#hugh-higgins

#hugh-higgins

Matthew Macfadyen started his career in a 1998 TV film adaptation of Wuthering Heights as Hareton Earnshaw, Heathcliff's whipped dog, and has been giving us brilliant incarnations of beta cucks ever since.

Here, a central character hides behind so many layers of deceit, he almost believes his own version of the truth while his wife refuses to believe their son died in the war. The pitfalls of capitalism and the hollowness of the American Dream certainly resonate today as they did after World War II.

According to my mum, my first word was look. My brother arrived 17 months after I was born, so most days Mum would have been pushing us around in a buggy, and I would be pointing at everything going, Look, look, look. What I was really saying was, Everyone, I'm here!

I'm most at peace at our place in Kangaroo Valley, a couple of hours south of Sydney - we have 12 acres of native Australian semi-rainforest. If I'm five hours into a day of trying to get rid of the weeds from a copse of trees, I'm pretty fucking happy, especially if my kids and my wife are helping me.

For the past four weeks, 11 performers and 20 writers have been spending every weekday together in this very building, hashing out premises for skits, workshopping each other's material and finding the alchemy, as cast member and standup Ayoade Bamgboye puts it. For another, actor and TikToker Jack Shep, it's been like comedy boarding school.

I wanted to mention Kenneth Williams because he was so profound, Allen tells me. And yet, because he was also funny, that profundity hasn't been acknowledged. As a child, I connected with his outsiderness. Rather than trying to fit in, he went in the opposite direction. Not only did he not apologise for being different, but he was queer in every sense, truly at odds with the world in which he found himself.

If City Center Encores! was originally founded as a kind of musical-theater seance devoted to raising the dead, or at least the long-forgotten then High Spirits is about as literal a mission statement as you could ask for. The rarely revived 1964 musical opens with a seance and arrives at City Center like a theatrical ghost itself: long unseen, mostly forgotten, and faintly glowing with the promise of pleasures from another era. That alone makes High Spirits worth summoning.

From Yes Minister co-writer Jonathan Lynn comes I'm Sorry, Prime Minister - the final act between Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey. Jim Hacker (Griff Rhys Jones) is back - older, no wiser, and still gloriously out of his depth. Dreaming of a peaceful retirement at Hacker College, Oxford, Jim instead collides with a very modern nightmare: being cancelled by the college committee.

Paddington The Musical has dominated the WhatsOnStage Awards, winning nine prizes after its triumphant launch in the West End last year. The show, based on Michael Bond's original children's books and the recent film adaptations, was a hit with fans and received rave reviews from critics after its debut at the Savoy Theatre in November.

At Troubadour, we are driven by a belief in creating extraordinary spaces that inspire artists, audiences, and the stories they come together to share. The 3,000 seat venue is to be built in Greenwich Securing planning permission for the new Troubadour Greenwich Peninsula Theatre marks a major milestone for us, and an exciting new chapter in our commitment to bold, large-scale live performance.

The Donmar's programme is as eclectic as ever, with the opening play being (Apr 18-Jun 6). US actor-writer-director Fran Kranz's adaptation of his own hit indie film is about two sets of couples - the parents of the victim of a high school shooting, and the parents of the shooter - who attempt a painful reconciliation years after the event. Carrie Cracknell directs a top cast that includes Adeel Akhtar, Amari Bacchus, Monica Dolan, Paul Hilton, Lyndsey Marshal, Rochelle Rose and Susie Trayling.

Mr. Darcy is its stern romantic lead. He has a massive income from his estate - 10,000 pounds a year - and, according to the novel's witty protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, just as large of a stick up his ass. Jane Austen was not one to go for lengthy physical descriptions of things, but we do know that when he enters a room, he draws people's attention with a "fine, tall person, handsome features," and a "noble mien."

The Shitheads is part period piece, part family drama and part allegorical epic. It unfolds at some time in prehistory (10,000 - 50,000 BC, to be exact). Nomadic hunter-gatherers coexist with a family of cannibalistic cave dwellers who justify their eating habits by dehumanising their human prey. Hunter-gatherers are 'shitheads', they say - inferior, stupid, without expansive interior lives. One of these cave-dwellers, a straight-talking fighter named Clare (Jacoba Williams - Vera), meets Greg (Jonny Khan - Statues), an endearing, simple-minded gatherer.

The play explores aspects of Hutch's life, and is centred on his 2023 trial at the Central Criminal Court

It's all happening 400 years ago, and in London there's a riot happening, there's a mob out in the streets,

A romcom fanatic, Foxx didn't quite get the quaint four-bedroom apartment in Bloomsbury he assumed he'd land when he moved to London, but he did, at least, get the guy: a tall, fit rugby lad, just his type, he tells us. Yet after several years of sort of bliss, sort of reluctant mothering on Foxx's part, the Julia Roberts meet-cute fantasy crumbled.