I first read Anne Gunter’s story about five years ago, when I was in my first year of university at Oxford, little knowing it would over time lead to our play Gunter [seen first in Edinburgh and transferring 3-25 April to the Royal Court].

“All discord without this circumference,” the Duchess of Malfi tells the good man she’s just asked to be her husband, “is only to be pitied and not feared”. Perhaps the villains should be more feared and less pitied in the imbalanced casting of Rachel Bagshaw’s clear and yet still atmospheric new production of Webster’s supposed shocker.

You do not need to be Einstein to feel it. If the only dimension missing is time, 75% of a place’s identity can invade your very being, hollow you out, replace your soul with a void. It happened to me at Auschwitz and it’s happening to Samuel at Cape Coast Castle, Ghana.

Not at first. We meet him as our host, full of bonhomie, not just reading his script, but revelling in communicating his love of history to the tourists who come to the last staging post for slaves before the dreadful Middle Passage to the Americas. 

It is no surprise that the phrase “Witch Hunt” is Donald Trump’s favoured term to describe his legal travails. Leaving aside its connotations of a malevolent state going after an innocent victim whilst in the throes of a self-serving moral panic, it plays into a founding psychodrama of the USA - the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

The Wigmore Hall, the high church of Beethoven and Brahms, hosted something less elevated last night: a programme called “Hey for Christmas” presented by vocal ensemble Siglo de Oro and period instrument band Spinacino. The conceit was of recreating a mid-17^th century English family’s musical diet through the Christmas season. And it was a whole lot of fun.

Four centuries on from the publication of the First Folio, is there anything new to be said about William Shakespeare?

Well, the fact that there is nothing old to be said about him (very little is known about the life of the glover’s son from Stratford) means that there’s always something new, as the evidence to gainsay any claim is minimal. Tedious conspiracy theories aside, it’s the kind of paradox the man himself might have appreciated.

Sir David Pountney’s creation of a “masque” performance for our times, recycling music Purcell wrote for his, is downright good entertainment even if the plotline’s a bit incoherent.

Now that’s a virtue, if you look at the 17^th century models he’s starting from. Shows with masques never were designed to have much narrative logic, and the music – even when it had words attached – could as easily fit one story as another. 

Writing about the upcoming 60th anniversary of the founding of the National Theatre in The Guardian recently, the usually reliable Michael Billington made a rare misstep. He called for the successor to Rufus Norris, the departing artistic director, to stage neglected classics: “I would also argue that the National, given its resources, has a civic duty to revive the drama of the past that, Shakespeare aside, is in danger of being consigned to the dustbin.” 

It was great to see Kings Place full on Saturday night for I Fagiolini’s take on the Monteverdi Vespers, added, rock’n’roll style, as an “additional date due to public demand” after the Friday show sold out. And it was superb.

That Shakespeare speaks to his audiences anew with every production is a cliché, but, like so many such, the glib blandness of the assertion conceals an insistent truth. The Thane of Glamis has had some success in life, gains preferment from those who really should have seen through his shallowness and vaulting ambition – he even says the phrase himself – and achieves power without really knowing what to do with it.