Third in our summer book extracts series is the theatre designer Tobias Hoheisel, whose designs for Glyndebourne Opera's Janáček productions remain iconic, and more recently designed English National Opera's Boris Godunov.

Born in Frankfurt, Hoheisel trained in design in Berlin and was strongly influenced by the theatre of Peter Stein/Karl-Ernst Herrmann, Luc Bondy, Robert Wilson and Ariane Mnouchkine. Patrice Chereau’s Ring cycle in Bayreuth and the world-class Berlin orchestras inculcated in him a love of opera and music.

By complete coincidence, this afternoon I tuned in to Air Force, Howard Hawks's 1943 propaganda picture: chiselled young airmen fill a B-17  "flying fortress", dropping their payloads over Japan, both a news service and wish fulfilment for domestic audiences. Their sharp, sweaty features glow in the firelight. Their commanders are tough but fair. Their bombs fall crisply, in a noble cause. This is not that film.

If the bust of Sir Henry Wood that watches over the stage of the Royal Albert Hall had come to life, Commendatore-like, during last night’s concert, I can’t help feel that he would have been smiling. Beethoven nights – once a popular Proms fixture – have lately fallen off the calendar, but alongside various nods to tradition have this year returned. Following Jiří Bělohlávek and Paul Lewis’s recent concerto-fest, Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen last night presented a second all-Beethoven programme.

This, Heinrich von Kleist’s last play, was completed not long before he committed suicide, aged 34, in 1811, when the map of Europe - and indeed that of his native Prussia - was changing with indecent frequency. It is loosely (very loosely) based on the real Prince of Homburg and events at the Battle of Fehrbellin in 1675, and with its leitmotif of honour, duty and loyalty to the Fatherland, it is no wonder that the play was appropriated (with suitable adjustments) by the National Socialists in the 1930s (it was a favourite of Hitler's apparently) and then fell out of favour in German theatre in the postwar period.

The longest and most densely historical play by Georg Büchner (1813-37) is a potential monster. In German, Dantons Tod can run to four hours or more. There's little action and much speechifying. In plays by his equally wordy, history-obsessed predecessor, Friedrich von Schiller, there are at least fights, battles, a lot of love - and some sex.

There is no consensus about what site-specific theatre actually constitutes. Does it grow organically out of the space in which the theatre piece is performed, and can therefore be staged nowhere else? Or is it no more than any theatre piece which happens away from the constricting formality of the thrust stage or the proscenium arch?

Only those who think the burnt-out question of Wagner and the Nazis can still be brought to bear on his operas could be disappointed by Richard Jones's life-enhancing new production. Not a swastika in sight, not a hint of anti-semitic caricature for the fallguy who was never intended for it in the first place, only affirmation of the opera's central message that great art can bring order and understanding to society.