Richard II arrives in London after a highly successful Stratford run and while the glow of David Tennant’s Hamlet resides still in the memory. Surprisingly, the pleasure of the production lies not so much in dazzle as solidity. This doesn’t give a bold new reading but a robust interpretation; it is not a star vehicle (so often with the star surrounded by mediocre support) but one of the strongest company performances of Shakespeare that I’ve seen for many a year.

It has been a hard slog, but he's emerging victorious in the end. Essentially, Shakespeare's Henry V tracks a military campaign. In Act One, the eponymous king declares war on France. By Act Five, against the odds, he has won and is sealing an entente cordiale with a kiss – wooing the French princess, Katharine. At the start of Michael Grandage's eagerly awaited West End production, the Chorus (Ashley Zhangazha) darts to the apron stage to address the audience with: "Oh for a Muse of fire, that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention!"

It begins on the street, nastily. An immigrant has got his hands on an English woman. Trouble is brewing. Then there is a dispute about money, involving a “Lombard” – the identification originally applied to immigrants from Lombardy in northern Italy, famous for its banking, but it had gradually become a term of abuse for all foreigners engaged in trade or banking, a word bandied around in the same way as “Jew”.

How irksome in some ways for the National Theatre that both the glamour and the accessibility of cinema have bookended its first 50 years, when the company and, latterly, its Southbank home, are essentially driven by and dedicated to live performance. But it was Laurence Olivier’s film career, making him a household name, which helped secure for him the job as first director of the National Theatre in 1963. And it is cinema relays that have taken NT productions to places and people who might never step into Denys Lasdun’s building, despite the company’s national ambitions.

What would happen if a top Hollywood and TV director decided to take actors familiar to him to make a Shakespearean comedy? Something very interesting, especially to those enamoured of The Bard.

All starts with a barely perceptible bass rumble, before Britten’s lower strings begin their queasy glissandi, shifting key signature every few seconds. It’s a wonderful operatic opening, here teased out with deft mystery by conductor Stuart Stratford.

The idea behind Muse of Fire was a simple one. We wanted to spend a year travelling the world and find out from as many sources as we could why Shakespeare is both so loved and so feared. We wanted to try and eradicate our own deep-rooted anxieties and help others to remove theirs.  This was the goal. How we would achieve all this was the ordeal.  It has been a five-year adventure but now the film is complete and ready for its world premiere at Raindance Film Festival, we can say that every moment of an incredible journey was worth it.

“What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?” Surely never before has Benedick’s opening quip cut so close to the literal, nor drawn such a laugh from its audience. With a combined age of 158, the romantic leads in Mark Rylance’s Much Ado About Nothing take the current trend for an older pair of lovers to the extreme. James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave turn Shakespeare’s text on its head.

It’s a nothing of a line – “Hail mortal” – spoken by nobody important, but in Michael Grandage’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream it becomes the basis for an entire concept. A trivial bit of linguistic sleight of hand turns it into “Inhale mortal” and there you have it, a fairy troupe high on waccy baccy and the most sexually and socially anarchic of Shakespeare’s comedies transformed into the toothless fantasy of a bunch of New Age stoners. It’s magic alright, but of the clumsiest kind.

Talk about absence making the heart grow fonder! I'm referring not simply to the news value of Kenneth Branagh making one of his comparatively rare returns to the theatre, this from an actor (now a knight) who in his early years popped up regularly on stage. But the more important reawakening of affection is the palpable one expressed between this protean talent and Shakespeare, his long-standing playwright of choice.