Paradise
Olivier, National Theatre, London

Leopoldstadt
Wyndham’s Theatre, London

Musicals created the “show-­stopper” moment, when applause and encores prolong a song. Some comedies create such accumulated waves of laughter that the cast must wait for the ebb. It’s almost unheard of for a single speech to stop a play, but I witnessed it happen twice in a week in circumstances revealing of our febrile times.

Paradise is a new, very free adaptation by writer and performance artist Kae Tempest of Sophocles’ 409 BC play Philoctetes, in which a great soldier is exiled to a remote island due to the stench from a suppurating foot wound. But army leaders, Odysseus and Neoptolemus, are forced to court him back when a prophecy reveals that only he can win the Trojan War.