Sir Derek Jacobi’s acclaimed performance as King Lear is attracting full houses to Milton Keynes this week as director Michael Grandage’s Donmar Warehouse production, first seen in December, takes to the road with the same 16-strong cast. Audiences are rewarded with a compelling and lucid — if visually oddly monochrome — account of what is arguably Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy.

Essentially, Jacobi supplies us with a study — sadly recognisable to so many today — of a great man succumbing to dementia. In the opening scene, as he recklessly divides his kingdom between daughters Goneril (Gina McKee) and Regan (Justine Mitchell), we observe a self-confident, joshing, extremely vain man who is “every inch a king”. Later, when he comes to use those words, they are spoken with a terrible irony to the blinded Gloucester (Paul Jesson) by a wrecked and deluded old man wearing a headdress of ludicrous foliage. How the mighty are fallen!

We hear the best known of Lear’s speeches delivered, sometimes very slowly, with careful regard for every syllable of their meaning. There is but one jarring note, when “Blow winds and crack your cheeks” is enunciated in a hugely amplified whisper against the cacophonous background of the storm. Intimations of its coming have been subtly hinted at in earlier, almost ghostly, rumblings supplied by composer and sound designer Adam Cork.

Christopher Oram’s design is of slatted grey timber on all sides, rarely relieved by props but with Neil Austin’s lighting eloquent in charting the changing moods of the play. Costumes match this stark presentation, all black or in shades of grey, with the only splashes of colour — welcome in the first case, emphatically not in the second — on the motley of the Fool (Ron Cook) and the bloodstained shirt of the tortured Gloucester.

Beards and boots — some absurdly large — are worn by most of the men, with the exception of Edgar (Gwilym Lee), whose ‘Poor Tom’ loincloth is daringly small. By the time he gets to despatch his gleefully evil brother Edmund (Alec Newman), however, he is again more decorously attired.

By then, the tragic Lear is reunited with his loving daughter Cordelia (Pippa Bennett-Warner), ready for closing scenes — also involving the faithful Kent (Michael Hadley) and Tom Beard as the restorer-of-the-peace Albany — as affecting as any I have witnessed in productions of this play.

Until Saturday. For returns call the box office on 0844 871 7652 or go to the website, (www.ambassadortickets.com/miltonkeynes)