#nick-payne

#nick-payne

The thing is an almost-four-hour-long continuous explosion - actors dancing, grappling, and hurling furniture; the director present onstage ripping pieces out of the set; paint and blood and flowers and feathers everywhere.

Irvine Welsh stated that Trainspotting was not the most obvious book to be successful, nor was it the most obvious movie or stage play. It has confounded expectations, especially his own.

The story told in Dog Day Afternoon, the classic 1975 film about a real-life 1972 Brooklyn bank heist, is also the story of Stephen Adly Guirgis's confounding new Broadway play, where the heat never rises past lukewarm.

This new stage version comes from Indian playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar, who previously gave the National Theatre a stonking hit with her Gandhi play The Father and the Assassin. We're promised some fairly major changes here, with the action explicitly relocated from central India to the Sundarbans mangrove swamps of the Ganges Delta (that now straddle India and Bangladesh).

It follows a young Syrian boy, Ahmet, who arrives in the UK without his parents. He joins a school and befriends a group of kids who hear that the government is going to close the gates. They don't fully understand what it means other than that Ahmet's parents, who must be looking for him, won't be able to get into the country. So they decide, in a beautifully innocent way, to go to the most powerful person they can think of—the queen!—and ask for help to find Ahmet's parents and keep the gates open.

Gerry and Stella, played by Ciaran Hinds and Lesley Manville, are a late-middle-aged couple from Northern Ireland who left for Scotland in the 1970s, traumatised by the Troubles, and are taking a restorative midwinter break in Amsterdam. They appear perfectly happy and affectionate, but Gerry has a drinking problem and Stella feels lonely because Gerry does not share her Catholic faith.

Manic Street Creature is gig theatre in its purest form. Kirsty Patrick Ward (The Rat Trap) directs a story about a musician breaking onto the London scene, told as a musical set. Olivier Award-winner Maimuna Memon (Standing at the Sky's Edge) leads a tour-de-force about young love, creative ambition and mental health.

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.

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.

Three middle-aged women may be all you need for anything. To run a business, raise a village, end a war, retool a civilisation, empty the loft. Even more usefully, you can make a great murder-mystery caper with them, as Lisa McGee (a fourth woman! If it ain't broke, don't fix it) has done with her new series How to Get to Heaven from Belfast.

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.

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."

'Write what you know' is a familiar maxim for novelists. Perhaps this is why, when Dostoevsky was faced with the challenge of writing a novel within 30 days, he wrote The Gambler. He, too, like his protagonist, was addicted to roulette and was no stranger to debt. In fact, the novel writing wager was a high-stakes venture. If he failed,

Since Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in 1938, it is said that not a day has passed when the Pulitzer prize-winning show hasn't been performed. Every time I read it, I come away with the feeling of having been woken up, says Michael Sheen, star of the upcoming touring production of Wilder's play about a close-knit community in small-town America. With this urgent sense of I have to not waste this.'

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 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.