Theatre review: Linda

Penelope Skinner's Linda opens with the title character bemoaning the fact that cosmetics for women over fifty are regularly advertised with images of much younger women. There'd be irony in the 55-year-old Linda being played by an actor ten years younger, if it weren't for the fact that she's a very last-minute replacement: When Kim Cattrall pulled out of the production with less than a week to go, the Royal Court turned to Noma Dumezweni, who'd only recently worked with director Michael Longhurst, and who's due to make her own directorial debut there next year. Dumezweni's won an Olivier, although hopefully she doesn't bring it up in conversation quite as often as Linda does the marketing award she won ten years ago. She's head of branding at a beauty company, and her "Changing the world, one girl at a time" campaign helped turn them from an obscure brand to a world leader, with a charity arm that funds self-confidence workshops for young women. Now that she's over fifty herself, her new project is for the company to stop women her age from feeling invisible, both in their outreach programmes and in the way they market their products.

Theatre review: That Face

When That Face made its debut all the publicity was inevitably about the fact that it was written by a 19-year-old. Six years after it premiered Polly Stenham is an established name with a loose trilogy of plays puncturing the smug (and frequently incontinent) upper-middle classes, so this first London revival is an opportunity to see her first work on its own terms. Of course, the concerns of a teenage girl who went to boarding school are not a surprising place for the story to kick off: Alice (Imogen Byron) is a newcomer who's been tied up by her head of house Izzy (Georgina Leonidas) and her friend Mia (Stephanie Hyam) in a cruel initiation prank. But Mia goes one irresponsible step further: Before the prank she secretly dosed the 14-year-old up with Valium, in what turns out to be an overdose that sends Alice into a coma.