There’s an uplifting scene where the whole world seems to turn into a dance class. With the police and the miners breaking into the unconscious patterns of Northumbrian folk dance and the children surreally swapping round the different types of helmet, this elaborate routine has the humane effect of showing how these two conflicting groups of men share the same working class culture.In a stage musical it’s as natural to dance as it is to lose your trousers in a farce. He hurls himself repeatedly against the riot shields of the rhythmically baton-thumping police, like someone trapped and going mad in a treacherous no-man’s-land.In the movie, the father has to sell the dead mother’s jewellery to pay for Billy to go back down to London for his audition. Here, he’s able to go because the money raised by the strikers is lavishly augmented by a donation from one of the scabs. This uncomfortable friction is honestly communicated right to the end.Peter Darling’s witty and constantly inventive choreography has the answers to another tricky difficulty.

It means that the boy’s triumph in being accepted has a constant undertow of sadness.”We can’t all be dancers,” exclaims his older brother bitterly when the news of his success coincides with the calling off of the strike. Rather than trade in evasions, this funny, touching and shamelessly enjoyable staging highlights the painful and unresolvable conflicts of feeling and ideology that arise.There’s a terrific sequence where Billy – enchantingly performed by twelve year old Liam Mower on opening night – freaks out in a dance of angular, floor-sweeping frustration. Different facets of the actor’s personality can catch the light. The two characters are, in some ways, opposites, but, thanks to the doubling, you can see each of them through the other’s perforations.Often when high-profile productions go on tour, they go stale. It’s a phenomenon that is certainly not unknown at the Edinburgh Festival But this is never the case with the Maly. As people who go to see this Uncle Vanya will discover, the production will seem freshly rehearsed, because, well, it has been.

As Dodin declares, with justified pride, “Every performance on tour becomes a premiere”.’Uncle Vanya’, Corn Exchange, Brighton (01273 709709) 17 to 21 May; Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891) 24 to 28 May. There are all kinds of problems to be surmounted in adapting Billy Elliot into a stage musical. But Stephen Daldry’s exhilarating production has some brilliant solutions up its fluffy pink tutu. Continuity, of a kind that we in this country can only marvel at, is the key, morally and aesthetically.

Pieces remain in the repertoire and grow, their meaning rendered more complex with time.Take Gaudeamus, a sort of surreal Carry On Sergeant about the Soviet Army Construction Battalion, an outfit that covered a multitude of brutal sins. Based on a novel that was the one work to be banned during the Gorbachev years, this show came to Britain in 1981. It is still being performed, though Dodin recalls the “tense silences” that have interrupted the laughter, and the young people in the theatre “with their heads in their hands” during the war with Chechnya.When the legendary director arrives, he is direct, humorous, impassioned and without side or pretentiousness. We speak through an interpreter who, at one point, after a long and over-involved question from me, equably conveys Dodin’s short, cheerful response: “Fuck knows”.Of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, he reveals: “Most of our rehearsal process was devoted to exploring and feeling what had happened in the world of this play before the first line of the text.” The back-story here is particularly tangled and painful, for this is one of the great dramas of disillusionment. These qualities shine through in his book Journey Without End: Reflections and Memoirs that is soon to be published in Britain by Tantalus Books.