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****

Seventeen years ago Michael Grandage played the title role in Schiller's romantic tragedy in a thrilling revival by Nicholas Hytner at Manchester's Royal Exchange. Now, for his final Crucible production, Grandage directs an equally exciting version that would do honour to any of our big national stages.

At the heart of Schiller's play, written two years before the French Revolution, lies a confrontation between absolutism and liberty. Philip II of Spain stands for iron rule. Against him the Marquis of Posa, championing Spain's oppressed subjects, voices Rousseau-esque ideals of freedom. Caught between them is Philip's son, Don Carlos, fatally in love with his Valois stepmother but also seduced by Posa's visionary dream. If the play sometimes buckles under its mix of passion, politics and melodramatic plotting, it vividly expresses the young Schiller's own yearning for liberty.

The triumph of Grandage's production and Christopher Oram's design lies in their visualisation of Schiller's ideas. A swinging thurible, a prison-like court with high, barred windows, even the menacing hiss of the ladies-in-waiting's fans all tell us that we are in a world of religious and political tyranny - a point underlined by Mike Poulton's translation, where Philip announces: "The instrument God places in my hand is terror." But Grandage also captures the subversive eruption of feeling in this crepuscular hell: at one point Richard Coyle's neurotic Don Carlos beats against the court doors like a trapped animal, and his simultaneous passion for Posa and the queen implies a state of Hamletesque sexual confusion.

Madness is never far below the surface in this production. Derek Jacobi's magnificent Philip II starts as a figure of cold intransigence, dismissing his kneeling son with "Spare us this playhouse pathos"; but Jacobi impressively gains our sympathy as he reveals the king's Lear-like fear of insanity. Claire Price also turns the queen into a vigorously angry exile trapped in a world of rigid etiquette. If Elliot Cowan could do more to suggest Posa's political fervour, there is superb support from Charlotte Randle as the lovestruck Princess Eboli and from Ian Hogg and Michael Hadley as a pair of plotters.

The production marks another vital stage in British theatre's absorption of Schiller - unsurprisingly, since his work is full of Shakespearean echoes, shows the intersection of private and public passion and captures the timeless rebelliousness of youth.