When that writer of spare French prose André Gide was asked who the greatest French poet was he replied, ‘Hugo, helás’. Well, Victor Hugo was many things besides and Les Misérables retains the power of the story of poor Jean Valjean and his pursuit by his enemy, the policeman Javert.

But Les Mis the musical is set for an arena production in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in May 2025. Michael Ball (one of the most distinguished Sweeney Todds) can be seen as Javert and Matt Lucas and Marina Prior are that raffish couple the Thénardiers. A distinct fraction of musical lovers who thrill to the spectacularism of Les Mis won’t be able to resist seeing the show in the Rod Laver arena from 14 May, 2025. You don’t actually have to be a Francophile to have stirring memories of Anthony Warlow in his semi-operatic days singing with extraordinary vibrancy at the barricades.

Russell Crowe had the wrong kind of voice for the film of Les Mis even though he was a staggering presence in Gladiator. It will be interesting to see if the new Gladiator with the Irish actor Paul Mescal comes within cooee of the 2000 Gladiator which overnight made Rusty one of the biggest stars around. He had been superb in L.A. Confidential and his thuggish leader in Romper Stomper was a bit like Henry V transposed to another idiom but it was the original Gladiator that made Russell Crowe a star in the Brando tradition.

It helped that Ridley Scott was at the height of his powers and that the rest of the cast were an assembled marvel: Joaquin Phoenix a sinister jewel box of collected infamies, Connie Nielsen his natural complement with Oliver Reed (in his last screen role) a soft-spoken mammoth of a man and Richard Harris a wonderfully pensive and wise Marcus Aurelius.

Will Ridley Scott build on this? There was general disappointment in his Napoleon with Phoenix and a sort of stunned surprise when Vanessa Kirby (Princess Margaret in The Crown) outacted everyone else in sight. We are so aware of the all-powerful hand of the auteur director that it’s easy to underestimate the other contributing elements.

And it’s easy too to forget yesterday’s milestones. Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus may be the film where he had least control – and the world may have lost the taste for Kirk Douglas’s looks – but it’s still the greatest gladiator film ever made. There’s still that great exchange between Olivier and Tony Curtis about snails and oysters (which had to be edited back in with the help of Anthony Hopkins’ dubbing) and it remains the case that ‘I’m Spartacus’ is a universal idiom and Charles Laughton gives one of his greatest performances as a wily humane politician.

We constantly re-make our culture. Eddie Redmayne has just completed a streamer version of that 1970’s classic of a political thriller The Day of the Jackal. Fred Zinnemann’s film had Edward Fox as a super suave, beautifully tailored version of Frederick Forsyth’s assassin in waiting. It seems that Eddie Redmayne’s version follows suit though in less exuberant fashion. The actor who played the emcee in the revival of Cabaret and won an Oscar for his impersonation of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything is aware of the way the new Jackal uses his own posh background as a paradox in the mix. Redmayne’s version of ‘posh’ is quieter than Fox’s but sounds like a characteristic bit of British class consciousness and one where the Etonian background can be used like a trailing Burberry scarf because the hero is at one level an arch villain.

Redmayne told the London Times that having come from a boys school he was very used to playing girls’ roles. His first professional role was as Viola the girl who pretends to be a boy in Twelfth Night. That was opposite Mark Rylance, an actor who has always been fascinated by transgendered (or at any rate crossover) casting in Shakespeare. None of which stopped Redmayne from copping a barrage of criticism when he played a transwoman in The Danish Girl. Why? Because he should have left the role for a trans actor apparently. It’s an area where it’s hard to win.

He also back in 2009 played Richard II which had the crowds lining up in the streets. Would he have been a bit light for the role of the playerish king who can eventually seem an avenging titan? ‘Here cousin,’ he says to Bolingbroke, ‘seize the crown.’ Jeremy Irons, long ago, played Richard as a kind of rock star. Then years later in the London Olympics Shakespeare he gave the one outstanding performance (nevermind Tom Hiddleston’s Hal and Simon Russell Beale’s Falstaff) as Richard’s opposite number Henry IV.

History is forever asking to become drama. In the wake of Wolf Hall we have a new streamer from Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series The Mirror and the Light with Mark Rylance as Henry VIII’s hatchet man who stole the monasteries (to placate the aristocracy) and opposed the reactionary loyalty to a conservative Catholicism espoused by Thomas More.

Mark Rylance is a very sleek Cromwell and looks nothing like the figure Holbein painted who seems a bit more like Leo McKern who played him in Fred Zinnemann’s film of A Man for All Seasons, the Robert Bolt play Mantel pitted herself against. You could also imagine the late Albert Finney (a great actor) or indeed Russell Crowe playing Thomas Cromwell with a handsomeness that nevertheless paid some homage to the fact that Thomas Cromwell was a rugged as well as a ruthless figure, that he was a man of brutally pragmatic decisions whatever his loyalty to the new protestantism (which he did so much to establish) even though he would eventually fall foul of a king who knew no mercy. But if you had the world to choose from, Rusty’s ruggedness would be the best bet for this man of wrath and rationalism.

For my money though the best Tudor costume drama yarn would be the Matthew Shardlake books by C.J. Sansom. The hero is a humanist, radically sceptical of the horrors religion can inflict, but very sympathetic to the view that English Catholicism was reforming itself. Recommended by a prelate who said he didn’t know whether the detective’s views reflected history or not.

There’s a streamer with Sean Bean as Cromwell.