AS PART OF ITS quatercentenary salute to Shakespeare, the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff invited Michael Bogdanov to speak on ‘The Welsh in Shakespeare’. His visit drew a large audience to the museum’s Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre, attracted by his fame as a multi-award-winning theatre director and his subject. His list of credits for theatre productions – plays, opera, musicals, and in film and television, is of such staggering length, and in so many venues worldwide, you marvel at his creative energy and how he finds time to sleep. With a lot of experience in various media behind him, mostly in Ireland, where he had graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, he joined the RSC in 1970 as assistant director on a production that transformed the presentation of Shakespeare on stage, Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (I saw it on tour at the New Theatre, Cardiff, and it remains the most exciting, most memorable, theatrical experience of my life.) He has been a disciple of Brook, dedicating himself, he says, to making Shakespeare politically relevant to people today, and viewing each directorial challenge as ‘like reading a detective story, piecing clues together, never taking anything for granted, ignoring received opinion’.

Throughout his international career Michael Bogdanov has maintained a connection with Wales, including a lengthy commitment, 2003–2009, as artistic director of the Wales Theatre Company, which had its home in Swansea. The location was a fitting choice for one born just down the road in Neath, to a Welsh mother and a Jewish father whose own boyhood was spent ...