... Declan Donnellan's superb staging, with a Russian cast, of Boris Godunov, now at Warwick Arts Centre and coming next week to the Riverside as part of LIFT, is in many respects similar [to Tim Carroll's Macbeth]: modern dress, diagrammatic grouping, ironic tone. But if he has discovered a leaner, drier and more satirical tragicomedy in what is traditionally a heavy costume drama, he hasn't, like Carroll, made the mistake of throwing the passionate intensity out with the old-style bath water.

The conflict in Pushkin's play between Boris, who has used murder to achieve the Tsardom, and the impostor Grigory, the monk who pretends to be the Tsarevitch he supposedly killed, is staged on a spectacular 50ft catwalk with the audience, seated on either side, cast in the role of the Russian mob. It's an arrangement that thrillingly reinforces a sense of the drama's discomfiting shrewdness about the manipulation of public opinion. As Boris, the excellent Aleksandr Feklistov oozes menacing corruption and demonstrates a Macbeth-like awareness of the futility of the life his crimes have brought about, while Yevgeny Mironov dazzles as the unsettlingly protean Grigory. Not to be missed.