Playing around with Shakespeare is so popular these days; it could almost become an Olympic event. The highlight of the evening, however, was the real Debussy’s Quartet in G minor, performed with a very decided rhythmic verve and a beautifully understated intensity.Laurence Hughes. Any slight rough edges in Mozart’s K575 quartet were soon smoothed out, and in that and Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, again a very Korean feeling for rhythm and the innate quality of every single note produced fresh and compelling interpretations. A rather drastic last-minute change of programme meant that we did not have a chance to hear Isang Yun’s Quartet No 4 – but we were treated to a work by the contemporary Dae-Woong Baik for Kayagum and strings, featuring soloist Hae-Sook Kim. Unfortunately, the mixture of intonations was not too successful, and with rather conventional western harmonies and none too inspired material, the effect was curiously kitschy – like Debussy on the banjo. After the interval, lighter material included a delightful fan dance by 20 or so winsome maidens, and proceedings came to an incandescent end with “Pungmullori” folk music in which brightly clad dancers (Korean costumes feature colours that are as strong and vivid as their music) managed to cavort energetically while playing precise and very robust rhythms on handheld drums – all the while accompanied by an ecstatic and apparently seamless oboe line, like some sort of ultimate free-jazz solo.
On Friday, the excellent Kumho Asiana String Quartet demonstrated the standard of modern Korean string-playing. The same qualities were evident in “Pyongch’ang” and “Kagok” singing, the former featuring the typically Korean sound of the Kayagum zither.

The “Salp’uri” folk dance, deriving from shamanist rituals, featured an unearthly dancer in flowing white, accompanied by an incredibly virtuosic bass bamboo flute. In contrast, shattering and mesmeric “Samullori” percussion music ended the first half. On Tuesday, a concert given by Korea’s National Centre for Traditional Performing Arts began with the hieratic “Sujech’on” (court music), dating from before the seventh century; an ensemble clad in impressive crimson robes and awesome headgear played stringed, wind and percussion instruments in slow, stylised music that already had the hallmarks of an intense, throbbing pulsation within the melodic line, and sudden explosive drum punctuations. Sampling two events in the series, with everything from wild folk drumming to refined string- quartet playing, interesting cross-currents were definitely the order of the day.

The South Bank’s “Gateway to the Orient” festival gave us a perfect chance to test out this theory. It has always seemed likely that the appearance of a remarkable succession of outstanding Korean classical performers in recent years must have something to do with the rich and ancient musical traditions of their home culture. So Godot may yet turn up and I live in hopeMichael Pennington’s `Anton Chekhov’ is on 18, 24 (mat and eve), 27 Aug and 1 Sep at the Old Vic, Waterloo Road, London SE1 (0171-928 7616). I reached the line “It’s so fiendishly dull, even the flies drop dead” and, I promise you, it did so.

On the same night, entering the last five minutes like some marathon runner coming into the stadium, I told Chekhov’s story of the black monk, who announces his imminent approach by means of “a light breeze that blew in from the window, sending my papers to the floor”. The Cottesloe is more or less a sealed room, and there had been no movement from me or, I’m glad to say, the audience Still, a paper on the desk fluttered to the ground. In the second half of the opening night at the National, I and the audience that was closest were troubled by a furiously buzzing fly that found something about my aura irresistible. Of course, I belong to a superstitious trade, and am always looking out for endorsement.

My father died suddenly on the afternoon of what would have been the first performance of the show: I was physically barred from a theatre in Haifa that didn’t know I was coming, and the same thing happened on a Sunday in Hereford: everyone had gone home for the weekend. This is not to mention the odd venue over the years that, having had my scrupulous list of props and furniture, left me instead with a wilting aspidistra and a lectern, or failed to announce the show at all. Through these and other dilemmas, great and small, Anton Pavlovich’s whimsicality, and perhaps his “incomprehensible daring ardour”, have assisted greatly. I must say that the Soviets hadn’t done their work so well because through Russian friends, I knew that there were many good accounts of visits to Siberian brothels, of manipulative love affairs and a lifelong obsession with lavatories (natural enough to a man with delicate physical difficulties in a barbarous age) waiting to be uncovered.