Daniel Raggett’s nightmarish modern-day staging set in gangland Glasgow

“It’s a bold move to reactivate Stratford’s The Other Place as a regular performance space with ‘Macbeth’,” said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. “This, after all, was the scene of Trevor Nunn’s landmark 1976 production starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench.”

Daniel Raggett’s new modern-day staging – set in a boozer in gangland Glasgow – is not in that league, but it “seizes every opportunity to achieve a sense of infernal intimacy”, often plunging the auditorium into darkness, and creating the atmosphere of “a nightmare lock-in”. The witches are a disturbingly ordinary trio of pub gossips. Duncan is a brutal “old capo” who has had the Thane of Cawdor executed; while Macbeth and his peers are thugs fighting to take over his turf. It’s a brutal production, blessed by a fine central performance by Sam Heughan, making his RSC debut.

Heughan “achieves full tragic weight, especially in the soliloquies”, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. “Tomorrow and tomorrow” is brilliantly – and shockingly – staged as a kind of grisly slow dance with a dead character. As Lady Macbeth, Lia Williams is a revelation. She makes the verse “vernacular”, and some lines as “modern as the Pinter” at which she has previously excelled. The text adapts “enjoyably well to a drinking den” setting, and the production is “genuinely scary”.

It’s certainly not for the fainthearted, said Michael Davies on WhatsOnStage: some moments are over the top nasty. As for the concept, it works well in some respects. The rivalries and shifting powers between thanes transfer effectively to gangland Glasgow; but it also has fatal flaws. Shakespeare’s Duncan is a “most sainted king”, yet here he is a hardman with no “virtues” to be mourned. Macbeth is a valiant warrior undone by his inadequacies – but in this telling he leads Macduff’s son off stage carrying a hammer, to “dispatch the lethal blow himself”. Thus a “mighty tragedy” is reduced to a “seedy bar brawl for control over a bunch of thugs for whom it is impossible to feel any empathy”.

The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until 6 December

by Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman’s “magnificent” new novel is the final volume in his “The Book of Dust” trilogy, which expands on “His Dark Materials”, his previous “unsurpassed” trilogy for children, said Philip Womack in The Daily Telegraph. All these novels are set in the same world − one “tantalisingly close to ours”, but with key differences, such as the fact that humans there are accompanied by souls in animal form, known as “dæmons”.

There were some who thought “His Dark Materials” unsuitable for children, owing to Pullman’s “stringent attacks on Christianity”. “The Book of Dust” really isn’t for children: Pullman uses the series to delve deeper into various points in the life of his heroine Lyra, whom we first met aged 12, in “Northern Lights”, but who is here a young adult. Mixing elements of fairy tale, “Arabian Nights”, spy and adventure stories, “The Rose Field” critiques various aspects of modern life, including multinational corporations, and is “imbued with melancholy, beginning in a ruin and ending amongst devastation”.

“At 640 pages“, this book “gives itself the time it needs to bring Pullman’s trilogy to a fitting conclusion”, said Sarah Crown in The Guardian. The route it takes is at times a bit circuitous – minor characters appear “without definite purpose”; there are narrative “cul-de-sacs” – but the “internal motor is strong enough” to carry the reader to the “nail-biting” final showdown. If at the very end there’s a “sense of threads left unknotted”, then perhaps that is only fitting: “The Book of Dust” is “a story for grown-ups”, and “storybook endings” are one of the casualties “of the putting away of childish things”.

The reluctant young star of Death in Venice

Björn Andrésen won screen immortality aged 16, when he appeared as Tadzio, the sailor-suited Polish boy whose beauty bewitches an ageing homosexual composer in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”. The film caused a sensation on its release, said The Daily Telegraph, and was hailed as a masterpiece. Visconti dubbed its child star “the most beautiful boy in the world”, a tag that was taken up by the press. But for Andrésen, the whole thing was a nightmare that, he said, “screwed up my life quite decently”. 

He was born in Stockholm in 1955. He was never told his father’s identity; and when he was 10, his mother died by suicide. It was his grandmother who pushed him into acting because, he said, she “wanted a celebrity in the family”. She sent him off to multiple auditions, one of which was for “Death in Venice” – Visconti having cast his net widely for a child with the requisite “pure beauty”. At the screen test, Visconti told the boy to undress and pose shirtless in skimpy swimwear. In the footage, Andrésen looks deeply uneasy – and things were little better when they started filming, in the heat of a Venetian summer. “Luchino was the sort of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work,” Andrésen recalled. With no lines, he was given just four directions: “Go, stop, turn, smile.” His co-star, Dirk Bogarde, wrote in his memoir that to preserve the boy’s alabaster complexion, Visconti never allowed Andrésen “to go into the sun, kick a football about, swim in the polluted sea or do anything which might have given him the smallest degree of pleasure”. 

The film made him an overnight star. Visconti took him to gay clubs, which he detested, and sent him on a promotional tour to Japan, where he was mobbed. He was ill-prepared for fame, said The Times, and found it hard to resume ordinary life. “You come back to school and you hear, ‘Hi there, angel lips,’” he recalled. He was still only a teenager, but in a 2021 documentary, “The Most Beautiful Boy in the World”, he said that he was treated like “a sex object. Big game.” People often assumed that he was gay, and in his early 20s he was offered gifts and places to live by rich older men. “I thought it was because they liked me. But actually, I was just a trophy.” He had been “naive”, he admitted. He stopped accepting work that had anything to do with his looks, and grew a long beard. In 1983, he married Susanna Román, a poet. In 1986, their baby son died of sudden infant death syndrome. He blamed himself, descended into depression, and disappeared from view for several years. His final film role was in “Midsommar”, a hit 2019 horror movie. In 2021, he was reported to be living alone in a rented flat. “My career is one of the few that started at the absolute top and then worked its way down,” he said. “That was lonely.”