I was unwise enough to remark, at the start of last year's essay, on the comparative quietness of the preceding year in terms of Shakespearian theatre. The balance has been more than redressed by no less than sixteen productions that seemed worth considering in 1997. I treat them, not precisely in Folio order, but still in a 'Comedies, Histories, Tragedies' progression.

Jonathan Miller's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which opened at the Almeida Theatre late in 1996, offered a new - if not quite wholesomely refreshing - vision of the play by casting virtually every role at least a decade older than one had ever imagined it, thus putting on display some reprehensibly silly behaviour by a whole lot of people who were clearly of an age to know better. Played on a set (designed by the Quay Brothers) that looked like a dilapidated hall of mirrors, and in costumes of 1930s elegance (the work of Clare Mitchell), the production began with a more-than-middle-aged, dinner-jacketed, cigarsmoking Theseus (Robert Swann) and an Hippolyta (Angela Down) in splendid ball gown, both of them, one felt, much more likely to take an interest in the quality of the claret at the next court dinner than in nuptials four days, or four years, hence.