In the play’s greatest scene, one of the most hilarious I have ever seen in a theatre, he simultaneously serves dinner to his two guvnors while reserving large quantities of food for himself, aided and abetted by an ancient and doddery waiter (the sublimely comical Tom Edden) who keeps falling down the stairs, and a member of the audience who suffers no end of humiliations. If you don’t laugh at this scene it can only be because you have already expired with mirth at the show’s previous gags.

Tombs, pots, craft, history, transvestites, what? If you have heard anything about the concept of the British Museum’s latest exhibition you will likely be feeling confused or sceptical. What has the Turner Prize-winning artist, mad potter, and celebrity transvestite been doing in one of Britain’s best-loved museums?

For two and a half years now he’s been raiding the bowels of the museum’s archives with a license to extract whatever treasure he wants from its academic context and present it to the public alongside the products of his own most recent creative outpourings. The result is a smorgasbord of world history, as seen through the eyes of the artist, or what he calls “a journey through my mind”. That, by the way, takes some serious confidence - both on his part and that of the exhibitions team at the British Museum.

Good on Grayson for opening the show with a retort to all his sceptics then. You are greeted at the entrance by a typically homebaked Perry-esque pot bearing some distinctive figures scrawled in his scruffily imperfect manner. It is called ‘You Are Here’ (2011) and depicts you, the museum-going public, explaining with speech bubbles why you went to see the show. It includes: “I liked the poster” and “I just wanted to satisfy myself that I am more clever than this celebrity charlatan.”

Along with Picasso and Dalí, the great Catalan modernist Joan Miró belongs to a triumvirate of Spaniards who dominated 20th-century art. (Juan Gris was a fluent Cubist, but he didn’t devise his own pictorial language.) Like his compatriots, Miró lived a long and prodigious life – he died on Christmas Day in 1983, aged 90. Famously, he wanted to “assassinate” painting, but he left behind thousands of works of art. More than 150 of his paintings, prints and sculptures have arrived at Tate Modern, for the first important London retrospective since another exhibition at the Tate, organised by Roland Penrose in 1964.

The exhibition covers six decades. There are early masterpieces such as The Farm (1921-22), once owned by Ernest Hemingway. There are mid-career triumphs, including Still Life with Old Shoe (1937), and a room full of exquisite paintings from the Constellations series of 1940-41. There are late flourishes: several enormous triptychs featuring colourful smudges, dark fuzzy blobs and spindly lines, like enlarged microscope slides of cellular life. One set of gigantic paintings should be known as the “Traffic-Light Triptych”, on account of Miró’s liberal use of red, amber and green. The effect is Rothko on happy pills.

These days, though, exhibitions are expected to come up with a “take”, and the spin of Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape is that the artist was a political animal. Where others see joy in Miró’s paintings, the Tate’s curators, Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale, spy “anxiety” about contemporary political events – clapping the artist in the irons of interpretation. As a result, the Miró on view at the Tate has a hint of a limp, inasmuch as it is possible to impede a giant’s gait.

Despite a receding hairline, (Actor Rory) Kinnear is very much the student prince in his hoodie and rumpled trousers. His bedroom is a disgusting mess, he doesn’t take off his trainers when he gets under the duvet and he even smokes a cigarette while delivering “To be or not to be”. But you can follow every shade of thought and flicker of emotion in the soliloquies, which are delivered with a beautiful mixture of intellect and feeling.

Beneath the anger, the bipolar mood swings, and the disguise of madness that Hamlet adopts, Kinnear also discovers a strong sense of morality in the character, and an endearing warmth and humour. No actor can capture the full elusive complexity of Hamlet, but Kinnear often comes thrillingly close.