A ‘glorious’ storm during King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe

Kathryn Hunter as King Lear

(Image credit: Johan Persson)

published 29 July 2022

As audiences and actors sweltered last week during an open-air production of King Lear, the heavens opened – just as the storm scene was unfolding in Act 3 of the play. “For the first time throughout the whole run it began to rain,” said Kathryn Hunter, who is playing Lear in the production at Shakespeare’s Globe. “It was glorious, a kind of moment of grace, the storm actually came.” There had been concerns that no one would turn up, on the hottest day of the year, she told The Times; but the theatre was packed, and the audience was grateful to have a “little free shower”.

Telling the stories of England’s working-class history

West Yorkshire’s boxing clubs, the “gut girls” who toiled in slaughterhouses in 19th century Deptford, and Morecambe’s fearsome B&B landladies, are to be celebrated as part of a new project to highlight little-known aspects of working-class history in England. Historic England has selected 57 community-led projects in total for funding. These range from photography exhibitions to workshops: in Birmingham, for instance, teenagers will be able to learn blacksmithing skills.

A “transformational” therapy could prove to be an effective cure for a rare form of haemophilia. As things stand, patients with the bleeding disorder haemophilia B are treated with regular injections of a clotting protein they lack; but in a small UK trial, patients were given an engineered virus to teach their livers to produce the protein. Two years later, nine of the ten participants had been able to give up their injections. Elliott Mason said he’d grown up feeling “anxious of getting hurt”, but now had a “completely normal” life.