Nor can the earth provide anything much better, I imagine, in the way of actors, producers and designers than those now working in London. But something important was missing in both these productions. There was nothing lacking in their ambition: appropriately for the Globe, Liberty is written in iambic pentameter and set in the Terror during the French revolution, while Her Naked Skin is a lesbian prison love story set during the suffragette revolution in Edwardian England. Both aspire to the epic, and both are ­tragical-­comical-­historical, and, even in the case of Liberty, rather pastoral as well. Both are sharply and elegantly written, with some excellent witticisms and jokes.

Needless to say in London these days, the productions were almost faultless; at one extreme the Globe was confidently and traditionally minimal, with a couple of chairs, a trestle table and a few banners, and a disturbing tumbril rolling among the groundlings at the end; at the extremes of contemporary production, the Olivier had the best that Howard Davies and Rob Howell can do, with a dazzling background of rotating wire cages representing Holloway prison.

Lesley Manville - a very great actress - and Jemima Rooper gave inspired performances as the suffragette lovers, the middle-aged socialite and the young factory girl whose hands first meet among the potato peelings in Holloway jail. So did Susan Engel, as a formidable old suffragette spinster; she delivers many of the funniest lines with perfect timing. And if not outstanding, Kirsty Besterman and John Bett are very beguiling as a persecuted actress and a ci?devant aristocrat in Liberty.