MARK TURNER wallows in the virtuosity of Swansea Jazz Festival openers, Simon Spillett and Pete Long
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Different but the same
GORDON PARSONS sees an imagined confrontation between Queen Elizabeth I and the jailed Mary Queen of Scots which reveals them as equally confined by personal and political traumas
Juliet Stevenson (centre)
[Manuel Harlan] 
PAUL DONOVAN recommends three new books that explore the human relationship with nature
Doomed adolescents, when the missing person is you, classic whodunnit, and an anti-capitalist eco-thriller
WILL STONE takes a ticket to indie disco heaven, but misses the rarely performed tunes
Reviews of new releases by Jens Lekman, Big Thief, and Christian McBride Big Band
TOM PIERSCIONEK recommends a remarkable series of interviews with those few and brave Israeli citizens who refuse to do military service
Mary Stuart
Duke of York Theatre, London
WE ARE all prisoners of our own personalities and of history and no-one understood this better than Friedrich Schiller, widely regarded as Germany’s Shakespeare.
His epic historical drama Mary Stuart, transferred from the Almeida theatre to the West End, focuses on the tragic conflict between the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots and England’s Protestant Queen Elizabeth.
The complex family web of the Tudors left Mary with a valid claim to the English crown in the event of Elizabeth’s death and was consequently a rallying point for Catholic dissidents.
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GORDON PARSONS is riveted by a translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into joyous comedy set in a southern black homestead
GORDON PARSONS is enthralled by an erudite and entertaining account of where the language we speak came from
GORDON PARSONS endures heavy rock punctuated by Shakespeare, and a delighted audience
GORDON PARSONS advises you to get up to speed on obscure ancient ceremonies to grasp this interpretation of a late Shakespearean tragi-comedy
