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: Blue Mist

Mohamed-Zain Dada's tragicomic Blue Mist, going into its last week Upstairs at the Royal Court, is a story of young British Muslim men set in a shisha lounge – apparently there’s a lot more of these dotted around London than is immediately apparent, serving as an alternative place to socialise for people who don’t drink so don’t have much interest in pubs. It’s not a subculture I was particularly aware of, but then that’s kind of the point: As something that’s a part of Muslims’ lives but not particularly on the radar of most other people, it’s an easy target for right-wing figures who want to build up a narrative of dodgy underground networks breeding terrorists at worst, segregation at best. Hoping to become a documentary-maker, Jihad (Omar Bynon) sees this both as fertile material, and a chance to reclaim the narrative (as well as help save his beloved Chunkyz Shisha Lounge from being targeted and closed down.)