Detective Chief Inspector Othello leads a quasi-paramilitary team of Metropolitan Police officers investigating gang activity in Docklands. With a chequered past now behind him, he has reformed and has the respect of both the team he leads and his superior officers. But his secret marriage to Commander Brabantio’s daughter, Desdemona, unleashes a stream of racist invective from her father, triggering memories of abuse that are never far from the surface.

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.

Some years there’s no obvious Album of the Year. 2023 is not such a year. Any one of five albums could have been my choice. I chose Kesha from that esteemed selection because her fifth album bombed commercially, and I want to BIG IT RIGHT UP.

We’re in Moscow (we hear that quite a lot) where an ageing woman on a rare trip out of her apartment block catches sight of an advert in a bank’s window. She is soon inside and subjected to a sales pitch by a keen young bank "manager", torn between his understanding of her dementia and the career-boost the loan will bring. Five months later, she’s in her little flat with a debt collector, a man even more ruthless in pursuit of his objectives – and events take an unexpected turn.

On the Adamant is an endearing  documentary by the French director Nicolas Philibert, best known here for his 2003 film, Être et Avoir, a portrait of a single-room school in the Auvergne.

The day after I saw the show, as went about the mundanities of domestic life, I wondered how long it would take to come across a reference to 1984. My best bet was listening to an LBC phone-in concerning next week’s conference at Bletchley Park on Artificial Intelligence, but the advertising break intervened, so I switched to Times Radio.

There’s an old-fashioned feel to the story at its outset: Young woman, guitar in hand, Northern accent announcing as much as it always did, who makes a new life in London, all the money going on a room in Camden. One recalls Georgy Girl or Darling, films that were very much of their time.

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.” 

Shakespeare gives Iago over 1000 lines to implant the jealous rage in Othello, so there’s plenty to of raw material to work with. The director Sinéad Rushe has had the idea to split these weaselly words between three actors, a device that seems so natural, so revealing, so obvious that one wonders why it hasn’t been done before (or, perhaps, more often).

Like theatre itself, the law finds its voice in stories, performance and spectacle. Any law student will, from that very first induction lecture, become suffused in a culture that is informed by and in turn informs theatre, some classes more like an evening at the Old Vic than an afternoon at the Old Bailey.