I CAN see Michael Feinstein aged about nine. To the delight of his mother (at least) he must have been a piano prodigy, doing songs from the shows at weddings and barmitzvahs. At my barmitzvah I wore a velvet jacket (it was the Seventies,) so imagine my surprise when Feinstein walked on to the vast Barbican stage wearing the very same item. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but he was sporting something suspiciously similar, topped off with a smile as permanent as the creases in his lounge-suit trousers But then that’s what Feinstein is: an upmarket lounge act Sorry, I got that wrong. That timespan has proved a Godsend, since early in the rehearsal process the cast was hit by chicken-pox. Now, though, they are fighting fit and raring to demonstrate that, compared with the warped psychological diseases they have to inhabit in this great comedy, mere chicken-pox is way down on the sickness scale.RSC Stratford: 01789 295623.

It’s a terror of death, he believes, that has given Volpone his fetish for hard, spiritless, sterile gold, a glittering but illusory counterweight to a world of sleaze, shit, blood and mortality.So, a masterpiece that brilliantly culminates in two courtroom scenes – the first a false, the second a genuine climax – still awaits a production that does it full justice. Will this be the one? With his background in new plays, which receive a standard four weeks’ rehearsal at the Royal Court, Posner is luxuriating in the 10 weeks afforded for the classics at the RSC. So what would the hero have nightmares about? Posner thinks his dream world would be full of images of his own flesh rotting. He agreed and made the further point that this febrile dumbshow implied that Volpone has a conscience which this director begs leave to doubt. But, invariably, something has either gone missing (as when Nicholas Hytner excised the Would-Bes from his coruscating Almeida production) or been intrusively added (as when Matthew Warchus at the National tacked on a prologue which, affecting to admit us to the hero’s nightmares, showed him being pursued through a swirl of connected rooms by predatory black-caped legacy hunters.I suggested to Posner that this Jacobean prequel had the effect of pre- empting the play, establishing in one fell swoop that insecurity in the hero which Jonson lets seep out much more subtly.

Posner points to the cunning with which Mosca dangles the prospect of defiling the virtuous Celia – a tactical piece of temptation which lures his master from the stagnant safety of his blasphemous bedroom and into the first panicky realisation that neither he nor his scam is immortal.There have been incisive recent stagings of the piece. This production will imply that, at some deep level, the con game is Volpone’s elaborate rationalisation of the terror of going out. Posner, invoking such modern recluses as John Paul Getty and Michael Jackson, views it the other way round. Most directors and critics see it as just an irksome penalty of Volpone’s scam that he has to spend so much time stuck in bed being spuriously slavered over by contemptible types and regard his growing boredom with this stifling routine as the beginning of the end. They were, apparently, highly erudite creatures, since one of the expected stages of seduction was the entertainment of the client with discussion of literature and music – rather as if the denizens of today’s Shepherd Market were to beguile customers with bright apercus about The Satanic Verses or the latest Andrew Lloyd-Webber before getting down to business.Contemporary parallels crop up in Posner’s talk, too. Volpone marks his debut with the RSC and he clearly brings to the preparation both a fresh eye and an appetite for historical research.