Rupert Goold's Young Vic production of King Lear, by contrast, is at times patchy and undisciplined. It must be a mistake, when Lear is suffering the extremes of abandonment in the storm on the blasted heath, to have the rest of the cast miming and moving all around him without any obvious reason, cluttering the imagination and the stage and diminishing this central scene. Directors should approach the current fashion for mime with caution. When it's good, it's very, very good but when it's bad, it's embarrassing.

There are a few other ideas that don't quite work, such as giving Edgar and Edmund plastic toy swords in their final scene, as if they were angry little brothers. However, there are many inspired and bold ideas, which work very well. Giving the highest-born courtiers paper party crowns and Lear's daughters a microphone, in the scene where they compete to describe their love for him as if they were in a reality TV contest, might sound gimmicky, but it makes sense on many levels. Presenting the maddened king in an afternoon frock with parasol and directing the play for saucy and heartbreaking laughs, as well as extreme violence, is inspired. All in all, this is a Lear production not to miss.

That is largely because Pete Postlethwaite's performance as Lear is something anyone who loves Shakespeare absolutely must try to see. It is a great, state-of-the-art classic performance and profoundly moving. Postlethwaite's control over Lear's fitful changes of mood is astonishing: now wheedling, whining and showing off, now bawdy, now wilfully absurd, now lost in the ravages of senility or reduced to flashes of noble honesty, his is second to none as a portrayal of Lear's emotional incontinence. There are several other excellent performances and an outstanding one by Forbes Masson as a Scottish Fool. His beautiful singing completes an interpretation that is at times overwhelming. I believe King Lear is the greatest play in the English language and it continues to inspire very great productions.