Arin Arbus' vivid production is 'nothing short of gripping'

"It goes without saying that 'The Merchant of Venice' is a desperately difficult play to stage for a 21st century audience," said Joyce McMillan in The Scotsman. Torn between his desire to give all his characters "a credible and persuasive human voice" and the "ingrained antisemitism" of his time, Shakespeare left them "stranded" between "outward romantic comedy and bitter underlying tragedy".

The "great strength" of Arin Arbus' production, first seen in New York, is that it embraces this space "as its own territory", and lays the play out here with "fearless clarity". Set in an American city in the near future – a place of "boozed-up men in suits where today's broligarchs" might feel at home – it has at its heart a "remarkable" performance by the Black actor John Douglas Thompson as Shylock, the Jewish moneylender the Christians need for their business ventures but despise for his faith.

Played with "cool authority", this Shylock is "even-tempered and jovial", said Mark Fisher in The Guardian; and though a darker side lies beneath that "genial surface", it's less a character flaw than the "product of an oppressive culture". Meanwhile Antonio, for instance, comes across as sensitive, generous. With his aura of relaxed affluence, you can imagine he'd help a friend in financial trouble; but he and the other men are used to things going their way. When they do not, "their antisemitic outbursts are poisonous".

The themes running through this production are bleak ones, said Allan Radcliffe in The Times – "dehumanising racism and uncomfortable male-female relations". With only minor changes to the text, "the play's mix of brutality and comedy are heightened and sharpened here to sometimes shocking effect". 

Thompson's performance is "magisterial", said Simon Thompson on What's One Stage. But the whole company bristles with "New World swagger", bringing vivid life – and striking vocal clarity – even to lesser roles. "I can't remember a recent Shakespeare production where the power of the diction drew me in so quickly", while the climactic trial scene is "nothing short of gripping".

The Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh. Until 15 February

by Michel Krielaars     

Joseph Stalin "regularly took time off from his busy killing schedule to vet each new classical music record that came across his desk", said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. The Soviet dictator, who "loved music", would note on each record's sleeve whether it was "good", "average" or "rubbish". As Michael Krielaars, a Dutch journalist and former Moscow correspondent, shows in this "revelatory" study of the musicians who "thrived and failed (or both) under Stalin", such judgements had profound consequences for the musicians concerned. If you were a composer whose work found favour, you were "treated as a secular god" – and were likely to be given a "palatial apartment, good food and freedom to roam as far as the decadent West (assuming you came back when called)". A bad rating could earn "a stint in the gulag" or, worse, a "bullet in the back of the head".

Musicians in the Soviet Union were, like all artists, expected to cleave to the principles of "socialist realism", said Matthew Janney in the Financial Times. Anyone who strayed from this doctrine was accused of "formalism" – a concept, borrowed from literature, associated with experimentalism and the avant-garde. The problem, however, was that what was considered "formalism" was never clear or consistent. Alexander Mosolov's 1927 work "Iron Foundry" was criticised for portraying "only the noise of the machines" and not the "spirit of the factory". Klavdiya Shulzhenko's morale-boosting wartime song "The Blue Scarf" – for a while Russia's equivalent of Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" – was "suddenly outlawed as foolish in 1946". As a musicologist interviewed by Krielaars tells him: "Stalin's terror had absolutely no logic to it."

For any musician in Soviet Russia, compromise was inescapable, said Rupert Christiansen in The Telegraph. The likes of Prokofiev and Shostakovich had to keep in with the authorities to "retain any space to write music that was original and personal". But even their efforts weren't enough: despite his "craven attempts to please", including producing a work entitled "Hail to Stalin" to mark the dictator's 60th birthday, Prokofiev was accused of formalism in 1948 – and when he died, on the same day as Stalin five years later, it wasn't even mentioned in "Pravda". Shostakovich, meanwhile, was "terrorised by government officials his entire life". While Krielaars' survey is sometimes "sketchily researched", the stories it tells are "fascinating". This a "very readable" account of the musicians who suffered for their art in Stalin's Russia.

Irreverent journalist whose love life made headlines

Charlotte Raven, who has died aged 55, came to prominence as one of a cabal of rowdy journalists who quaffed champagne in the Groucho Club in Soho and worked on the Modern Review. Offering "low culture for highbrows", the magazine launched in 1991 and, in its first issue, featured Bart Simpson alongside Roland Barthes, said The Times; a later one had Keanu Reeves on the cover under the line "Young, Dumb and Full of Come". It was the time of Cool Britannia and Britpop, and Raven was not only a witty and intelligent chronicler of that hedonistic era, she embraced its excesses. As a result, she claimed to have little recollection of her years as a "bad girl" of British journalism. "If you can remember the 1990s, you weren't really there, and I remember so little of it that I must have been more there than practically anyone, Liam Gallagher excepted," she wrote.

The magazine had been founded by Julie Burchill and her husband Cosmo Landesman, with Toby Young as its editor. Raven was employed fresh from Manchester University, where she'd read English literature and been ostracised by her fellow Marxists in the student union for having a relationship with Derek Draper, the future New Labour aide. At Modern Review, she had a fling with Young, then fell in love with Burchill, who left Landesman for her. Burchill soon hatched a plot to install Raven as the editor – prompting Young to sabotage the magazine. It closed in 1995. Before long, Raven's relationship ended too: Burchill had fallen for Raven's younger brother, Daniel, whom she later married. Raven married Tom Sheahan, a filmmaker. They started a family, and (as she admitted in the column she wrote for The Guardian), she found that she adapted remarkably easily to bourgeois family life.

Alas, this contentment proved short-lived. In 2005, soon after the birth of her first child, she learnt that her father had a terminal hereditary disease that she'd never heard of – Huntington's. He'd kept its presence in the family a secret from her, though it was likely she'd get it too. A test later confirmed the worst. As her condition deteriorated, said The Guardian, her marriage fell apart – something she chose to blame on her own character defects, exacerbated by a neurodegenerative disease that can cause personality changes and severe pain. She chronicled all this, movingly and unsparingly, in a blog, which formed the basis of her 2021 memoir: "Patient 1". She was devastated when a pioneering drug trial she was on was aborted: she had hoped her legacy would be a cure for the disease that blighted her family.