It was not the fall of the Empire, but it felt like it might be the shadows of it.

Declan Donnelan bestrides the theatrical world like a Colossus. His company, Cheek by Jowl, has grown from ground-breaking fringe productions in the eighties, to being a huge theatrical enterprise, perhaps the nearest thing the theatre world has to a Hollywood studio. They run three or four internationally touring shows in tandem, playing in top venues wherever they go, with workshops, academic tie-ins, and of course the book of the man himself (The Actor and The Target) touted along the way.

I read the book. It seemed like common sense, which is a scarce enough quantity in theatreland, so I could see how it was useful.

Then I saw the Cheek by Jowl Russian-language version of Chekhov's Three Sisters in Cambridge last year, and it was brilliant, heartbreaking, fantastic. The Russian subtitles were gloriously crude (The ready-made translations by Frayn et al seem to aim at Oscar Wilde, falling short of course). The sisters moved balletically, the soldiers proudly, pathetically, and the old man seemed hardly to move at all: I have never seen large groups so well orchestrated: it was Picasso to Trevor Nunn's Renoir. In one scene, the drunk soldiers staged a mock funeral for a comrade, which ended in the would-be corpse chasing the rest round with obols on his eyes, a sick and glorious blind-man's-buff. Here, I said to myself, is a director who is equal to the old Russian doctor, who can match the intelligence, wit, and despair of the words a physical world every inch as good: as far as actors, the exact physical tic to go with each verbal tic, overactors put down, character before heroism in every case, each neurosis lovingly displayed, not a trick missed in the script, and with setpieces that seemed to see as deep into the farce and glory of it all as Chekhov himself.

In short, I bought into the myth entirely. Until this evening.

For example: Whoever was behind the idea to cover up the large and gorgeous Barbican auditorium and build a substandard traverse set on the stage should be sacked. The set creaked, the lighting wasn't bright enough, and the acoustics were so bad that the poor actors had to yell at each other. Why buy a mansion and then build a bungalow in one of the rooms?

It was this, principally, which made me think that Donnelan's fame had sent him to pot. Perhaps it was not hubris on his part, but perhaps he prefers to take a back seat, content - like Achilles - to lounge in his tent and be fed grapes by some young Patroclus while assistants and deputys squabblingly fought in his name failing to conquer the walls of the audience's opinion.

Left with a long narrow set like a running track, the actors spent half the time yelling at each other from either end, and half running up and down, training for the Olympics.