“Don’t you get bored seeing the same play over and over again?” No: there’s always room for excellence. Last year was an extreme case: I saw eight (or was it nine?) different productions of King Lear in 2016, but I was no less enthralled by and admiring of Jonathan Munby’s current Chichester revival than if it had been my first ever. Never mind my first with Sir Ian McKellen.

This is not as extreme a Lear as the one McKellen gave for Trevor Nunn ten years ago at the RSC... by which I mean he doesn’t get naked. It is, however, no less intelligent and at least as powerfully reflective. The opening “division of the kingdoms” scene is a transparently stage-managed affair, with lectern and microphones, at which nevertheless his demand “Tell me, my daughters [...] Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” surprises them. His vitriol against Cordelia in this scene, and his growing rage at his mistreatment by Goneril and Regan, is slightly dissociative, as if this is a king who has simply never been gainsaid before and is trying to find a way to cope with the experience. His fury and later madness are not incandescent – he never vies with the wind itself as he bids it, in a prolonged and practical onstage rainstorm, blow and crack its cheeks – rather, he is a bewildered yet curious explorer of a (to him) strange new psychogeography. This is the note which informs his gradual recovery, somehow more poignant this time for not forming a stark contrast with what has gone before.

Of his daughters, Tamara Lawrance is a quiet but not timid Cordelia, and once again the more duplicitous Regan proves to be a better role than Goneril: here, Kirsty Bushell enjoys all manner of Regan’s manipulations including the sexual, and at moments ventures into gleeful, villainous self-parody. The faithful Earl of Kent is here given a sex-change: Sinéad Cusack also offers an intelligent reading, in which the sole weak link is, oddly, this native Dubliner’s adoption of a northside Dublin accent when Kent disguises herself. (The same paradox afflicted James McAvoy’s excessively Scottish Macbeth a few years ago.) Phil Daniels’ banjolele-strumming Fool smartly combines a veneer of old-stager glibness with a genuine acerbity when he admonishes Lear’s own folly.

Often during last year’s Learathon I felt let down by weaker portrayals of the Gloucester family in the play’s subplot. No such reservations here: Danny Webb’s Gloucester is among the finest I have seen, compact of dignity and decency and thus much more desolate after he is blinded. As the treacherous Edmund, Damien Molony is fluent and downright casual in his serial wickednesses, almost sociopathic.

The more one ages, the more Lear overtakes Hamlet as Shakespeare’s greatest work. Munby discreetly makes his production the tragedy of growing old in a world where form and certainty alike are shrivelling. In early scenes, any reference to a god or gods is accompanied by the raising of one hand, not just by the speaker but others present, in formal oath and respect; this deference gradually falls away until, by Act Four when the blind Gloucester laments, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods: they kill us for their sport”, the depth of this sense of metaphysical desertion is palpable.

McKellen’s performance is, finally, perfectly pitched to the scale of the space. The Minerva studio seats only 280-odd people, and demand for this staging is so strong that tickets are limited to two per application. It is well worth the constraint.

Written for the Financial Times.