Stage-to-screen review: Tartuffe (BBC iPlayer)

Next up in my digital theatre catch-up is a production I'm pretty sure I had been due to see at the RSC's Swan, but had to skip when I got ill. A couple of years later Iqbal Khan's production of Tartuffe moved up to Birmingham, where Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto's adaptation is set, and that's where it was filmed for the BBC. Molière's farce is a satire on religious hypocrisy, and here the con-man posing as a holy man becomes a fake Imam, manipulating and destroying a well-off British-Pakistani family for his own ends. In place of a servant we have a Bosnian cleaning lady, Darina (Olga Fedori,) who acts as a chorus figure and outside eye on the Pervaiz family, whose patriarch Imran (Simon Nagra) has been charmed by the wise and pious words of a seemingly homeless man he met at the mosque. He's invited him to live in the family home, and pretty soon he's reliant on Tartuffe's words for every decision he makes in his life.

Theatre review: Linck & Mülhahn

Not that there seem to be a lot of great times for the trans and non-binary community lately, but we're in the middle of some particularly bad days at the moment, so it's fitting timing for a historical drama about a pioneering gender-bending couple. Linck & Mülhahn may be a tragicomedy that delivers on the tragic side as much at the comic, but it's also undeniably triumphant, celebratory, and optimistic that, while not enough has changed between 1721 and 2023, the day is coming. It's inspired by real people and events, but Ruby Thomas' play does add its own caveats about what exactly constitutes a true story - is it the story as interpreted by the laws and mores of the time, or the truth as felt and experienced by the people at the heart of it? In 18th century Prussia, Anastasius Linck (Maggie Bain) is a well-liked soldier in his regiment and as much known for his debauchery and female conquests as any of them.