Ten of my favourite shows in five decades as a theatre critic

1 Ken Dodd’s marathon celebration of comedy, Ha-Ha, at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1973: one of many happy nights – sometimes stretching into the following day – watching a master at work.

2 Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land at the Old Vic in 1975: the first sight of an enigmatic theatrical poem dazzlingly performed by Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud.

3 Peggy Ashcroft in Happy Days at the Lyttelton in 1976: this Beckett performance heralded the opening of the National Theatre.

4 Macbeth at the Edinburgh festival in 1985: Yukio Ninagawa’s production, filled with cascading cherry blossom, turned this dark play into a poem on human transience.

5 The Mahabharata at Avignon festival in 1985: Peter Brook’s production of the great Sanskrit epic unfolded over 11 hours in an all-night production in a stone quarry.

6 The Cherry Orchard at the Berlin Schaubühne in 1989. Anton Chekhov’s symphonic realism has never been better caught than in Peter Stein’s production, with Jutta Lampe as Ranevskaya.

7 The Weir in 1997: Conor McPherson’s tale-spinning spellbinder was unveiled by an exiled Royal Court in a room over the Ambassadors theatre to general astonishment.

8 Julius Caesar at the Royal Shakespeare theatre in 2012: an all-black British cast injected new life into this Roman tragedy and provided an object lesson in verse speaking.

9 The Masque of Anarchy at Albert Hall, Manchester, in 2013. Maxine Peake performed Percy Bysshe Shelley’s response to the Peterloo Massacre with such vigour that it felt like a call to political action.

10 The Watsons at the Minerva, Chichester, in 2018. Laura Wade’s version of an unfinished Jane Austen novel was a miracle of wit, invention and intelligence.

Five things I won’t miss

1 The ritual standing ovation – a filthy habit imported from the US – for even the most modest piece of theatre.

2 The sense of being pushed and shoved in cramped West End foyers by air-kissing, B-list celebrities on fashionable West End first nights.

3 The sound of plastic glasses being crunched under foot at the most crucial moments of a play by spectators who will apparently expire if they are not allowed to drink.

4 The growing use of mics, even in medium-sized theatres, to compensate for the failure of actors to learn how to project.

5 The delay in turning off mobile phones until the first words of a play have been spoken or the first bars of a musical score have been played.

Michael Billington will be talking to Arifa Akbar at a Guardian Live event at Kings Place, London, on 3 February