Jamie Lloyd's 'infectious' take on Shakespeare's comedy

"It's pink, it's loud – and it's irresistible," said Sarah Crompton on WhatsOnStage. Jamie Lloyd's production of Shakespeare's "best-loved and richest comedy" rides on a "wave of falling confetti and 1990s pop favourites". It uses wonderfully choreographed disco dancing to illuminate the battle of the sexes, and features two glorious lead performances that manage to be both "truthful and incredibly funny".

It all makes for a "thoroughly weird and absolutely wonderful reconceptualisation", said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Lloyd turns Shakespeare's "comedy, which narrowly swerves tragedy, into an old school house party cum modern romcom", with the sparring lovers clad in spangles, gold shimmer and sequins. It's a "wonderfully giddy thing" – and you'd have to be a "god of stone to not be seduced by its wacky joy".

This remarkably "infectious" production is blessed by actors who embrace the disco craziness with gusto, but have the acting chops to transcend it, said Susannah Clapp in The Observer. Tom Hiddleston has previously turned in triumphant performances as Cassio in "Othello" and as a "blazing" Coriolanus. Here, he "startlingly expands his Shakespearean range" with a display of nimble physical comedy. He "unbuttons his cerulean shirt to seduce his Beatrice", and "proves a swivel-hipped executor of embarrassing dancing". Hayley Atwell, too, has the ability to move "from wildness to serious romance without dropping a beat of the verse". Together, their Beatrice and Benedick are "full-on fiery and fleshy, making sexy sense of a couple who are often more shrivelled and sour", but they also find the sombre strains beneath the joy.

Lloyd has scrapped the Dogberry subplot, which makes the resolution of the main drama seem rather abrupt, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. "We lose, too, the potential social commentary embedded in the tale." Still, it is hard to quibble when the show is such a joy "from start to finish", boosted by outstanding performances across the board. "Heartbreak, hope, healing – it's all here in this gorgeous, bighearted production."

Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London WC2. Until 5 April

by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund 

"You might imagine that the hero of a book about how Keir Starmer led the Labour Party from electoral disaster to Downing Street would be, you know, Keir Starmer," said Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times. But while Starmer is "certainly present" in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund's "well-researched account of Labour's return to power", his role is that of a supporting actor. The book's hero is Morgan McSweeney, the PM's 48-year-old chief of staff, who is portrayed as the architect of Labour's triumph and the current power behind the throne. By this account, it was McSweeney "who picked Starmer and not the other way round": in 2019, he needed an MP to front his crusade to make Labour electable again, and he alighted on Starmer. "Keir's very bright and picks things up very fast," he told friends. "He's not completely unpolitical." Packed with such revealing details, "Get In" is a "cracking read".

"The Irishman", as McSweeney is referred to throughout, as if he were a character in a Scorsese film, grew up in a middle-class family in County Cork, said Jason Cowley in The Sunday Times. Arriving in London aged 17, he worked on building sites and, later, on a kibbutz in Israel, then studied politics at Middlesex University and got a job at Labour HQ in 2001. Over the next few years, he developed a reputation as a formidable organiser by masterminding successful local election campaigns in east London; then, in 2017 he became director of Labour Together, a "secretive network" dedicated to defeating the Corbynite Left. Cunningly, McSweeney presented Labour Together to Corbyn as an organisation that could help him unite the party, said Kara Kennedy in The Telegraph. So thoroughly did McSweeney dupe the "now-exiled member for Islington North" that you "almost feel pity" for him.

This is a "rattling tale, terrifically well told", but McSweeney should keep it away from Starmer "because he will surely loathe it", said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. The PM emerges as "someone acting a part others have ghostwritten for him". As one insider puts it, "Keir is not driving the train. He thinks he is driving the train, but we've sat him in the front of the DLR" – a reference to the driverless trains of London's Docklands Light Railway. Another insider wonders if the PM knows that he is "just a pawn" in McSweeney's game, but doesn't care: he comes across as "weirdly disengaged". But, if this book flatters McSweeney, it also endangers him. "Machiavellis attract resentment", and PMs don't relish "being portrayed as the dumb instrument of someone else's designs".

Respected journalist who was Wilson's press secretary

Joe Haines, who has died aged 97, was fascinated by the workings of power, and observed it close up by acting as a "sort of consigliere" to two powerful men, said Julia Langdon in The Guardian. A dyed-in-the-wool Labour man, he served as press secretary to Harold Wilson from 1969 until the end of Wilson's second stint as PM in 1976. He then went to work at the Daily Mirror. When Robert Maxwell expressed a desire to buy the paper in 1984, Haines denounced him as a "cheat", a "crook and a liar"; but he stayed on, becoming the paper's political editor and a trusted adviser to the media magnate.

Haines' vanity was flattered by the reliance both men came to have on him, but he retained a journalist's instinct to share information. From the late 1970s, he wrote a series of books and articles about his years in politics, said The Times. These revealed damaging details about Wilson's physical and mental decline. He also wrote in detail about Wilson's relationship with his jealously controlling private secretary Marcia Williams (Lady Falkender), and her "corrosive influence" on the PM. It had long been rumoured that she and Wilson had had an affair, and, in one of his books, Haines reported that she had once told Wilson's wife Mary, "I have only one thing to say to you: I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn't satisfactory." But Haines' final disclosure, made last year, was that Wilson's mistress during his final period in office was a member of his press team: Janet Hewlett-Davies.

Intensely loyal (until he wasn't), Haines also wrote an authorised biography of Maxwell that was described as a hagiography (Mirror shareholders accused him of having "dipped his pen in brown ink"). This proved a huge embarrassment when Maxwell died, and it emerged that he had plundered millions from the Mirror Group pension fund. As a former director of the Mirror Group, Haines was later publicly rebuked for not having done more to prevent his boss' crimes.

Joseph Haines was born in Rotherhithe, London, in 1928. His father, a docker, died when he was two, leaving his mother to raise a family of three on her wages as a hospital cleaner. His education was interrupted by the Blitz, and he effectively left school before he turned 12. Streetwise, tough and ambitious, he took a job as a messenger on Fleet Street aged 14, and embarked on a programme of self-education, focusing on politics and history. Steadily, he worked his way up to become a copy-taker, a sub-editor and eventually a political reporter on the Glasgow Bulletin. In the mid-1960s, he moved to the newly launched The Sun. He was appointed deputy press officer at Downing Street a few years later. His role, he said, was not to serve the press, but to use it, in the interests of the PM. Completely dedicated to the Labour project, he was the first No. 10 news manager to be politically partisan, said The Telegraph. Wilson valued his loyalty, and his undeniable brilliance as a speech writer, but journalists found Haines obstructive and abrasive. Many loathed him. He was referred to as "the anti-press officer".

Haines and Falkender had never got on, and their relationship fractured completely over policy differences. His first memoir, published in 1977, seemed designed largely to ruin her reputation but, in the process, it painted Wilson as a pitiful weakling, said The Times, a man so under his political secretary's sway that he let her compile his controversial resignation honours list. (She'd drafted it, Haines claimed, on lavender note paper.) He had written the book partly to make money, and was rewarded with a huge serialisation fee from the Mirror, and a job as a features editor. Maxwell offered him a more influential job as political editor, and more money: it was said that after the buy-out, his colleagues jingled the coins in their pockets when he walked past. Proudly working class, Haines was old Labour but not hard Labour, and, in 2016, he urged the party not to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader. By then, he and his wife Irene had moved to a comfortable house in Tunbridge Wells. They had no children; she died in 2022.