Twice last week I found myself watching, in slight discomfort, as stage villainy was presented to me as if it were a by-product — possibly an inevitable one — of disablement.

First, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, in Stratford, I saw Sam Alexander limping back from the wars, leg bandaged, as the malevolent Don John in Much Ado About Nothing (retitled on this occasion as Love’s Labour’s Won). The implication was that his beastliness to Claudio and his bethrothed Hero was a consequence of his wounds. Crippled body, crippled mind, as it were.

Then a few days later came Clive Bayley as the wheelchair-bound proto-fascist Austrian governor Gesler in Welsh National Opera’s William Tell. His appearance reminded me very much of the odious Davros, the éminence grise behind the Daleks. (Maintaining a Dr Who theme, one of his minions looked like a cyberman.) Am I alone in finding something rather distasteful about this?