Lloyd Evans

On Tuesday Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor take on Othello at the Donmar. If the show hasn’t sold out already, it soon will. Doubtless the starry cast will help shift a lot of tickets but so will the play’s peculiar ‘self-rationing’ effect. Of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies, Othello is the least often revived. The play has always been particularly problematic, not because it’s bad — though in parts it is — but because it’s so outstandingly good. The final act is perhaps the finest piece of pure theatre ever written, a sublime blend of nail-biting suspense, heartbreaking pathos and triple-fortissimo lyrical effects.

The Arsonists, Royal Court; The Giant, Hampstead; The Bicycle, MenKing’s Head   Strange happenings in theatreland. Three London playhouses have taken it into their heads to mount a sustained attack on the avant garde. Result â” carnage! Careers are in tatters. Reputations have been shredded. Some of these playwrights will never be seen again. In August the Donmar cruelly demonstrated that N.F. Simpson was unworthy of adult attention by staging two of his silliest playlets alongside a slice of tedious cleverness by Michael Frayn. Last month the Royal Court embarrassed Ionesco by putting on his dated sci-fi fantasy, Rhinoceros. Next the Almeida started knocking lumps out of Caryl Churchill with a resuscitation of her 1970s dodo, Cloud Nine.

Theatre: Lotte’s Journey, Cloud Nine, Joe Guy Beware of plays that open on trains trundling through Europe in the 1940s. You know where they’re heading. The strength of Candida Cave’s new work, Lotte’s Journey, is that it evades cliché by telling the passengers’ stories in reverse. In particular we focus on Charlotte Saloman, a brilliant Jewish artist haunted by the suicide of her mother and grandmother. The script is technically ambitious and takes us from Berlin to Rome and Nice, and covers Saloman’s life from the age of eight when her father explained the cause of her mother’s death as influenza. These large transitions are skilfully handled by Ninon Jerome’s direction.

Big date for Bohemians next month: 28 November marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake whose memory is honoured by every moth-eaten visionary, every babbling poet and every garret-bound artist flinging paint at a canvas. Nowadays, Blake’s eminence is universally accepted but the great mystery of his career is that his achievements, as both illustrator and poet, made such a feeble impression on his contemporaries. It didn’t help that he was widely thought mad. And he complained throughout his life of a ‘Nervous Fear’ that made him uneasy in company. Because of his visions his behaviour was often weird.

If you can, get to Macbeth. Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood have set a benchmark that will remain for years. Never mind impersonating the murderous couple, these two look like the genuine article. Consider Stewart. That sly and lordly head, those inscrutable little eyes, the smirking menace, the sudden changes of temper. A king, easily, or a killer of kings. And Kate Fleetwood is the most terrifying Lady Macbeth I’ve ever seen. Imagine Lauren Bacall with the eyes of a cobra. There’s a coldness and cruelty about her so palpable that it seems an aspect of her nature, not of her art. And the sexual chemistry between them, the slow hungry greed of their embraces, suggests a violent eroticism.