MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
2021 Round-up with Gordon Parsons
On stage the intriguing Splinter of Ice, eccentricity of Wuthering Heights and a revival of the Living Newspaper tradition absorbed just as much as the graphic novel The Dancing Plague, Ariel Dorfman’s The Compensation Bureau or Mario Vargas Llosa’s Harsh Times
UTTERLY ABSORBING: Oliver Ford Davies (Graham Greene, left) and Stephen Boxer (Kim Philby) in Splinter of Ice
[James Findlay] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
THIS year we all needed cheering up on the theatre front and two shows hit the mark. In their new Avon-side, Stratford, mobile theatre, the RSC’s Comedy of Errors (now a perfect London Christmas treat) was a splendid choice for the company to re-emerge onto a live stage.
Shakespeare’s most chaotically joyous farce, centred on a kaleidoscopic tangle of mistaken identities, was a fine two-fingered gesture to the misery we had all suffered during the past 18 months.
Less likely, perhaps, to lighten spirits, was Wuthering Heights at Bristol Old Vic and bound for The National Theatre. However, this was a production from Emma Rice’s Wise Children Company, successor to the wonderful Kneehigh Theatre.
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