UNTIL I went to see the Magna Carta plays I had had a very good Magna Carta year. Cautious, because your own review was hardly effusive and the bit on Radio 4 was intellectual and fey.

We decided to go early and read the programme very carefully.

Unfortunately the plays needed a week’s study, a helpful lecture or two and probably a spectator’s manual rather than that introduction.

The first play was a parody of Shakespeare. My experience of Shakespeare proper is by the end I have understood and enjoyed most of it. Go to the same play again and the enjoyment increases.

Neither of these outcomes were, or would ever be, true of this play. This was a pity because it was the ‘best’ of a bad bunch. The next play involved an African dictator. Had I read deeper into the programme I would have understood his gibberish, a mix of Latin and nervous tic inspired by a lady witch doctor. Happily the great white hunter arrived and shot the witch doctor.

Number three was all hackneyed TV police series stuff.

Denton had become Melchester.

The three policemen with much bad temper were rude to one another, while the other characters, cathedral types and a Russian oligarch, were unfunny Wodehouse characters.

I will not turn on my TV to see if they solved the plot, which I missed anyway. Sadly I got number four mixed up with number three. I was so numbed that the plays had run together.

Two women harangued a third whom they reduced to tears.

Having never got to the end of the explanation about this argument, I would have been baffled had not the words they quarrelled about been projected on to the stage. Rebellion was up there – just what I felt.

Driving home through the happy, curiously costumed, Halloween revellers was a blessed relief.

TOM RIDOUT Salisbury