Theatre review: Lyonesse

Elaine Dailey (Kristin Scott Thomas) was a rising star of TV and film who'd just made a celebrated stage debut when she vanished the day after Press Night, disappearing for decades and becoming almost a figure of legend, with rumours abounding over whether she was alive or dead. Now a figure from her past has died, and she's ready to resurface and tell her story - and she hopes she can be centre stage again when it gets told. In Penelope Skinner's Lyonesse Lily James plays a Mrs Trellis of North London, an executive at a female-led film production company who are looking for a #MeToo project to develop. Her boss Sue (Niky Wardley, who's replaced Doon Mackichan at short notice after she had to leave the show for personal reasons,) has heard that Elaine's story might fit the bill, and sends Kate Trellis to her crumbling Cornish home to secure the rights.

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.

Non-review: Rough Cuts - Bytes

Not a review as this is the return of the Royal Court's occasional series of rehearsed readings and works-in-progress, Rough Cuts. This time around, established playwrights have been given the remit of touching on issues of technology and the internet. Jack Bence, Mandeep Dhillon, Malachi Kirby, Rebecca Night, Sarah Woodward and Al Weaver perform the four shorts collected as Bytes, performed in the Wilson Studio - a small rehearsal room behind Sloane Square tube station.

Alia Bano starts us off with a play set in a high school, where a handsome new teacher (Weaver) catches the eye of one of his students (Night.) There's a familiar story of accusation and rumours to be told but modern technology gives it a new twist: The girl suddenly has a naked photo of Mr Burns she says he sent her, but this happens to be just after she learned how to hack into locked Facebook accounts.

Theatre review: The Promise

Donmar Trafalgar's final season has an overall theme of lesser-known foreign language classics, presented in new adaptations by well-known playwrights. First of these is Penelope Skinner, who writes a version of Aleksei Arbuzov's The Promise (from a translation by Ariadne Nikolaeff.) The Soviet love triangle spanning 18 years, is a showcase for director Alex Sims. In 1942, during the Siege of Leningrad, 17-year-old Marat (Max Bennett,) following the rest of his family's deaths, returns to their tiny flat only to find that neighbour Lika (Joanna Vanderham,) whose own home has been bombed, has moved in. Starving and freezing, the two pool their meagre resources and become each other's support network, until a few weeks later the even worse-off Leonidik (Gwilym Lee) arrives on their doorstep and they decide to nurse him back to health. As post-war Russia starts to take shape, we rejoin them at various points when the three reunite.

Theatre review: The Sound of Heavy Rain

The casts of both Lungs and One Day When We Were Young come together for the final play in Paines Plough's Roundabout season at Shoreditch Town Hall, The Sound of Heavy Rain. Where the other two plays are intimate relationship stories, Penelope Skinner's contribution is a drily witty pastiche, relocating the hard-boiled detective tropes of film noir from LA to the rain-soaked streets of Soho. Dabrowski (Andrew Sheridan) is a PI who spends his nights drinking to get over being dumped, when the dowdy Maggie (Maia Alexander) arrives at his office with a case for him. Her best friend and flatmate has disappeared, and the detective sets off to find the glamorous cabaret singer Foxie O'Hara. But the further he gets into the case, the more Dabrowski starts to suspect that Foxie may never have even been real.