Ken's back on top with Richard

Kenneth Branagh's Richard III is little short of sensational. Back on stage after a decade away doing films (and directing the boxoffice-busting The Play What I Wrote), it's an irony that his return comes not at the hands of the National or the RSC but under Michael Grandage at Sheffield (who is shortly to leave and come south to take charge of the Donmar in the footsteps of Sam Mendes).

Branagh and Grandage's revelatory take on the villain who kills and murders his way to the throne like some mafia boss, or latter-day political tyro, is to reveal him as a cross between a psychotic, a Christ figure and a stirring warrior. I can't have been the only one to have been saddened when Richard's Boar - designer Christopher Oram gives Branagh a wonderfully dashing red doublet with a prickly golden spine - meets his appointed death at Bosworth Field. But the knockout is the contraption in which we first see Richard - suspended as if in some giant electro-convulsive machine, legs akimbo, arms out-stretched.

This is the image either of crucifixion or redemption, repeated just before Bosworth Field as the ghosts of those murdered by Richard come back to haunt him and serves to underline his sense of self-loathing. Deformity has really driven this Richard mad.

Extraordinarily moving and played by Branagh with a depth and emotional nakedness we've seldom seen from him before, it comes as a coda to a performance of breathtaking command, sudden mood switches and sardonic humour.

Branagh's Richard is also one of the most physical I can remember, wrestling Claire Price's eloquent Lady Anne to the ground, seductively nestling in the lap of Phyllis Logan's Queen Elizabeth (whose two little sons he has just had murdered in the Tower) like some child seeking sanctuary.

Elsewhere, Grandage's production, with its looming stone pillars, slanting light and martial percussion, boasts a stirring if over-glamorous Queen Margaret from Barbara Jefford and generally conveys honest intelligence, if missing the cumulative thrill of the play as part of an over-arching theme as witnessed in last year's RSC Histories.

Until 10 April, Crucible Theatre Sheffield. Box office: 0114 249 6000.