

He sounded at first as if he'd rasped himself out - the voice so magnificently used over several octaves had lost a bit of its cut. But the madder, or the madder-seeming, the abuser abused becomes, the more did he tickle us Groundlings and make our flesh duly creep. In this he gave Anthony Hopkins, never better in Julie Taymor''s stupendous film, a run for his thespian money.

I took godson Alexander for his first taste of the Globe, and he couldn't have had a better one as the violent hordes rampaged within and around us - 'move!!' - in the Groundling arena. I put it up there with the two other best Globe experiences I've had: the all-male Twelfth Night, which we saw three times during its first two manifestations there, and Kathryn Hunter's thrilling realisation of the near-impossible Pericles, similarly imaginative in its use of the space (I shan't forget the creation of the storm-driven ship or the harpies rampaging around the netting above us).

Carousel, of course, is a gentler experience in some ways, but its tough undertow hits as hard as (presumably) did Billy Bigelow his over-patient Julie. The crucial domestic violence issue, seemingly mishandled by Hammerstein from our perspective, was given its edge by updating the action from the 1890s to 1930 for the first stage of the drama (depression-era troubles) and 1945 for Billy's return from Up There (a time of liberation for women tainted in retrospect by the impending back to the kitchen - not for Julie, of course, at least under the thumb of another man, for she ain't going to marry after Billy).

Well, I guess we still have to take it for what it is: and still, in 1945 as the year of Carousel's premiere, that was somewhat. The through-composition of the early scenes, above all the stupendously poetic 'If I loved you' sequence, still comes across as one of the finest achievements of musical theatre (and that tune is, perhaps, only matched by Sondheim's 'Too many mornings' from Follies for sheer love-duet moonshine).

It always amazes me how talent pours out upon the current musical stage, partly due to the fabulous training in the London drama schools. Ascribe to that the note-perfect Julie of Gemma Sutton, emphasising the girl's singularity simply by her stillness and implicit strength, and Vicki Lee Taylor's lovely Carrie. And welcome a great new voice to the stage, Joel Montague's rich baritone as Enoch Snow.

Howard Keel's film performance as Billy - it was supposed to be Frank Sinatra, who even got as far as recording his songs - leads me to expect the same timbre from our lead.

Not so. Tim Rogers, looking just a bit like fellow Aussie Hugh Jackman when he swept so many of us off our feet as Oklahoma's Curly at the National, has a slightly worn tenor voice. But such was his intensity and conviction that high points like the great Soliloquy always hit the mark. Did I weep at 'You'll never walk alone'? You bet, but especially because the intimacy of the space allowed Amanda Minihan's freshly interpreted Nettie (centre below) to sing it as a soft lullaby with Julie held close.

Splendid company work, too - exceptionally good dancing, strong choruses, as I've already intimated, and everything  filled with convincing business under Luke Fredericks' expert hand. Impressive how the New England coastal setting can be conjured by the evocative text alone when the imagination has to work overtime. Careful handling meant more tears for the finale: less, in the form of a cappella harmony, was more, when it came to emotional truthfulness, than the big Hollywood/Broadway treatment. The five-piece orchestra emphasised the delicacy and grace of so much in the score, dominated by the sound of Alex Thomas's harp. And look, listen, no miking: Menier Chocolate Factory and others, please pay attention. It just isn't necessary in venues like this.

Yet how amazing that there are so many of them serving musical theatre so well: the Arcola in the north, and that constellation of South Bank gems the Union, the Menier and the Southwark Playhouse. A golden age indeed for off-West End dazzle. You have until Saturday to catch this unique Carousel; my apologies, but Titus has already crept into his unholy grave, and Lucy Bailey has moved on to a very peculiar-sounding Importance of Being Earnest. I'll find out for myself how she deals with a veteran Jack and Algernon tomorrow night.

Lear, in tears

She moved me very much, as only Kathryn Hunter before her had on the stage (and I've seen a few King Lears. Jacobi's is probably No. 1, but his I experienced in a livescreening). Unlike Hunter, though, Ursula Mohan is not playing a man. Her Queen Lear makes sense from the start, where we see her joshing at the piano with her Fool (a male nurse as played by Joseph Taylor: and why not, said Ursula afterwards - isn't it the case with so many old people that their carers are the last to stand by them?) Phil Willmott's production is fluent, the ideas of its contemporary setting all followed through and its engagement with a tiny audience total (50, I think, the maximum in the tiny Union Theatre we love so much).

The verse speaking always makes sense, however variable the cast, and certain themes are driven home with unrelenting pungency, like early-onset dementia, drug-taking and homelessness. If that feels right-on, it never seems so as you watch. We arrive in the dark space and stand for the first 20 minutes to witness the capricious division of the kingdom (selfie before it all goes wrong, Mohan pictured in one of Scott Rylander's superb production pictures with Claire Jeater's Goneril, Daisy Ward's Cordelia and Felicity Duncan's Regan) then seats are unobtrusively set up. The last third takes place with half the audience sitting around a white-covered table on which the scenes on the way to or at Dover are acted out with unremitting vividness.

Mohan's Lear launches her downfall in chilling confrontations with her three daughters, the horror of what she says offset by the bewilderment and confusion we register so closely in her face. Is an invocation of sterility on a thankless daughter the more horrifying when it comes from a mother? I felt so. And Harriet Walter's wise words on the human predicament affecting everybody chimed with the universality of this Lear. It felt absolutely right to me, at any rate; not a false note, no meaningless histrionics from Mohan.

Our central 'act' took place mostly in darkness, with torchlight adding to the atmosphere of the scenes on the heath (Mohan below with Taylor's Fool). If only the soundtrack of thunder, wind and rain had been turned down for the arrival in the hut: the words here weren't so easy to make out above it.

Action after the second interval was raised to an almost unbearable and unremitting level of tension. The absolute highlight for me, the point at which the tears really flowed, was the emergence of Mohan's flower-crowned Lear from cardboard packing to confront the blind Gloucester on the white table.

The official Gloucester, Richard Derrington, pictured above, was sick, so Simon Purse, the Doctor in the original cast (well adapted for the Fool) took over. He did it with the script until the blinding, after which he was truly moving without a prompt.

Among the very mixed blessings of the cast, Rikki Lawton's Edmund was the spunky prankster-villain to the life, winking and nodding at the audience to keep his soliloquies vivid, showing some good in the character at the end (Edgar is not exactly likeable in this production). Super-statuesque Claire Jeater was the stylish Goneril, pictured with Lawton and Duncan below.

Catch the run, if you can get a ticket, before it ends on Saturday, We went because our dear friend Kurt Ryz, who knows Ursula well, praised it to me - and I know he wouldn't say anything insincere. Usually wary about 'backstage' visits, but I and our Berlin friend Debbie York were so moved that we had to see her. And how lovely she was, with plenty of insights which chimed with what we'd seen. The upshot of which is Debbie, always looking for new ways of presenting recital programmes, thought she might like to collaborate with Ursula on one in future. The actress willing, of course.

I wasn't sure if Ursula would remember me from our one meeting some years ago, but she'd just seen me on the telly. Which means the Glyndebourne documentary aired on BBC Four on Saturday. All of it was interesting and a lot of the details in it new to me, though inevitably it was compromised by being half about the history of Glyndebourne and half about Richard Jones's new production of Der Rosenkavalier, which was where I came in, and eventually I got used more than I'd expected. Any excuse for using more images by Bill Cooper from that extraordinary show, so let's have one from each act with the lovely Kate Royal as the Marschallin, Tara Erraught as Octavian, Lars Woldt as Ochs and Teodora Gheorghiu as Sophie

Anyway, the dovetailing was skilful and I especially loved the enthusiastic contributions of Gheorghiu and the utterly delightful Tara, a woman who clearly has enough inner strength to have weathered the recent storm in a teacup - s'ist halt vorbei - and who likes as I do to walk across the Downs from Lewes to the house.

Nice contributions from easy-going Gus Christie and David Pickard, but Jones is the king of the idiosyncratic both in what he said about the opera and about Glyndebourne, undercutting everyone else's no doubt sincere comments about the beauty of working in deepest Sussex by saying how he sometimes wanted to get away from 'Planet Opera' and smell the fumes of his native south London as he got off the train at Clapham Junction. He also described the olfactory effects he wanted from each act, stopping short of saying what pong the inn scene should conjure.

You can see the documentary on the iPlayer until this Sunday evening (UK only, friends abroad tell me). I do recommend watching the whole thing.

STOP PRESS: Don't miss the chance, via what else but The Arts Desk,  to  win two tickets to Glyndebourne's Don Giovanni.  Sounds like an ace revival of a good show that's a hell (no pun intended) of a lot better than Kent's turgidly staged (but superbly sung and conducted) Manon Lescaut.

Later: wonders will never cease. Having alerted friends to Glyndebourne having the complete production up on its website until last Sunday midnight, I now find out it can be seen on the BBCiPlayer for another three months. Watch it here.