STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
TV SCHEDULES reflect an apparently insatiable viewer appetite for hospital soaps and it's a brave playwright who tackles the genre in the theatre.
This online version of Nina Raine's play, which she also directed, in some ways reinvents the wheel in presenting a familiar scenario, with medical crises mixed in with the relationships of staff stressed by their work and emotional entanglements.
But time and events, as so often, exert their influence on audiences. The advent of the coronavirus must surely break through the comfortable fiction of a TV series — locked-down online viewers are only too well aware of the heroic efforts of NHS staff to cope with what must seem an overwhelming crisis.
GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship



