Stage-to-screen review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (BBC Wales)

Russell T Davies' TV adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream first aired in 2016 as part of the BBC's commemoration of the fourth centenary of Shakespeare's death. I had planned to watch it at the time but never got round to it - that summer was one of those particularly full of competing productions of the play and I'd seen quite enough of them. Apart from that, it was clear from the opening shot of Athens as a fascist state draped in red, white and black ersatz-swastika insignia that Davies' version was going to be one of those defined entirely by the line "I wooed thee with my sword" (not necessarily a problem in itself, by this point I think I was mainly tired of people thinking they'd discovered a uniquely dark take on the play, when in fact I would say bad-guy Theseus was the standard interpretation of the 2010s.) In any case, with "Culture in Quarantine" the latest BBC strand to heavily feature Shakespeare, the film got repeated on BBC Four, giving it another month on iPlayer for me to finally catch up.

Theatre review: Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya is Anya Reiss' third Chekhov adaptation with Russell Bolam at the helm, and hopefully that'll let her view it as a trilogy and return to her own original plays, which in the past have been rather good. (Although here's a fun game, see if you can spot the bit on the website where it actually says this was written by Anton Chekhov. It's there somewhere. Like Wally.) This is one of the Chekhov plays I've seen less often, and I've yet to see a production that convinced me of its greatness. Spoiler alert, but this production didn't either. John Hannah plays the titular Vanya, who's spent most of his life taking care of the farm owned by his late sister, and now passed on to her widower, the elderly academic Serebryakov (Jack Shepherd.) The latter has now retired and come back to the farm with his new young wife Yelena (Rebecca Night,) where he's not entirely welcome.