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?
China has a strategy and Britain doesn’t
A roadmap to better relations requires realism. Beijing’s interests and goals are openly stated—if you know where to look
The plague
Standpoint goes to press as the pandemic rages. So too does the search for blame and the political fall-out
Defeat begets defeat for Britain’s cloth-eared Left
The censorious culture of the liberal Left is hostile to freedom of expression. The fate of the trans-rights movement evinces this pointless politics