Military take on Othello

Othello from a military perspective? It sounds like yet another director’s far-fetched take on Shakespeare’s endlessly adaptable plays. In fact, it’s not. The dress may be modern, the bunkers concrete and the guns automatics, but Nicholas Hytner’s brilliant version of Othello at the National Theatre slots right into place with the text. This is a…

Dysfunctional and histrionic

Leo Tolstoy famously said, in the opening lines of his novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That may not be quite true, seeing people laugh with a sense of recognition at the play The Last of the Haussmans. No-one’s family can be quite like…