UR TV CAST

His habit of name-checking real-life pubs, restaurants and shops in works of fiction was unusual (and was considered indecorous). She came to realise that “when they read my book, people in the East are not proud of the courage of their compatriots in it. Instead, they reproach themselves for having done nothing, or perhaps, in some cases, for having collaborated.”The other shortlisted titles were Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps by Anne Applebaum; John Clare: A Biography by Jonathan Bate; The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War by Aidan Hartley; and Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Public by Tom Holland.. [It is] an intimate portrait – both touching and funny – of survivors caught between their desire to forget and the need to remember. A beautifully executed first book.”It is the first book by Funder, an Australian former radio and television producer and lawyer, who once lived in the former East Germany.Many Germans warned her the book would be impossible to write because no former Stasi would speak about its workings. Undeterred, she advertised in a German newspaper and found her telephone line hot with confidants.Written from the side of those who resisted the regime, one of the main characters is Miriam, who tried to scale the Berlin Wall in 1968 to escape a trial for treason and later loses her husband in suspicious circumstances.Funder said she was repeatedly asked by Germans what gave her the right to tell the story. A book telling the story of life under the secret police in cold war Berlin won the £30,000 BBC4 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction last night.

But Annette McLaughlin’s gawky, man-hungry Helena, Eve Arden with a touch of Joyce Grenfell, makes up for a lot. Overall, not quite a dream, but a very pleasant way to spend a warm June evening.In rep to 8 September (08700 601811). The other concession to the mass media is the casting of Russ Abbott as Bottom; but this turns out to be a masterstroke. Purely from seeing him on television, you would never guess how at home he is on a stage – he has presence, a clear grasp of the language, and superb timing (particular his double-takes at his transformation into an ass); I’d like to see him try some other Shakespearean clowns. He gets uniformly excellent support from the other mechanicals, and their final performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” is a hoot – Snug the joiner, as Lion, breaking out of character to hand round business cards to the assembled gentry.Some minor irritations intrude – I didn’t take to Kit Surrey’s Teletubbyland set, or Catherine Jayes’ music – but the only real longueur comes when the four young lovers get lost in the woods: Hermia is too bland, Lysander too loud to carry the tetchy romance. Their taller, slimmer king and queen come from other mythologies: Titania (Lauren Ward), with Irish accent and matching shawl, seems to be a Celtic fertility goddess; Oberon (Keith Dunphy) also has a brogue, but his hairstyle and clothes are distressingly reminiscent of Orlando Bloom’s Legolas in The Lord of the Rings.Perhaps that is meant as a sop to audiences unfamiliar with Shakespeare. The rank-and-file sprites, led by Mark Hilton’s pudgy, balletic Puck, are punkish urchins – shaven-headed, soot-smeared, clad in cast-off petticoats and 18-hole Doc Martens, their highly sexed writhings sitting eerily with their childish voices and mannerisms.

He meets Egeus’s complaints about Lysander’s unauthorised wooing of Hermia with guffaws of laddish congratulation, and is clearly put out when Egeus reminds him of the dire penalties stipulated by law.This sunny, staid imperial afternoon is sharply contrasted with the anarchic nocturnal realm of the fairies. The tone is set at the beginning, with the entrance of Duke Theseus, dressed in late Victorian military splendour, to an Elgarian fanfare.As played by Terence Wilton, this duke is a genial old buffer – hardly the sort of man you would expect to find conquering an Amazon queen, which may go some way to explaining Hippolyta’s peculiarly frosty manner. This is just as well, since the acoustics, occasionally inflected with aircraft noise, militate against nuanced interpretation and depth of character: different rules apply here.
But by any standards, Ian Talbot’s new Dream is a pretty satisfactory affair – a touch short on mystery and enchantment, but compensating with skilful comedy and an overall air of good humour that is hard to resist. Any production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream here is pretty much critic-proof – the trees shaking in the breeze, the birds and bats flitting about in the twilight do half the director’s work for him or her. Summer is here, and at Regent’s Park it is time to roll out the Pimm’s and the fairies.