Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Jodie Whittaker’s Duchess of Malfi strides on to the stage in a scarlet cocktail dress and confidently takes hold of a standing mic to sing about desire. She then pours herself a strong drink and waits for her two madly controlling brothers to express their disapproval — which they duly do, volubly and at length. It’s a promising start to Zinnie Harris’s The Duchess (of Malfi), first seen in 2019, which wrests John Webster’s blood-soaked tragedy from the 17th century and relocates it loosely in the early 1960s. Sadly, what follows is a muddle.

There’s potential in a response to the Jacobean original from a female perspective: a chance to give the duchess greater interiority and an opportunity to examine the enduring nature of misogyny and violence. With a setting evoking the Sixties, it could make sense that the duchess’s weirdly possessive brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal, would panic at the prospect of greater liberation for women.

But the result is an oddly patchy affair that cleaves closely to Webster’s plot without bedding it into the new context. We don’t get much closer to the duchess and the characters seem to be floating free: the hierarchy that determines their actions in Webster’s time no longer fits and there’s no sense of another society’s pressures to replace it.

That might matter less if the focus were more psychological. Here we see the misogyny but we get no deeper into what drives it: Paul Ready’s Cardinal is an ice-cold sadist and Rory Fleck Byrne’s Ferdinand is snake-mad from the get-go. Harris’s script is brisk and modern, but too often characters flatly state what is going on with them rather than it seeping out of the drama.

Meanwhile Tom Piper’s brutalist set, with its clanging metal walkways, could be a modernist house but also has the feel of an institution, suggesting that society is a prison — or that the whole thing may be unrolling in a psychiatric hospital. Interesting ideas both — the 1960s was a period of disturbing psychological experimentation — but again they don’t feel explored.    

There are moving scenes in Harris’s production. The female characters occasionally express their feelings in song, as if needing to break out of the structure of the tragedy to speak freely. The torture of the duchess evokes war crimes; her slaughter, along with that of her maid and daughter, leaves three broken female bodies on a dirty floor — a piteous sight that speaks for so many domestic murders. They then gently rouse one another to haunt the men, becoming a timeless chorus of battered women. And there’s a touching ending that suggests a path away from toxic masculinity.

But, for all that, and despite Whittaker’s vibrant, warm, determined duchess, it’s an odd, messy affair. It often feels strained, confusing and over-emphatic and, in the end, it fatally misses the tragic power of the original.

★★☆☆☆

To December 20, trafalgartheatre.com

Today’s agenda: EY fires staff for “cheating”; Mubadala Capital’s private equity push; Chinese share buybacks soar; Navalny’s memoir; and the use and abuse of Orwell

Good morning. We start with the latest updates on the US presidential race, with a Financial Times analysis showing Kamala Harris raised $971mn in the past three months, more than the Trump campaign’s entire haul of $894mn since the start of January 2023.

Who’s donating? The vice-president has received contributions from more than three times the number of individual donors as Donald Trump since she entered the race in July. The Republican former president has been more reliant on billionaires giving through so-called super political action committees, which unlike political candidates can raise unlimited amounts from individuals. Nearly half of Trump’s money has come from super Pacs, and four billionaire donors combined — Timothy Mellon, Miriam Adelson, Elon Musk and Richard Uihlein — have given $395mn to four pro-Trump super Pacs.

Why it matters: A recent poll shows Trump has all but erased the slender lead Harris had built up in crucial swing states. The poll found that about a quarter of registered voters described themselves as “uncommitted” to either candidate. With just two weeks to go until the November 5 vote, both candidates are criss-crossing the country and splashing out on expensive advertising in the battleground states that could decide the outcome.

We have more on the money race here, and further analysis below:

• Harris’s economic team: The Democratic candidate is expected to bring in her own people if she wins. We explore her potential choices for Treasury secretary and key policy advisers.

• Global impact: Strongman leaders around the world would welcome a victory for the Republican former president, writes Gideon Rachman.

Sign up for our US Election Countdown newsletter for the latest updates on the final stretch of the White House race. And here’s what else I’m keeping tabs on today:

• Economic data: The IMF publishes its latest world economic outlook and its global financial stability report. The UK has data on public sector finances, and the US has labour figures, both for September.

• Brics summit: Leaders of the group gather in Kazan, Russia. Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping are set to attend after India yesterday said a deal was reached with China on patrols at their disputed border.

• Companies: Chanel is expected to announce a deal with the Oxford-Cambridge annual boat race. General Motors, Kimberly-Clark, Lockheed Martin, Moody’s, Philip Morris International are among those reporting results. Full list in our Week Ahead newsletter.

Five more top stories

1. Exclusive: EY has fired dozens of US staff for what it called cheating on professional training courses. The dismissals took place last week after an investigation found that some employees had attended more than one online training class at a time during the “EY Ignite Learning Week” in May. Several of the fired employees told the FT they did not believe they were violating EY policy.

2. Exclusive: An arm of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund is preparing a push into private equity markets, spotting what it believes is an opportunity to take over large holdings as buyout groups race to sell assets and return cash to investors. Mubadala Capital has raised $3.1bn for its latest private equity fund, surpassing a $2bn target. Antoine Gara has more details.

3. Iran’s currency and stocks have declined and most foreign airlines have suspended flights in anticipation of an Israeli retaliatory attack on the Islamic republic. While regime loyalists insist that Tehran is not afraid of a potential war with Israel, many fear that the country’s sanctions-hit economy can ill-afford another cycle of escalation.

4. Share buybacks on mainland China’s biggest exchanges have soared to a record high of Rmb235bn ($33bn) so far this year, more than double last year’s total and far surpassing the previous record of Rmb133bn in 2022. The rush comes amid policymakers’ attempts to revive a flagging stock market.

• Beijing’s U-turn: After resisting calls for fiscal stimulus for years, today’s Big Read explores why Xi Jinping changed his mind — and whether it will be enough.

5. PureGym plans to make the US its second-biggest market, with more than 300 sites by 2030, as it pursues a $105mn deal to buy dozens of outlets from collapsed chain Blink Fitness. The UK’s largest gym operator has offered to buy “a substantial portion” of Blink’s estate after it was put into Chapter 11 by owner gym group Equinox in August. Read the full story.

News in-depth

Launching a “national conversation” about the future of England’s NHS yesterday, health secretary Wes Streeting admitted it was in the midst of “the worst crisis in its history”. As health leaders press for a substantial funding injection in the UK’s Budget on October 30, the latest data underlines the scale of the strains on the taxpayer-funded system.

Think you can run the UK economy? Step into the chancellor’s shoes and play the FT’s new Budget game.

We’re also reading . . . 

• Moldova’s EU bid: Here’s how Russia won over the former Soviet country’s south to deliver an unexpected upset for President Maia Sandu’s referendum to join the bloc.

• Immersive fashion: Vogue’s next event will go beyond the runway to become a theatrical light show. Is immersive entertainment more than a passing fad?

• Alexei Navalny: Patriot, the memoir of Vladimir Putin’s murdered opponent, is a worthy testament to his courage, defiance and humour, writes FT Moscow bureau chief Max Seddon.

• Victims of success: While challenging, the prevalence of today’s mental and physical conditions may actually be a good sign for the human race, writes Stephen Bush.

Graphic of the day

Long regarded as more science fiction than reality, low-cost, high-energy laser weapons are getting renewed attention from the defence sector, as militaries around the world look to the cutting-edge technology as one of the ways to counter cheap new missile threats such as drones.

Take a break from the news

For years, journalists, critics and columnists have vied for George Orwell’s posthumous approval, writes Irish novelist Naoise Dolan for the FT Magazine. How did one of Britain’s greatest writers become the single answer to so many questions, in so many different subjects, for so many people?

Additional contributions from Gordon Smith and Benjamin Wilhelm

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

UK ministers have taken a big step towards redesigning the flight paths aircraft use to take off from and land at London airports, in a change that could lead to greener flights but also new noise pollution in parts of the capital.

The Department for Transport and the Civil Aviation Authority on Tuesday announced a consultation on the formation of a new “airspace design service” to redraw “the way planes fly in, out and over the UK”.

The review by ministers and the regulator will start with the heavily congested airspace over London and the south of England, with ministers vowing to modernise the “highways of the sky” that have barely changed since the 1950s.

Modernising the capital’s airspace offers the prospect of quicker and more direct flights that emit less carbon, but could mean new communities are affected by noise pollution.

The UK’s airspace infrastructure was first designed in the 1950s and 1960s, and based on a fixed network of “way points” that mirror the positions of obsolete ground navigation beacons.

Although the airspace infrastructure has since been refined to account for the rise in air travel, many big routes from major airports have barely changed in decades. Governments have pledged to modernise the UK’s airspace for more than a decade, but progress has been slow.

“UK airspace is one of the nation’s biggest invisible assets, but it’s been stuck in the past — a 1950’s pilot would find that little has changed,” said aviation minister Mike Kane, as he promised to make air travel “a better experience for all”.

More than 2.6mn aircraft fly through the UK each year, and a wholesale redesign would allow planes to climb and descend more efficiently and rely less on circling airports in holding patterns.

It would build on work by National Air Traffic Services, the UK’s air traffic control provider, which has in recent years redrawn airspace thousands of feet above south-west England, Wales and Scotland.

Martin Rolfe, Nats chief executive, said: “Any initiative that can help speed up the modernisation programme for UK airspace is very welcome, especially in London and the South East. It is some of the busiest and most complex airspace in the world.”

But some industry figures said trying to redraw London’s highly complex airspace was likely to be contentious because changes to flight paths could trigger new noise pollution.

Still, airlines have called for the changes in response to growing air traffic control problems, which have led to significant delays and cancellations for carriers including British Airways.

It is also part of the aerospace industry’s road map to lowering its carbon emissions to reach net zero by 2050.

Tim Alderslade, chief executive of AirlinesUK, which speaks for carriers, said reform of Britain’s airspace would “not only reduce delays and improve resilience for passengers and cargo operators in what is an increasingly congested system” but also help the sector “achieve net zero emissions”.