“IT WAS always inevitable for him at some point, and that’s where I came into the equation, because he didn’t have a director he particularly wanted to do it with: he just knew he wanted to do it. It’s huge for the actor, and pretty big for the director.”

Thus Michael Grandage, the outgoing boss of London’s Donmar Warehouse Theatre, on actor Derek Jacobi, pictured, and how their production of King Lear was born.

It is difficult to recall in recent years a Shakespearean theatrical event so hyped before its first performance and so immediately garlanded afterwards — in December, tickets for the small space that is the Donmar were being offered at staggering prices on eBay. Next week, sell-out audiences at the Milton Keynes Theatre have the chance to see what all the fuss is about.

Grandage is one of this country’s leading theatre directors — with awards aplenty already and a further four Oliviers lurking for Lear in Sunday’s ceremony.

When I spoke to him shortly after the production’s opening, he remembered asking fundamental questions: “If we’re doing Lear, he’s King of Britain. Where is ‘Britain’? How are we doing ‘Britain’? What does ‘Britain’ mean and represent? Out of that came a separate discussion about what paganism is — very relevant in the play; and out of paganism came timber: something solid, of the earth, something real. And how do we do ‘Blasted Heath’? So many lines of enquiry.”

He also had to approach the art of text cutting: “All Shakespeare needs cutting: audiences aren’t happy with four hours. Mostly you take a huge speech and take out a line here, a line there; you never remove a famous line, ever. Quite often in Shakespeare, he takes an image and repeats it and repeats again and you must take out one of the repeats. The audience will never notice.”

And you discussed this all with Derek Jacobi? “If it involved a line of his, you did!”

Sir Derek Jacobi, aged 72, joined us.

If you have time with one of the great thespians and national treasures, you try to extract what nuggets of stagecraft you can. Guinness always tried to imagine the shoes of his characters, while Welles looked at the nose: where had Jacobi sought to find his Lear?

“The words — if only it were the shoes! A lot of Shakespeare is difficult for the audience and for the actors. It’s our job to make it accessible, to make it sound like spoken thought with a feeling that is perfectly contemporary.

“A lot of the time, it ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it — the attitude, the tonality, the rhythm with which you say the words.”