Theatre review: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Lia Williams takes on another iconic role as the Donald and Margot Warehouse stages Muriel Spark's novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in a new adaptation by David Harrower. In a private Edinburgh girls' school in the 1930s, the final year of juniors is taught by Williams' titular Miss Brodie, a free spirit who avoids the curriculum wherever possible, preferring to teach "her girls" to be independent thinkers - as well as how to deport themselves in her own image, and aim for future success in the fields she believes them best-suited to. Sharing with them stories of her European travels and tragedies from her personal life, she becomes an inspirational figure many of them stay loyal to even when they've moved on to senior school, returning to spend time with her and the male teachers who are similarly enraptured by her. But as time goes on Sandy (Rona Morison) starts to see the cracks in her idol.

Theatre review: Jess and Joe Forever

When a 9-year-old girl is caught spying on a group of skinny-dipping boys, they make fun of her until the smallest of the boys, and the only one wearing swimming trunks, distracts them by jumping out of a tree into the water. It's a little kindness that'll develop into a friendship over the next few years. Two young adult actors give convincingly wide-eyed and halting performances as the titular characters of Zoe Cooper's Jess and Joe Forever. Jess (Nicola Coughlan) is the city-girl daughter of a rich couple who've bought a cottage in a remote part of Norfolk just so they can send her there with the au pair for a couple of weeks every summer to "learn how to have a childhood." Her real holiday will be with them straight afterwards, for quality time and to brush up on her Italian language skills.