Theatre review: What Shadows

I can’t wait until a time when I can go months without seeing a play about a dark chapter in history, and finding it painfully relevant to the present day. We’re not there yet though, and so Roxana Silbert transfers her Birmingham production of What Shadows to the Park Theatre, in which playwright Chris Hannan looks at one of the most notorious instances of a British politician fanning racism. After decades playing Emperor Palpatine Ian McDiarmid is about as qualified as you can get to play Enoch Powell, the Conservative politician whose hate-filled “Rivers of Blood” speech in Birmingham made him a by-word for racism. In 1967, with the Tories in opposition, Powell starts to see himself on the one hand as the man to get them into power, and on the other marginalised by his own party, who view him as a crank who gives shit-stirring populist speeches to regional Conservative clubs.

Radio review: King Lear (Radio 3)

BBC Radio 4 have been serialising Shakespeare but there's no such messing about over on Radio 3 - Gaynor Macfarlane's production of King Lear was presented as an uninterrupted 150 minutes (although personally I downloaded the iPlayer version onto my kindle and listened to it over a couple of days' worth of train journeys and lunch breaks.) When staging or filming Shakespeare it's easy to impose a high concept; less easy without the visuals, but this production has been given an all-Scottish cast, led by the distinctive voices of Ian McDiarmid as Lear, the king who, as madness sets in, puts his faith in the wrong two daughters while banishing the only loyal one; and Bill Paterson as Gloucester, who makes a similar error of judgement with his two sons. The fact that everyone has a Scottish accent (except for Simon Harrison's King of France who, paradoxically, is given an English one) could have been confusing but there's enough variety in voice and subtle differences in accent never to make it a problem.

Theatre review: The Merchant of Venice (Almeida)

In my end-of-year reviews I usually have a look at some of the recurring themes that have kept turning up on stage in those months. Most are unexpected but as I go into my first show of 2015 I already know what one of them is going to be: It's generally a Shakespeare play that theatres avoid nowadays but at the moment there's three separate productions of The Merchant of Venice that I'm planning to see in the next six months. First up is a production I first saw in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2011, Rupert Goold's high-profile relocation of the action to modern-day Las Vegas. Venice is now a '60s-themed casino where the merchant Antonio (Scott Handy) takes out a $3 million loan on behalf of his friend Bassanio (Tom Weston-Jones,) who needs it to seek out a wealthy heiress on a reality TV show.

Theatre review: Bakersfield Mist

Kathleen Turner is no stranger to the West End, and her latest visit sees her take on a broken woman whose one remaining hope in life is tied up in an unlikely place. Lionel (Ian McDiarmid) is an authority on modern art whose career has seen his instincts rarely betray him, and who now works for an elite art institution, investigating potential forgeries. His latest job takes him to the unlikely venue of a trailer park in Bakersfield, California, and a woman whose usual taste in art extends to generic watercolours and drawings of clowns (a detailed set design from Tom Piper.) Turner plays Maude, who bought the ugliest painting she could find in a junk shop for $3, as a gag gift for a friend. Closer inspection, though, reveals that it could be a previously unknown Jackson Pollock, and Lionel's seal of approval could mean the difference between junk and millions of dollars in value.

Theatre review: A Life of Galileo

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The RSC isn't inviting the Press to this until Tuesday.

To round off the RSC's "A World Elsewhere" season, looking at what else was going on in the world during Shakespeare's lifetime, we have a 20th century classic that deals with one of Shakespeare's exact contemporaries, Brecht's A Life of Galileo. Always strapped for cash, Galileo Galilei passes off the Dutch invention, the telescope, as one of his own. He gets found out but not before the new tool gives him a new look at the heavens, and he realises he's found proof of Copernicus' theory that the Earth rotates around the Sun. The fact that the theory is considered heretical by the Catholic Church doesn't dim his enthusiasm or deter him from sharing his knowledge with the people. But the Church won't let mere evidence get in the way of centuries of teaching, and soon the Inquisition has taken an interest, demanding that Galileo betray his science and abjure his theory.