Mark Lawson
Infectious enthusiasms
Hard times on stage—and off it
Honour and courage
Tom Stoppard’s roots and Caryl Churchill’s dystopia
Special affects
The National finds a niche in staging literary adaptations while Shakespeare returns to school in the Donmar’s Teenage Dick
Pulling the trigger
Two dramas of gender tension are re-explored for the era of #metoo by the RSC
Ibsen perplexed
Why modernise old plays when their message is already topical?
Will the green agenda be killed off by the pandemic?
‘Will the green agenda be killed off by the longer-term coronavirus recovery? Or might the closure of so much business, and the cleaner air that results from planes not flying and factories not working, give us extra years to gain control of our environment?’
Why T.S. Eliot still matters
His contemporaries’ reputations have diminished. But Eliot’s has grown: he is the poet who shows us what can be saved from the ruins
Music’s in the house
Rappers have found a role in lockdown: chronicling coronavirus with topical tunes. Most people, though, are rushing to the safety of the past