You know theatre’s back when the words fall trippingly on the tongue

During the grimmer days of lockdown, we wondered when theatre would officially be ‘back’. There’s no Victory Day to mark a pandemic’s end – but perhaps we might declare theatre back on the first occasion that Ralph Fiennes yelled at an audience member for using a phone? The first time a celeb initiated a social media pile-on to a critic? Or perhaps at the first moral panic about theatre ‘trigger warnings’? Such are the natural news rhythms of a Covid-free theatre ecosystem.

For my money, British theatre would never be back to normal until we were hit by a megawatt, sell-out production of Shakespeare featuring a Hollywood star. And now we have two: the Almeida’s Macbeth, starring Saoirse Ronan alongside James McArdle, and the Young Vic’s Hamlet, starring Cush Jumbo. The former has even given us a manufactured trigger-warning controversy, so that’s two of my bingo spots in one. (So too did Shakespeare’s Globe’s recent Romeo and Juliet, starring the always-compelling Alfred Enoch, though no one was selling out tickets to that didactic mess.)

Both Macbeth and Hamlet have sold out most performances, which should cheer everybody – though it’s fair to say that at the midweek matinee I attended for Hamlet, a slot that always skews to an elderly audience, I looked around at empty seats and wondered how many ticket-holders had stayed away with renewed Covid nerves.

There’s something about experiencing a dextrous actor perform poetry that means you can’t quite predict where the stress will next fall, or how the sense will twist

What I found lovely, however, was finally hearing Shakespeare’s language spoken live again. At these two productions the best performances were built on speech, each beat a test of the live fragility of a shared aural landscape.

Jumbo, in a recent interview, talked about falling in love with Shakespeare’s language while studying at the BRIT School: “I realised how the language could fly and it fit into what was going on in south London with grime – speaking at speed and with poetry.” Listening to her rapid-fire verse, you know she gets it. There’s something about experiencing a dextrous actor perform poetry that means you can’t quite predict where the stress will next fall, or how the sense will twist.

Sure, I could always listen to a poetry record – or the recordings of Patrick Stewart reciting lockdown sonnets – but it’s never the same when you can press rewind, knowing the scansion will fall the same way each time. So much of Shakespeare can shift its meaning on the roll of a tongue.

No surprise, then, that the weaker performances were those that fluffed the language test. Too often, they came from actors better used to screen than stage. At the Almeida, McArdle entered my all-time pantheon of Shakespeare performances for his diction alone – Ronan, despite her charisma, occasionally gave way to a mumble. In Hamlet, Adrian Dunbar has the presence for Claudius, but recited his lines as if trotting through a series of neatly end-stopped sonnets, no ear for the natural breaks and telling disjunctions where sentence structure breaks against formal rhythm.

Thank God for Norah Lopez Holden as a sharp Ophelia. Stage actors trouncing screen stars off the stage? Perhaps we really are back to normal.