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ANGUS REID urges us to understand the persecution of Jason Arday from a political and historical perspective, and to see the victim in human terms
Theatre: King Lear
In its depiction of societal and personal breakdown, a new production of King Lear by Sam Mendes speaks directly and uncomfortably to our own times, says GORDON PARSONS
Re-releases of the classics Gypsy Rhumba and Buena Vista Social Club, and a stunning album by Palestinian artist Faris Ishaq
Nothing, says ANDY HEDGECOCK, can rescue this undistinguished amalgam of ponderous melodrama and shallow philosophical speculation
JAMIE BRITTON invites readers to visit 3,500 locals as part of a marathon artistic pub crawl
JOHN GREEN welcomes a valuable and incisive analysis of a world become hyperpolitical but without the mass movement institutions to represent it
King Lear
National Theatre, London SE1
4 Stars
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Family issues and dragon-fuelled history amount to a vacuous spectacle that ill-fits the theatre, muses SIMON PARSONS
MAYER WAKEFIELD is gripped by a production dives rapidly from champagne-quaffing slick to fraying motormouth
JAN WOOLF is beguiled by the tempting notion that Freud psychoanalysed Hitler in a comedy that explores the vulnerability of a damaged individual
‘Honest’ Tom Wharton’s 1682 drunken rampage through St Mary’s church haunted his political career, but his satirical song Lillibullero helped topple Catholic James II during the Glorious Revolution, writes MAT COWARD