Phillip Breen’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor is a romping farce, very good to look at. Trap doors are freely used for the appearance of cast members and props and there are various delights for the eye such as an old Citroen 2CV and rugby posts. Why Page should play rugby and the Host should be a referee I have no idea. I imagine the rugby posts were on stage because one of the characters is called Jack Rugby, although I have a sneaking suspicion that the RSC hadn’t yet shown how high the new fly tower is and therefore wanted to invent something to show it off.  The inside of the Garter Inn has a quasi-realistic bar and a (presumably heavily reincforced) billiard table which Falstaff dances on at one point. The ear is entertained, too, with Dr Caius’s oft repeated ‘by gar’ sounding like ‘bugger’ and Ford chasing round his house looking for Falstaff shouting ‘buck’ over and over again. Once the audience cottoned on they obediently laughed every time the word or phrase was said, clearly enjoying a little gratuitous scatology. Much is made of the malapropisms which litter the play and again the audience laughed at some of the most obvious of these. Little is made of the filthiest jokes and nothing of the more subtle ones.

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.

This two hander by Ben Power is the RSC’s most recent production. It is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet deconstructed and then reconstructed to tell the story of two ageing lovers. Almost all the dialogue is Shakespeare’s, although it comes in a dfferent order and there are some lovely moments when bits of the sonnets suddenly turn up.

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)Â 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.

Iqbal Khan’s production of Much Ado works precisely because it is set outside Delhi with a Asian cast. As well as tapping richly into an Indian love of words and wordplay, this cultural context helps to make plausible and intelligible many aspects of the play which I have usually felt don’t make much psychological sense to a modern western audience. Paternal authority, marriages arranged by others and codes of honour often make the play implausible, but not so here. The military context, with soldiers returning from war, is often underplayed but here it makes sense that Claudio, returning from war, should want a wife. It also makes sense that benedick, unpracticed in love, should fall for the tricks played on him and should begin to think he is in love without losing his moral integrity. Indeed, when placed in the civilian context once again, he gains in moral stature and insight. Khan also does interesting things with class, paricularly when doubling characters, making it richer than usual as making me think about class relationships and roles both in India and in contemporary Britain.

This production is also interesting because it places the main focus on Claudio and Leonato (beautifully and powerfully played by Madhav Sharma) , and somewhat away from Benedick and Beatrice.

The casting of Shiv Grewal as a young, energetic and sexy Don Pedro is also interesting in that I had some sympathy for him at the end of the play. Having organised the match for his social inferior he remained alone like an Antonio figure at the end. Khan’s attention to textual detail is also apparent in his treatment of Don John, pulling out the  enigmatic ‘I cannot hide what I am’ for the audience to ponder.

The cast is strong. Sagar Arya is a strong Claudio, well able to support the focus placed upon him. Amara Karan’s Hero is poised and very beautiful; the audience can believe that she would do what her father demanded without losing her sense of self. Meera Syal is mesmerising as Beatrice; it is a perfect choice to play her as a mature woman, not yet married, strong in her opinions and yet wanting a relationship. Paul Bhattacharee’s Benedick is also strong, transforming himself physically as he falls in (for?) love. They are grown ups in a society where most marry young.

I even found the Dogberry/Watch stuff tolerable.

The set, the outside of an upper middle class house outside Delhi, is functional and clever, opening up at the end. Himani Dehlvi’s costumes are lovely – flowing, atmosphereic and varied – and the Indian wedding is a delightful mixture of colour, opulence and tackiness, giving the characters yet another chance to change their footwear. Niraj Chag’s music is full of spirit and cultural colour. There are (as in all the productioins in the main theatre since its reopening) some special effects. There was only a soundtrack of rain when it is mentioned in the play, but lots of rain in the scene where Claudio visits Hero’s mausoleum. Although I thought it did little more than add a touch of unnecessary pathetic fallacy, I imagine that many members of the audience would ooh and aah about the rain and ask themselves how it was done, particularly if they noticed it trickling along the grooves in the set floor. I always prefer to hear the play, but the RSC needs to show off its state of the art equipment, I guess.

There is plenty of detail to enjoy and think about: footwear and the lack of it; mobile phones and call centre cables; peeing on stage; social and domestic business;Â wedding lights; complex and varied light projections.

Tickets are selling fast, maybe because of Meera Syal. She certainly demonstrates that she is a considerable Shakespearian actress but there is also much more to enjoy. As with Julius Caesar I ended up thinking about the play’s ideas afterwards much more than usual.

It is also an opportunity to celebrate the return of a main production to the Courtyard. The importance of this theatre, run by the legendary Buzz Goodbody when it was The Other Place, is huge in twenieth century theatre history. Many Stratford philistines, under the mistaken guise of supporting ‘traditional Stratford’ want to have the theatre pulled down because it’s a ‘rusty shed’.  Even normally sensible bodies like the Stratford Society seem to have been pulled into the campaign to get it pulled down rather than remodelled. The country has already lost Joan Littlewood’s Blackfrairs Theatre. Let it not also lose The Other Place/Courtyard, too.

Come and see Meera Syal and a really enjoyable, coherent production. And enjoy bed and breakfast at Moss Cottage, too.