"The Tempest"

"I have bedimm'd the noontide sun..." says Jonathan Slinger's Prospero, as we sit ensconced inside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre through a fine, bright Saturday afternoon watching The Tempest.

As we've found before in Stratford's revamped main house, some of those magic words were lost to us this time also: we were in the extreme left corner of the Circle (as you look at the stage) - this may have had something to do with it, or are we just getting older and deafer? Slinger's admirably wide-ranging voice seemed to drop almost to a whisper at times. He has little of John Wood's presence, but the virtual twinning of Prospero and Ariel - Father and Holy Spirit - was inspired.

The Dramatis Personae listing Sebastian as King Alonso's brother makes it feel wilful at first to cast a high-heeled, curvaceous Kirsty Bushell in the part. But this is all part and parcel of a brilliant production by David Farr: a highly poetic and mysterious play is given to us full of real theatre - indeed, this Tempest is one of the best RSC renderings we have caught in recent years.

John Wood RIP

I once read that every building in Chipping Campden High Street was listed, plus of course many others in the town. One of them was the much-loved home, more than 300 years old, of the actor John Wood, who died last week and is now rightly and lavishly mourned in the newspapers. Of his obituarists, Michael Coveney surprised me by writing that "His real passion was architecture, which he rated the most important of all the arts."

Only a day or two ago, when clearing out, I threw away theatre programmes bearing Wood's name as star of the show. Whether in Shakespeare or Stoppard, Gorki or Etherege, comedy or tragedy, he always seemed to me to excel: indeed, he was one of the few I actors whose performances I would invariably seek out. Why did he never get a knighthood? No doubt because he was too self-effacing.