It was over four years ago that I was commissioned by Michael Boyd,  then artistic director of the RSC, to write a play which I had vaguely pitched to him as “a costume drama set in the nineteenth century with Asians running around in it”. And here we are, finally, about to open an epic and ambitious play set over the last 14 years of Queen Victoria’s reign. My initial inspiration came from an old black and white photograph taken in an ayah’s home in Aldgate in the 19th century.

I read and loved The Mouse and His Child as a child. Apparently. I was reminded of this by the inscription in the copy I gave to my god-daughter 15 years ago. And again, when I read it to my own daughter 10 years later. It’s such an extraordinarily original, moving, funny, story, I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it.

It’s brave to take Shakespeare into the West End in midsummer – and in this of all summers. Greg Doran’s all-black, African Caesar certainly doesn’t lack for impact, colour, zest, urgency. It takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and rams the play down our throats. The concept is impressive. The set, half Roman amphitheatre, half Nazi bunker dominated by a giant effigy, its back towards us with arm raised in totemic salute, summons up TV images of dictators who eventually come crashing down, from Stalin to Mubarak and who knows how many more to come.

“Let slip the dogs of war.” Somewhere in the bowels of Kiev’s Olympic Stadium, a football coach will have said something along these lines around the half seven mark. Meanwhile, over on the clever-clever channel, an alternative meeting between England and Italy took place.

The RSC’s Twelfth Night dumps its audience unceremoniously onto the shores of Ilyria in the thump and beat of waves. While Viola struggles from the (very deep and very real) water, asking “What country friends is this?”, we by contrast find ourselves in familiar territory. Like this season’s opener, A Comedy of Errors, both Twelfth Night and The Tempest take their birth in the water. But as the triptych progresses and comedy turns to uncertainty and ethics, so Shakespeare’s drama itself suffers something of a sea-change.

Unlike the National, the RSC has not had a good record of producing exciting new plays in the past 20 years or so. But one exception to this rule is the theatre’s support for the work of David Edgar, whose masterpiece Pentecost was put on by them in 1994.

Matilda, the Royal Shakespeare Company-spawned musical about an extraordinary young girl, managed the extraordinary feat Sunday of snaring a record seven trophies at last night’s 36^th Laurence Olivier Awards. Its rampaging hold over the black-tie ceremony at the Royal Opera House came at the expense of such comic hopefuls as One Man, Two Guvnors and The Ladykillers, which had 10 nominations between them and emerged with no awards. Nor did the twice-nominated Noises Off.

Gregory Doran was today named the incoming artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he will succeed Michael Boyd in the post later this year. The announcement came as no surprise given Doran's longstanding commitment to an organisation that he first joined as an actor in 1987, before shifting careers to rise up through the RSC ranks as director (and occasional writer, as well).

In 1992 Northern Broadsides, the Halifax-based theatre company founded by Barrie Rutter, staged its first production, Richard III. Rutter (b 1946), an established actor who had worked with some of the most distinguished names in theatre such as Jonathan Miller, Terry Hands, Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn, directed the show and also played the title role. However, what made this production unique was that it was performed entirely by a cast speaking with northern voices - note, not northern accents, more of which later.