William Forsythe uses lighting that bleaches away colour, makes muscle look like gristle and leaves half the dance in shadow. It’s the choreographer’s own lighting design, a perfect match for stage action that is sullen or murkily ironic. Forsythe is the big-name opener for this year’s Dance Umbrella, the admirable autumn festival of contemporary dance. Though this programme is Forsythe’s mixture as before, the festival has caught him just as he changes direction.
His 20 years as director of Ballett Frankfurt ended last year, after the Frankfurt city council planned to close the company down in favour of something more traditional. Grey, grey, grey.

Soyinka, Kane, Marlowe, Schiller, Brecht, Jarry, Beaumont, B?er. Geniuses all? Are my three criteria fulfilled? Or redundant? Take your pick of what’s on show at the Barbican from now until November and let us know via the website.The Young Genius season, Barbican Theatre, London EC2 (0845 120 7511; www.youngvic ), 16 September to 10 December. That this can happen seemed to us a sort of miracle which we could not explain – is genius hard-wired? – but which seemed good to celebrate. From Oedipus to Ayckbourn, at the centre of a play is a suffering human being. We may be appalled by the horror (Titus Andronicus) or cry tears of laughter (A Flea in her Ear). As Kenneth Tynan put it, “Whether in a farce like Charley’s Aunt or a tragedy like King Lear, the behaviour of a human being at the end of his tether is the common denominator of all drama.”Our fourth criterion: Just do itPlays for our Young Genius festival had to have been finished before the writer was out of their twenties, so they must have grasped the previous three criteria the moment their writing lives began. The second baking was in the ritual of the late medieval church: the acting out of the passion of Christ.

You might say that the Renaissance was an astonishingly swift accretion of skill and technique so that audiences would feel, ever more acutely in their own bodies, the actual experience of the crucifixion; so that they would share Christ’s suffering.The key to dramaturgy is conflict. The first baking was in the Greek Dionysian ceremonies of the death of winter. Theatre as fruit fly, or as bullet.In the truly sensuous there is nothing redundant. To achieve that – as Robert Lepage does even, as in The Dragons’ Trilogy, in a show lasting five and a half hours – takes genius.Third criterion: PainThe theatre of Europe is like a biscuit: twice baked, twice born – both times in the fire. (It had gone by Luther and only returned when his ideas ran out of steam.) He came within an ace of achieving Beckett’s control of the passing instant.In the 1920s, the German Expressionists and Brecht had been after the same thing.