John Webster’s sour, bloody tale of brotherly greed and vice has been updated by the playwright Zinnie Harris, who also directs her own text at the Trafalgar. The title has a handy [of Malfi] added. But do we really know where we are? Or which century we’re watching?

Queer

An incendiary play has opened at the Marylebone, the adventurous venue just off Baker Street. Bigger houses were apparently unwilling to stage it, fearing anti-Israeli protests. Their loss.

It’s common to say that Shakespeare would have liked such-and-such a modern story, but I think he actually might have gone for this one. The Bard’s eye was drawn to cruelty at every turn, and bad-to-the-bone cruelty seeps from each scene of The Apprentice, a drama about Donald Trump’s rise to fame and gain.

Christian Gerhaher, the most compelling and complete interpreter of German Lieder of our time, makes no secret of the fact that – unlike his devotion to, say, Schumann – his relationship with the songs of Brahms has never been comfortable.

Straddling the USA Presidential elections, Simple8’s run of Land of the Free could not be better timed, teaching us an old lesson that wants continual learning – the more things change, the more they stay the same.

How many times does a politician survive wave after wave of attack from rivals, surf the waves of fickle voters and tiptoe around every policy mishap, only to be undone by an appalling error of judgement in their private life, a skeleton in the closet, their own, flawed personality? And how many times, on the downfall of a British PM, does the television news take us back to the moment the disgraced politician stood on the steps of No 10 in their moment of victory?

For his latest pick’n’mix sortie into the world of the women’s picture, François Ozon has gone back to the 1930s and a popular play of the time, Mon Crime (1934). In his hands it emerges as an île flottante of a film that slips down easily but isn’t that nourishing, even though he adds some crunchier elements along the way.

There’s a moment in writer/co-director, Jonathan Brown’s, gritty new play, Knife on the Table, that justifies its run almost on its own. Flint, a decent kid going astray, is "invited" to prove he’s ready for the next step in his drug-dealing career by stabbing Bragg, another "soldier", who has become more trouble than he’s worth.

“I knew he was risky, but like fuck it, everyone’s risky.” A young woman (Kelley Jakle) poses for pictures on a deserted mountain road in Wyoming in 1977, telling Rodney, a charming, award-winning photographer (Daniel Zovatto), about the boyfriend who walked out on her when she got pregnant. She cries, grateful for his attention, and he listens sympathetically. Suddenly, his expression changes and he attacks her, strangling her, then revives her, then attacks again.