“ALL the world’s a stage,” announces Callow as he steps out of a cloud of dry ice to swelling music.

It’s his first insight into the mind of William Shakespeare – the incomparable playwright for whom every man was the lead in his own script.

Penned by Bard expert Jonathan Bate with added dramatic flourish by Callow, The Man From Stratford is a fascinating journey through the life of a writer whose work endures four centuries after his death.

It is presented as a tour through the Seven Ages of Man – our path from birth to death as laid out in Greek mythology and referred to in As You Like It.

Young William begins as a baby with a tendency towards puking – a practice Shakespeare did not invent, Callow points out, though he did manage to coin the word. The one-man show is peppered with intriguing trivia such as this – that his father was fined for not cleaning up a dunghill outside his home, that his union with Anne Hathaway may have been a shotgun wedding, that he himself played the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

This and Callow’s journeyman theatricality ensures that it is very much a show rather than a lecture, although there is plenty to quench an intellectual thirst.

Descriptions of the Bard’s rise to success and slope to relative anonymity – “nobody of importance noticed his death” – are interspersed with excerpts from his plays and sonnets.

The greatest treat is seeing such a fine actor as Callow in a vast range of roles within a single performance – from the boy prince Mamillius in A Winter’s Tale to the rambunctious Falstaff; from Macbeth to the whole cast of Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

And his recital of Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day, which closes the first act of the performance, is simply breathtaking.

Laura Davis