‘He shows us what it is to be human. But what was it like being Shakespeare? That is the question we ask in our play.” So writes Jonathan Bate, the author of this clever show, in a programme note. It is a question that Simon Callow dealt with brilliantly in this week’s two sell-out performances.

Immersed in the works of Shakespeare since he worked in the box office at Laurence Olivier’s Old Vic in 1967, Callow embraced the words and the history of the man in magnetic fashion, alone upon a spare set and with occasional relevant props. As he told me last week, he enjoys bestriding a stage with only an audience to deal with.

The play is not a play as such. Bate is a leading Shakespeare biographer and scholar and this is his first ever serious work for the stage. What he has done is to construct an entertainment using the playwright’s ‘seven ages of man’ speech from As You Like It as the conceit for blending well-written information about William Shakespeare with apropos extracts from the Collected Works.

Thus Callow moves seamlessly from, say, a delightful evocation of the teaching of rhetoric at the King’s New Grammar School in Stratford as WS would have learned it straight into a wonderfully judged Mark Antony praising Caesar.

The actor has a really fine voice for Shakespeare’s words; he effortlessly gives us some Othello and Richard II — here a touch of Malvolio, there a splendid Falstaff, by way of a so-tragic Lear. In ordinary clothes, Callow wandered around the stage, relaxing every now and then into a chair to tell us more of the life and times of our hero. I was struck especially by the contrast, in Bate’s words made real by Callow, between what was “simply a very ordinary little market town” and the seething and frenetic place that was Elizabethan London.

I was also struck by Simon Callow’s sangfroid after a somewhat extended interval on Tuesday evening caused by a technical problem with the lighting rig: “It’s going to be a bit avant-garde — I’m now going to go backstage and pretend that everything is going smoothly!”. Seconds later, he was front of stage giving us his Henry V at Harfleur.

Callow is touring this very personal production leading up to an extended sojourn in Edinburgh at festival time, and two Oxford audiences were lucky indeed to have seen in person that man from Four Weddings and a Funeral doing what he does best. And, importantly, most of us will have left the theatre knowing and understanding more of the wonder of William than we did.