It’s a weird connection but they say Donald Trump is devoted to his presidential predecessor Andrew Jackson who was popular with the generation he comes from. Jackson was known as Old Hickory and he was a kind of deus ex machina in Davy Crockett films, a bit like Richard the Lionheart in Robin Hood or Ivanhoe. Charlton Heston played him in the 1958 film The Buccaneer about the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 – with Yul Brynner as the pirate Jean Lafitte. Jackson was the inveterate enemy of the Cherokee and he was accused of cronyism and government by personal partisans. In any case, that’s how my dog – an Australian terrier known as General – had as his full name on his kennel General Andrew Jackson.

Sometimes YouTube can seem like a gift from heaven. That was true when a friend insisted that we watch a version of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius from Canterbury cathedral conducted by Sir Adrian Boult with the great tenor Peter Pears as the Soul and the great soprano Janet Baker as the Angel. There were extraordinary fusions of colour that suggested this as a late-Sixties production but the effect of this dramatisation of the soul meeting its maker was unearthly and majestic.

What Oscar Wilde did with The Importance of Being Earnest was to create the highest form of comic facetiousness in a language of sustained volleying brilliance.

Sharmill have a new version of Earnest with Ncuti Gatwa as Algy and Wilde’s greatest comedy is great in any version so people should see the new production. There’s a 2002 version with Judi Dench which made some people say they got the wrong dame – meaning that the living actress born to play the old dragon was Maggie Smith.

But the production that turned, ‘A handbag!’ into one of the greatest lines in the history of the theatre is the one captured in Asquith’s film with Michael Redgrave as Worthing, Michael Denison as Algy, Joan Greenwood as Cecily and Dorothy Tutin as Gwendolen, with the great Margaret Rutherford as Miss Prism, the woman who lost the baby. Yes, but the performance to die for is Dame Edith Evans (the greatest comedienne of her day, the predecessor of Maggie Smith) as Lady Bracknell.

The film is the greatest version of The Importance of Being Earnest we’ll ever see just as the play itself is unsurpassable. The NT Live release coincides with Sharmill’s release of a Metropolitan Opera Live version of Beethoven’s Fidelio with the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen notable among its glories. There’s a sense in which Fidelio is too great to be an opera because Beethoven bursts open the confines of the form.

And this sense of Fidelio is underlined by the version we have by Klemperer with John Vickers and Christa Ludwig which we know will never be equalled let alone surpassed.

Moving sideways, is My Fair Lady the greatest musical? Max Gillies told me he thought it was a Disneyland version of Shaw’s Pygmalion. But it can be seen as superior to the great Shaw play on which it was based because it brings the comic opera Cinderella theme to its culmination (which is why T.S. Eliot thought it was superior). There are eight recordings of it and apart from the three with Rex Harrison (the first two with Julie Andrews), there’s one with Kiri Te Kanawa and Jeremy Irons and another with Alec McCowen which goes for an hour and three-quarters and includes every note of the music and more of the dialogue.

It also has Michael Denison as Pickering. Denison, who’s Redgrave’s running mate in the Asquith/Evans Earnest played Higgins with a consummate brilliance in Australia in the early Sixties.

Redgrave was offered the part of Higgins in the original Moss Hart Broadway production but knocked it back because he didn’t want to be tied down for a long run. In fact, Rex Harrison was born to play Higgins because he was an extraordinary high comedian and the sprechgesang which was written for him because he couldn’t sing takes on an extraordinary power because of it.

Does all this suggest that we’ve lost something by not importing Brits for big shows? It does a bit.

Recently we heard Paul Daneman acting like a god in a 1970 BBC radio version of Racine’s Phèdre with Barbara Jefford in the title role.

He was King Arthur in the original J.C. Williamson production of Camelot. He had been a comrade-in-arms of Richard Burton at the Old Vic and he was everything you could want in Lerner and Loewe’s once and future King.

When the musical was done in London Laurence Harvey opened as Arthur – though the production like the Richard Harris/Vanessa Redgrave film was designed by Melbourne’s John Truscott – but when Harvey left the cast Paul Daneman took over.

Daneman is a brilliant Richard III in This Age of Kings and he was a superb Mr Knightley in a BBC television Emma.

Michael Denison did live drama on Australian commercial television with his wife Dulcie Gray in Shaw’s A Village Wooing and he had a popular courtroom drama Boyd Q.C. He would have been marvellous as Michael Innes’s highbrow detective John Appleby. None of which is meant to in any way deny the glories of Australia drama and value of the great Australian plays that came out of La Mamma and the Pram Factory or the best of Hannie Rayson and Joanna Murray-Smith. The 2002 production of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Robyn Nevin was marvellous and so was Jean Pierre Mignon’s 1990 production of Peer Gynt with Robert Menzies.

But it’s a sobering thought that we don’t necessarily see the contemporary equivalent of Man For All Seasons done as expertly as the 1962 one with Robert Speaight – the man who created the role of Becket in Murder in the Cathedral in a production that could hold any stage in the world.

We did not go in the direction of Canada and establish a classical national theatre. Robyn Nevin understands that people want to see the best actors in the world not all of whom are Australian. It is enough to remind any baby boomer of General Andrew Jackson.