Theatre review: Comus

It's a strange time to see the start of a new Globe season, given all the current sound and fury over Emma Rice's premature departure (personally I'm sure the situation is far more complex than it initially appeared, but I think the board's official statement suggesting they're now interfering directly in artistic policy was disastrous, whether that's literally true or just a badly-worded press release.) Still, for the couple of remaining seasons we will be seeing Rice in charge, it's starting to look as is there's a theme to what'll end up on the Swanamaker stage: Weird shit, possibly involving Philip Cumbus. For the first time the venue attempts to recreate one of the elaborate masques that were a private treat for the upper classes, with John Milton's Comus: A Masque in Honour of Chastity. As the subtitle suggests, this is a rather po-faced morality tale, but that's not quite what director Lucy Bailey puts on stage.

Theatre review: Another Country

The past may be Another Country but I had to double-check when Julian Mitchell's play was set, as the real foreign environment in his fictionalised take on Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt is public school. It's an insular world with its own rules and language, and one that seems to exist outside of time. The play is a look at the formative years of the men who would grow up to be the country's most notorious spies for the USSR, through two fictional public schoolboys in the 1930s. Judd (Will Attenborough) is the school's resident Marxist, awake in the small hours studying theories that oppose the system he's at the heart of, and dreams of changing from within. Judd seems to be one of the few pupils in his house not to have had sex with his friend Bennett (Rob Callender,) a brazenly effeminate boy in an environment where everyone else is trying to assert their masculinity.