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Michael Berkeley's guest is the Laurence Olivier award-winning director Declan Donnellan, who co-founded Cheek by Jowl theatre company with Nick Ormerod in 1981. He has directed Shakespearian productions for the RSC, and a wide range of work for Cheek by Jowl, including Shakespeare, Restoration comedy, Jacobean tragedy, and plays by Corneille, Racine, Chekhov and Pushkin, as well as an adaptation of Dickens's 'Great Expectations'. In 1993 he directed the smash hit National Theatre production of Sweeney Todd. A specialist in French and Russian drama, he directed the 2012 film of Maupassant's 'Bel-Ami', starring Uma Thurman and Christina Ricci, and has directed Le Cid at the Avignon Festival and Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. His current Cheek by Jowl production is a French-language version of Alfred Jarry's satire 'Ubu Roi', which is touring in the UK and abroad.

His music choices include traditional Irish music, 19th-century ballet excerpts and operas by Mozart and Verdi.