June in Oxford is Shakespeare season, and what better way to spend a hot summer night than watching the brightest of Shakespeare’s comedies and the darkest of his tragedies?

Macbeth takes the first half, Kate O’Connor in title role, sharply switching between uncertain ambition and chilling, bloodthirsty determination. Teamed with Nicola Jones, sharp of suit and unswerving in her ambition, they make a terrifying, murderous, loving couple. The performance captures that peculiar horror of contemporary conflict, that powerful sense that everyone pays and no-one truly survives.

Macduff – a brilliantly bleak performance from Helen Taylor – ends the tragedy desolate and passionless, while Jessica Reilly’s brief moment as their wife crackles with brutal, chilling effectiveness. Here and there, Charlie Stewart as rightful ruler Malcolm, drops in to twist the plot and give absolutely no sense that wrongs will be righted, for this is war, and all is blood, murder, horror. But then the interval, and the sound of roof parties and happy students, drifting over the summer-warm courtyard.

The sky darkens, the lights come on, and the cast reassemble to right all wrongs with Much Ado About Nothing. Punkish army fatigues switch out for suits and sequins and Alistair Nunn steps up as Benedick, flinging out wild fountains of witticisms, while Beatrice (Jessica Reilly, in series of escalating outfits) gamely, joyously lobs them back.

Catherine Woolley returns as Hero, crystal-sharp and veering between gleeful mischief and desolation. James Macdougall makes a fine war captain landed in a drawing room comedy, over and underreacting, funny and frightening, all sudden cruelty and whimsical directness. Cate Welmers picks up Don John with appropriately gleeful nastiness. Scenes unfold in tidy style, happily zig-zagging to their final happy ending as the last light fades behind the castle mound, the stars come out overhead, and all is delightful.