Declan Donnellan's Russian-language Cheek By Jowl production, first seen at the 2001 Brighton Festival, brings the play forcefully home by staging it in modern-dress on a 20-metre catwalk. It also boasts a performance by Yevgeny Mironov that rivals Jonathan Slinger's magnetism in Richard III.

Mironov plays a young monk, Grigory, who assumes the identity of the murdered tsarevich, Dimitri, in order to claim Boris's throne. Mironov's physical mutations, as he gets closer to power, are extraordinary. He starts as a halting recluse, turns into a glittering game-show host as he recruits sympathisers and, in the production's finest scene, woos a Polish princess across a pool. Mironov resembles a Slav Olivier in his capacity for danger and darting suddenness: he looks as likely to strangle Irina Grineva's princess as to seduce her and, mission accomplished, he dives into the water like a demonic porpoise. Power, Mironov suggests, is both an aphrodisiac and a source of madness.

Aleksandr Feklistov's chunky, vodka-tippling Boris, having murdered his way to the throne, also never enjoys peace: he eyes subordinates warily and broods on the fickleness of the multitude. Pushkin shows his mentor Shakespeare's grasp of the seductive illusion of power which Donnellan's intelligent production turns into an icy comment on contemporary Russia.