Having a sportswriter father is no excuse. The young man was tall, long fair-haired with a hat. ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m an athlete,’ he replied. ‘Oh yes, what kind?’ ‘AFL’‘Really? The first eighteen?’ ‘Yes.’

It was only later that I learned this was Darcy Moore, the captain of Collingwood and therefore one of the most revered and reviled figures in the country.

Is David Hallberg thought of like this? It’s moving to hear that he wept at the last performance of Nijinsky and this man of artistic steel confirmed that he’s signed up for another five years as the head of the Australian Ballet. It’s fascinating too that Asher Fisch the Israeli conductor who recorded the whole of Wagner’s Ring for the Melba label, and who heads the Western Australian Symphony Orchestra, is doing Brahms Symphony No. 2 with one contemporary Australian work at the Australian National Academy of Music at the Music Gala this Friday 21 March. The Academy wants a home for their prodigious talents.

Brett Sheehy is fresh from running the Adelaide Festival and making a sizeable profit and cites the very dynamic Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal with their kind of meta-dance and meta-drama.

Their pure electricity re-creates the very idiom of dramatic art as something people will pay for. None of which changes the stunning fact that the production of Othello with Denzel Washington as the Moor and Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago is sporting tickets at nearly $1,000 for front stalls at New York’s Barrymore.

Denzel Washington – who first played Shakespeare as the Prince in Ken Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing in 1993 – is not the most natural Shakespearean. In his Macbeth directed by Joel Coen with Frances McDormand he hits the generalised emotion of any moment in the play without actually getting the emotion in the cadence – as his co-star can – and that’s the fundamental trick with a classical actor.

Still, theatre vultures will kill to see his performance and Gyllenhaal should be a fascinating masked villain. Lucky enough baby boomers are likely, of course, to treasure the memory of James Earl Jones’ Othello to the Iago of Christopher Plummer. Or Raul Julia’s in Central Park. Unless they are 100 no one will have seen Paul Robeson’s Othello that toured America in the mid-1940s with José Ferrer as Iago and Uta Hagen as Desdemona. Some people might as babes in arms have seen Robeson’s 1959 retake at Stratford directed by Tony Richardson. Plenty of people saw Olivier’s a few years later.

It’s fascinating to see George Clooney (now 63) scheduled to play Ed Morrow – the legendary broadcaster from London during the Blitz – at the Winter Garden Theatre. It’s now in preview (at about $800 a ticket). It’s enough to make you wish – selfishly – that the US dollar will drop, as predicted.

Notwithstanding all this it’s good to see some sense of the dramatic classics is still alive, especially in their Anglo-Saxon home in London.

Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell are zapping their way through Much Ado About Nothing like a dance routine and Jonathan Bailey from Wicked is getting his teeth into Richard II in Nick Hytner’s production.

Then there’s the staggering news that London is sporting two productions of Sophocles, the great tragedian who sent his chorus on in black when his rival Euripides died and who lived into his nineties though only seven of his tragedies survive.

The great classicist Edith Hamilton says he sounds like Milton which tallies with George Steiner saying that Samson Agonistes – ‘Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves’ – is the closest thing in English to the sound of Greek tragedy.

But isn’t it a bit amazing that Rami Malek – whom we know from his impersonating Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody  –  is doing Oedipus Rex with Indira Varma as the older woman in his life. Varma was recently Ralph Fiennes’ Lady Macbeth at the National. The production is being directed by that wizard of London theatre Matthew Warchus. The play itself came to drive the Australian-born translator Gilbert Murray stark mad because he knew it so well.

It’s hard not to be haunted by the line from Oedipus Rex the critic Hugh Kenner quoted as the epigraph to Dublin’s Joyce, ‘I weep; and walk through endless ways of thought.’

Sir Tyrone Guthrie – from whom the Chifley government commissioned a report on a National Theatre – did an Australian production in 1970 with Ron Haddrick as Oedipus and Peter Carroll as a very bird-like Tiresias.

There is a very watchable film with Christopher Plummer as Oedipus, Lilli Palmer as Jocasta and Orson Welles as Tiresias. The very iambic translation by Paul Roche – the old Mentor edition – lassoes all the wild imagery and Plummer is commanding with all that spectacular colour in his voice.

There’s also – a bit unbelievably –  a production of Sophocles’ Elektra in London with Brie Larson (who won an Oscar for Room in 2016). Elektra has grown in status over the last 50 years and this version is in the translation by the Canadian Anne Carson who many think is the best poet writing in the English language.

The Carson Elektra was performed in Melbourne in 2010 with Zahra Newman in the title role and Jane Montgomery Griffiths as Clytemnestra. Jane Montgomery Griffiths was so taken by the role as a teenager that she proceeded to learn classical Greek because of it.

If you want a modern classic about a mother and daughter and you’re in London try Imelda Staunton and her daughter Bessie Carter in Mrs Warren’s Profession. She’s a sometime madam, the girl is a maths wiz. But London is full of fascinating theatre at the moment. Brian Cox is at the Haymarket in The Score which is about Bach’s famous meeting with Frederick the Great and from 17 April there’s My Master Builder inspired by Ibsen and with Ewan McGregor directed by Michael Grandage (who directed him as Iago to Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Othello) and Elizabeth Debicki in the cast.

How fascinating to see the Art Gallery of South Australia is sporting a small but exquisite exhibition Reimagining the Renaissance which includes a handful of paintings from the English Renaissance, among them versions of Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII, of the boy-king Edward VI and a very young Elizabeth I.

If you want a verbal equivalent to this – and the literary renaissance dwarfs the visual glories – listen to the last two episodes of Vivat Rex, the 1977 drama as history show which concludes with a lustrous version of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII with Sian Phillips as Catharine of Aragon, Diana Rigg as Anne Boleyn, Dame Flora Robson as the Old Lady and John Gielgud as Cranmer.