Frantic Assembly’s placing of Shakespeare’s Othello on and around a pool table in a West Yorkshire pub certainly takes some beating for daring and originality, if not commonsense.

It’s interesting how the race issue energises interpretations of this play. One of the silliest was a Washington DC production by Jude Kelly in which Patrick Stewart played a white Othello to a black Iago.

And a German production by Peter Zadek had a “blacked-up” Othello whose body paint came off all over Desdemona and her white night gown as he killed her on the marriage bed, but not before he’d raped her ferociously all over the stage and indeed on top of one of the wardrobes.

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The annual awards season has kicked off with the announcement of the Evening Standard’s long list and as usual the omissions are at least as interesting as those nominated.

How any best actress list can include Phoebe Nicholls’s admittedly striking support performance in Waste at the Almeida yet omit any mention of Vanessa Redgrave in The Year of Magical Thinking and Elena Roger in Piaf is the biggest mystery of all.

And while the best actor list rightly includes Kenneth Branagh as Ivanov and Jonathan Slinger for his RSC double of Richard II and Richard III, there’s no room for the one truly outstanding performance of the year — Douglas Hodge in La Cage aux Folles — or for Ralph Fiennes for his impressive comedy and tragedy double in God of Carnage (a play omitted from the best play category along with Fat Pig) and Oedipus.

And surely there was a case for bracketing Kevin Spacey with his partner Jeff Goldblum in Speed-the-Plow. Theirs was the most electrifying double act on the London stage since Morecambe and Wise, and one performance meant very little without the other.

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