The basic story is quickly told. Declan Donnellan met Nick Ormerod at Cambridge and 30 years ago they set up a theatre company, naming it Cheek by Jowl.

They started small, at the Edinburgh Festival, with a production of Wycherley’s The Country Wife, but quickly broke through with a mainly Shakespearean portfolio and now lead one of the country’s most important touring companies.

Along the way, Cheek by Jowl has been rather important in furthering some important careers, including those of Michael Sheen, Daniel Craig and Adrian Lester.

They also have a reputation for mounting European classics in translation, having given British premieres to plays by Racine and Corneille centuries after their original French productions.

But in an international sense, Donellan and Ormerod have become best known for their collaborations in Russia, joining the Chekhov International Theatre Festival in the early 1990s to put on Measure for Measure, As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing.

Since then Cheek by Jowl have formed their own company of Russian actors and it is they who come to the Playhouse next week with perhaps their most challenging Shakespearean production yet: The Tempest, to be performed in Russian.

How did he approach this production, I asked Donnellan?

“I love the play and it’s a long time since I’ve done it. I like working in the three cultures of England, France and Russia and would do this play differently whichever of the three I was in.

“For this Russian version, we’ve made no changes from our normal system: we had a period of research, spending two weeks researching the scenes of the play with our actors and built the play up partially by things within Nick and me and partially within them.

“This is a piece of theatre, which is different from a play in that it is an encounter between the audience, the theatre and the play, if you see what I mean.”

Donnellan says that Shakespeare’s verse translates well into Russian, “better than French, actually — its own poetry has an iambic structure similar to English verse, which helps”, but then immediately broadened his answer as only a seasoned theatre director can.

“But, of course, you cannot translate Shakespeare and the words that we already hear in modern Germanic accents are quite different from what people would have heard in 1590. When we do it in English, we’re already hearing a funny sort of translation.

“Incidentally, the Russians have as much of a tradition of performing Shakespeare as we do of Chekhov — who we have almost adopted as an English national writer!”

Declan Donnellan’s connections with Russia grew even deeper ten years ago.

Although his command of the language is sparing — he has to use an interpreter when working with the Russian company — his book The Actor and the Target was a Russian commission and first published in that country.

It is emphatically not a ‘how-to-act’ publication but has been described as more a manual of directed psychology.

In the book, Donnellan tries to deal with, as he puts it, “that vague sense of dread an actor often has that what he’s doing isn’t very good”. He adds: “This is nothing to do with stage fright — which can hit anyone at any time and can be dealt with by one-to-one treatment — but a different sort of blockage entirely.

“The most important thing for an actor is not ever to lose sight of the priorities — the target being that acting in a theatre must be alive.

“Priorities in life are not very popular, because by definition it means you have to put something second; but if you prioritise everything, by definition you prioritise nothing. Incidentally, I don’t think my views are particularly unique.”

The Tempest will be performed with English surtitles, shown on screens to each side of the stage.

But if everything that Declan Donnellan assumes is true, it’s likely that the audience’s eyes will be firmly on the boards themselves.

lThe Tempest is at the Playhouse from March 8 to 12.