Theatre - Sheridan Morley enjoys a week of poetic inspiration from Shakespeare to Larkin

After six years, Trevor Nunn bids farewell to the National Theatre. His parting play, Love's Labour's Lost, reflects both his RSC beginnings in the reinvention of minor Shakespearian comedies and his interest in classic musicals - My Fair Lady, Oklahoma! and Anything Goes are all either at the National or have moved on from there. Indeed, this new Love's Labour's Lost is cross-cast with Anything Goes and there are moments when it seems to want to be a musical - preferably one by Cole Porter or Noel Coward.

Nunn's most striking concept is to set this Love's Labour's Lost as a dream sequence on the battlefields of the First World War. Men about to die horribly are given a brief glimpse of the love they will never know.

What we have here is the bittersweet and ultimately very black tale of the King of Navarre and three of his lords, who have all sworn to study for three years during which time no woman shall come within a mile of them. Almost at once, the Princess of France and three of her ladies throw those vows into deep confusion. A sequence of complex sub-plots suggests that romance comes no more easily to the lower classes.

This play is all about love, language and lyricism. Berowne, one of the king's men, played here with a fine aquiline strength by Joseph Fiennes, describes his love as "subtle as the Sphinx - as sweet and musical as Apollo's lute". None of Shakespeare's plays, not even any of the other romantic comedies, comes as close to the mood of the sonnets. Before we dismiss Love's Labour's Lost as a very minor work, we need to remember that 50 years ago it brought Peter Brook and Paul Scofield together at Stratford. What Brook had already seen was that this play anticipates Moliere, Marivaux and Alfred de Musset. It is by far the most French of all Shakespearean comedies and has always appealed to the great verse-speakers - Michael Redgrave, Kenneth Branagh and Joseph Fiennes's brother Ralph have all played it since the Second World War. But none of those productions captured the extraordinary mix of farce and lyric verse that Nunn uncovers here.

Nunn's control of the National will be remembered for its triumphs as well as its disappointments. He achieved on the Olivier stage a permanent acting ensemble, only to see it fall away after a season, while his choice of musicals has been far more conservative than was originally promised.

Like both Richard Eyre and Peter Hall before him, Nunn has not often been able to tempt living playwrights to the forbiddingly vast open spaces of the Olivier, but his work at the Lyttelton and the Cottesloe, as both director and producer, has seldom been without courage.

In Tom Courtenay's absorbing one-man theatrical portrait of a very untheatrical man, Pretending to Be Me, at the Comedy Theatre, a wonderful actor plays a great poet whose work and life he clearly loves. Philip Larkin was an unlovable man - alone and lonely, observer but never participant - who described his own life on one occasion as "uniquely dreary" and on another as "just boredom and fear". What makes a poet, Courtenay asks, as he trawls through the best and most mysterious of the poetry and the prose, the letters and the memoirs, in a script he himself has compiled. I'm not sure he ever finds an answer, but the journey fascinates from beginning to end.

When we meet Larkin, in 1974, he is about to move from the attic flat in Hull, where he has lived for 18 years, into a soulless modern house. He feels, he tells us, like a tortoise taken out of one shell and forcibly crammed into another. Surrounded by packing cases, he ruminates on a life which is unchanging, uneventful, dull even, like so many others, except that this Hull librarian ("a regular job is no bad thing for a poet") was the most important English poet of his generation.

Gawky, ungainly, awkward, a child of a depressing family (his father was the city treasurer of Coventry), Larkin emerges from his chrysalis at Oxford to discover literature and jazz, the only interests (other than pornography) that absorbed him for the rest of his life.

As Courtenay performs, rather than recites, the best and best-known of Larkin's poems, seamlessly built into the narrative of his biography, a remarkable picture of middle-class Englishness emerges. This play is permeated with sadness, strangely embarrassed and joyless, but oddly beautiful like the unique and chilly landscape that separates the city of Hull - which poet and actor share in common - from the softer England all around it.

Love's Labour's Lost is at the National Theatre (Olivier), London SE1 (020 7452 3000) until 18 March

Pretending to Be Me is at the Comedy Theatre, London SW1 (020 7369 1731) until 26 April

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