Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, though inspired by Chekhov, is Shakespearean in both structure and theme. There is something of Lear in the lead character Aydin. It is a deeply melancholic film, starker for the beautifully bleak Turkish landscape that provides a backdrop for the disintegrating relationship of a wealthy actor and his bored younger wife. The performances were subtle and multilayered, with a more available sense of emotional release than is generally available in English films.

Later in the week I watched Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree. There is the same sparseness of expression, but it lacked the intense, attentive sensitivity of Winter Sleep. Both films compel me to trace Ceylan’s other work. I cannot recall the last time a film moved me so emotionally as Winter Sleep, with some of the force I find in Shakespeare.

Where else to turn after these two than Richard Eyre’s adaptation of King Lear? This is a play, like so many, that I prefer on the page. The film starts stronger than it proceeds, but  by the time Cordelia (played by Florence Pugh) delivered her line, ‘No cause, no cause’, the force of the words found their home.

This year I reread Hamlet and Twelfth Night, both favourites. There are however, many of the Bard’s thirty-eight or thirty-nine plays that I’ve never read, and others I’d like to reread. Without worrying too much about how long it takes, I’ve a plan to read them all and where possible watch their film adaptations. Although I often enjoy watching a writer’s development I don’t intend a chronological reading, just a random reading, interspersing the major and minor. Years ago I purchased a BBC DVD box set of film-adaptations, which is a decent excuse to do more than sample its recommendations.