The KGS Shakespeare Festival was a glorious voyage through the amazing diversity of the Bard's work, from the youthful comic exuberance of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', through the middle-aged bleakness of 'Macbeth' to the final sense of acceptance, grace and redemption that characterises his last play, 'The Tempest'.

Running from 25th to 28th November, with two of the three plays each night, the Festival was an opportunity for a huge number of senior actors to get to grips with Shakespeare in some innovative original adaptations, and the audiences were treated to a range of styles, spectacular staging and stunning effects.

But this was no hotch-potch of productions; the three plays were bound together by their themes, most notably their use of the supernatural, and also by the developmental thread that ran through them, a potted history, almost, of Shakespeare's ideas, his life and his work.

'A Midsummer Night's Dream', adapted and directed by Renata Allen, was a colourful, magical show full of inventive details and clever devices, a joyful, funny production which gave the audience a real sense of child-like wonder.

'Macbeth' was a stark contrast. Adapted and directed by Nick Bond and Eleanor Varley, this was a sparse, bleak almost monochrome production, full of menace and threat, with even the final resolution given a bitter twist.

Finally, 'The Tempest', directed by Simon Bell, filled the Theatre with movement and 'noises, sounds and sweet airs'. This production, which had been a huge success as part of the Shakespeare Schools Festival at the Unicorn Theatre earlier in the month, conveyed simply and clearly the complex ideas of the play and brought us triumphantly to the peace and grace of its conclusion - our revels now are ended indeed.