The Faction’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a production in which women are more likely to kick ass than sleep with one – a muscular, mischievous take on the Bard’s most light-hearted play about forbidden love. As might be expected, this boldly dynamic theatre company takes all that is most sinister and subversive about the work, and spins a stereotype-smashing evening of pagan delights.

Just as the Last Night of the Proms is an end-of-term party with a concert tacked on, The Grange Festival (like other similar venues) offers a massive picnic interspersed with some opera. Unlike the Proms, however, where anyone can get in wearing anything they like for just £6, the English country house opera is the preserve of the well-heeled and genteel dressed in their finery, sipping expensive drinks.

One space, one person, one story, one voice – the monologue is theatre distilled, the purest form of entertainment.

Not far into Aftermath, Tate Britain’s new exhibition looking at how the experience of World War One shaped artists working in its wake, hangs a group of photographs by Pierre Anthony-Thouret depicting the damage inflicted on Reims.

Some have contended that King Lear is unstageable, and perhaps it’s unfilmable too.

There was a time when Hugh Grant was viewed as a thespian one-trick pony, a floppy-haired fop dithering in a state of perpetual romantic confusion. But things have changed. He was excellent in Florence Foster Jenkins, hilariously self-parodic in Paddington 2, and he’s brilliant in A Very English Scandal (BBC One) as smooth, treacherous Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. At moments, he even manages to look uncannily like him.

Ian McEwan has said that he decided to adapt his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach for the screen himself at least partly because he did not want anyone else to do so (with earlier works, including Atonement, he was glad not to have taken on the adaptation). The sensitivity of the original lies in its interiority, a quality that moves medium with far more difficulty than most. It’s a moot point whether the challenge could have finally been met by anyone, but somehow Dominic Cooke’s film, his screen debut, never quite attains the perfect, lonely poignancy of the book.

That said, Cooke has made a film of quiet quality, his most emphatic achievement to draw such high-calibre performances from his two principals, Florence Ponting (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle). Elaborating their story feels somehow redundant: On Chesil Beach is surely one of those films which most viewers approach knowing at least the outline of the story. It seems equally extraneous to note that the ill-fated wedding night of these lovers is set in 1962, so ubiquitous have been the accompanying references to Philip Larkin (his Annus Mirabilis in particular, with its references to the following year, “Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban/And the Beatles’ first LP”).

The social details are so expertly captured that they seem practically carbon-dated 

It’s very much to Cooke’s credit, too, that he has brought no cheap embellishment to a stark story in the way that Hollywood might have done (the screen rights were first with Ang Lee, apparently). The back-and-forth between the couple’s in-the-moment honeymoon unease and their earlier acquaintance and courtship is subtle, as is the way in which character is defined by music – Edward’s jazz set against classical for Florence (the gradations of the latter, from the optimistic expanses of Mozart to the tempests of Beethoven, are nicely caught). (Pictured below: Billy Howle, Saoirse Ronan)

So too their respective family worlds. There’s the contrast between the freedom, the lack of order at the country cottage that is Edward’s home (it's located in some generic English screen-idyll village), and the sterner, harshly defined setting of Florence’s Oxford. It certainly pays, adaptation-wise, to add full visual context for the accident that defines Edward’s mother (Anne Marie-Duff, never overplaying but always poignant). The embellishments chez Ponting are more subtle, though that’s hardly the first word that comes to mind for Emily Watson’s image-breaking performance as Florence’s mother. (One does wonder how the Ponting household, where Iris Murdoch – once famously defined into her bonking and bonkers periods – seems to be on speed dial, has so disregarded sex, including education in aforesaid.)It leaves the trimly-moustached Samuel West, playing Geoffrey Ponting, whose very name seems to have a brisk home-counties efficiency to it, as the dark force of the piece. McEwan’s adaptation underplays his book’s more emphatic hint at abuse, leaving us with just a moment’s ambiguous eye contact between father and daughter across the deck of the family yacht. But the scene in which West, after soundly defeating Edward at tennis before then realising that Florence has been watching, positively explodes, signals with semaphoric clarity that something is very wrong in this family world.   

On Chesil Beach, book and film alike, leaves us to ponder the circumstances that brought these protagonists to such a seismic coincidence of anger and fear, one that will annihilate their youth and hope. For these are two lovers who cannot step out of themselves, out of their time, the social details of which are so expertly captured by Cooke and his design collaborators that they seem practically carbon-dated.

Was McEwan consciously aware, writing his story, of another literary honeymoon, another beach, another century, a different poet – “Ah, love, let us be true/To one another! for the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams…” – and the possibility of a different conclusion to marital desolation? The inability to act – to turn back, to reconcile – is as tragic as action blundered, but it’s not quite tragedy that defines McEwan’s conclusion, rather acute poignancy (another speciality of Larkin). Perhaps the sole false note of Cooke’s film comes in its final scene, one that channels emotion in the most familiar cinematic terms. Until then, On Chesil Beach has been a film of close sensitivity, in which Saoirse Ronan – musician that she is – plays never less than exquisitely.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for On Chesil Beach

Everyone knows that Elizabeth I was a monarch of deep intelligence and sharp wit. Fewer know how good she was at the galliard. This was a virile, proud, demandingly athletic dance, usually performed by the men at courtly gatherings, and the fact that the Queen of England so enthusiastically flouted convention in this way says a lot about her.

Simon Napier-Bell’s film has a huge appetite for its subject, which is, of course, the half-century of gay history in Britain that followed the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality brought by the Wolfenden Report in 1967. 50 Years Legal barely slows for a moment over its 90-minute run, concentrating on the wealth of personal testimony of some four dozen interviewees, drawn predominantly from the worlds of entertainment and the arts, its perspective completed by a small rank of politicians and public figures.

Everyone was involved – in different ways, at different times – in the history that they talk about, their experiences coloured by a huge range of emotions, from anger, both raw and considered, to humour. 50 Years Legal was first broadcast on Sky Arts in July 2017 (there is an accompanying book) as part of last year’s generous range of offerings marking the anniversary. Another was Peter Ackroyd’s Queer City, a wider history of gay London over two millennia, that devoted some 50 pages to the period that Napier-Bell covers in his film, but somehow managed to present it as almost dry-as-dust history. To say that 50 Years Legal gives us a sense of history as a living entity would be a massive understatement, and its testimony is incisively backed up by the director's choice of archive material, including plenty of treats. 

It’s presented in a rapid-fire edit (full kudos to editor Joshua Hughes for bringing the whole structure together), with contributions delivered in bites of a sentence or two, themes recurring over a narrative that Napier-Bell divides into five loose chapters, each of a decade. The effect is somehow cyclical – not unlike the film's visual interludes, gymnastic hoop gyrations from Matthew Richardson Circus Art – which makes it as difficult to single out any one episode as it would be egregious to choose from any of the contributors (though it should remind us just how considerable is the debt that Britain's gay community owes to Peter Tatchell). It's a collective company, as the DVD cover indicates (pictured right), in which men very much dominate, though women and trans people do feature more as the years move on.

There’s occasionally a sense of being bombarded with information and feeling, the result no doubt of Napier-Bell having filmed so much more material than the film's length could accomodate. But the director closes with a much longer excerpt from the remarkable speech that Ian McKellen gave at the Oxford Union in 2015 (main picture), its lapidary power all the more striking for the contrast with what has come before. It also reminds us, hauntingly, that for all the achievements and advances of a remarkable half-century, one that has changed British society beyond recognition, the struggle against prejudice is never going to go away.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for 50 Years Legal & Ian McKellen's speech at the Oxford Union, in full

As Aerosmith’s guitarist Joe Perry put it, “there’s a certain amount of fuck you-ness in everything Jeff does.” Perhaps it’s this which has allowed Jeff Beck to achieve the rare feat of surviving into his seventies as what you might describe as a guitar legend without portfolio.