Margaret Bending adored her teenage brush with drama. More than half a century later, she began performing for paying audiences

At 67, Margaret Bending performed her first professional show. Taking to the stage at the 180-capacity stage@leeds venue in February 2020, Bending launched into a dance and theatre piece accompanied by an ensemble all aged over 60. “I was terrified but as soon as we got going, I realised that this is what I had been looking for,” she says. “Moving my body and being surrounded by all these wonderful performers, I felt completely liberated.”

The one-off show, entitled Crossing, was the culmination of a six-month collaboration between Bending and Leeds-based The Performance Ensemble , who produce shows with more than 30 dancers, actors and singers whose ages range from 60 to 90. “From the first time I stepped into their rehearsal space in summer 2019, I was hooked,” Bending says. “It’s so different from what I had spent my life doing.”

Standup has enjoyed a rapid rise in India over the last decade, and now its leading lights are conquering the Edinburgh fringe and packing out the Royal Albert Hall. Where better to take aim at the legacy of Empire …

In the summer of 2010, Anuvab Pal was writing an article about the opening of the Comedy Store in Mumbai, impresario Don Ward’s attempt to introduce British-style standup to India. Pal, then working primarily as a screenwriter, went to interview Ward, whose storied London venue was a cradle of alternative comedy in the 1980s. He told Pal that press coverage was all well and good, but what he really needed was performers. The initial plan – flying British comics out to India – would be too costly to maintain long-term, which meant he had to find talent, fast. Would Pal audition for him?

Pal agreed but remained sceptical. “I remember telling my family: ‘This is just a little hobby, I don’t think English comedy’s going to pick up in India,’” he recalls. “Fourteen years later here we are chatting. I still wake up every morning thinking: ‘This is going to end, obviously.’”

Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London
Owen Horsley’s frolicking staging has jaunty music and mischief, but this production dances over sadness

Tonight belongs to the lovers, but not the ones you might expect. “What are you? What would you?” asks Olivia (Anna Francolini), pointing at Viola (Evelyn Miller), her questions cynical, challenging. Much of the night’s events hinge on the younger woman’s answer.

The stage is full of music and mischief, but nothing else reaches the intensity or clarity of Olivia and Viola’s scenes in this light, frolicking production by Owen Horsley. On Basia Bińkowska’s open, ocean-blue set, the cast sprawls across Olivia’s, a seaside bar with its extravagant owner’s name up in lights. The set provides a neutral space for the cast to roll in and out of, but the wider world feels undefined; the band of sailors who offer gentle accompaniment with Sam Kenyon’s jaunty music, and who double as Orsino’s court, feel unmoored within scenes, not given enough individual character to be more than spare parts.

At Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London , until 8 June

This face-to-face with the real-life ‘Martha’ made for queasy viewing. It’s hard not to feel that the world would be a better place if it hadn’t happened. What horrible turn will this story take next?

Has any television programme ever had such a dramatic off-screen arc as Baby Reindeer? Dropped on to Netflix without expectation or warning a month ago, its popularity exploded as people sat gripped through Richard Gadd’s stalking horror show, boggled by the promise that all of this had actually happened.

And yet now it’s hard to think of Baby Reindeer without it leaving a distasteful smell. The show’s popularity – and the promise of veracity – led to a small army of internet sleuths effectively stalking the characters’ supposed real-world counterparts. Martha, the woman who tormented Gadd’s character with an onslaught of unwanted interaction, was outed as a Scottish woman named Fiona Harvey. With grim inevitability, Harvey was last night interviewed on Piers Morgan’s YouTube channel .

The theatre director, now teaching at Oxford after years running the RSC, thinks The Two Gentlemen of Verona is perfect for a young cast to argue over. We go into rehearsals

Which is Shakespeare’s least loved play? The Two Gentlemen of Verona would come high on many people’s lists. It is clearly apprentice-work. It has had few significant revivals. And it also raises problematic issues since the treacherous Proteus threatens at one point to rape Silvia who is betrothed to his best friend, Valentine. For these and other reasons it is no one’s favourite play.

This could, however, be about to change. Greg Doran – now officially Sir Gregory – is staging a production at the Oxford Playhouse with student actors . After 35 years as an actor and then director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Doran is this year’s Cameron Mackintosh visiting professor of contemporary theatre at St Catherine’s College. It is a seductive post – whose previous occupants include Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Miller, Deborah Warner and Adjoa Andoh – which involves giving lectures and workshops. But Doran has had the bright idea of using his tenure to direct the one play in the First Folio that has so far eluded him: The Two Gents. After spending time watching him at work, I have a hunch that he may have cracked some of the problems posed by one of Shakespeare’s early works.

Nottingham Playhouse
A teenager kills a trainee paramedic with a single strike on a night out in Nottingham in this deftly directed play based on a real story

Take note: this is not a play about the eponymous magazine specialising in scathing political satire, although such fare might more readily be expected from playwright James Graham. This is about the ripple effects of a single punch, thrown by a teenager on a night out, with fatal consequences.

Fabulously directed by Adam Penford, it is based on a memoir by Jacob Dunne who killed 28-year-old trainee paramedic James Hodgkinson in this way. Its Nottingham staging is relevant: it is where Graham and Jacob (played by David Shields) grew up, the latter on a council estate that slowly sucks him into gang culture.

At Nottingham Playhouse until 25 May.

Marylebone theatre, London
Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Martha Howe-Douglas ably embody Gogol’s schemers, but this show doesn’t hit any 21st-century targets

You can see why, in 2024, one might revive Gogol’s play about rampant government corruption, and adaptor/director Patrick Myles asserts its topicality in the programme notes as well as onstage. “You’re laughing at yourselves!” Dan Skinner’s puffed-up provincial governor howls at us, breaking the fourth wall in a pointed moment near the end. But are we? Everything onstage is so cartoonish, and the characters played as such fools, it’s unlikely anyone’s sitting in the crowd thinking: “That’s me, that is.”

Myles sets the play in some hybrid of imperial Russia and Victorian/Edwardian England, a culturally unspecific world where the gramophone exists, Dickens and Wilde are au courant , and “we could be sent to London in chains!”, frets Skinner’s Swashprattle, aghast that the titular inspector might dob him in for graft. So he and his council of cronies brown-nose, bribe and grease their way into their visitor’s favour – little knowing that Kiell Smith-Bynoe’s Fopdoodle is no official, just a spoilt toff on the make.

Obnoxious flatmates Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston and Kerry Fox get way more than they bargained for with the arrival of enigmatic Keith Allen and a suitcase full of cash

Rereleased for its 30th anniversary, the macabre black-comic crime caper is from screenwriter John Hodge with Danny Boyle making his feature-directing debut, giving us a hint of the turbocharged showmanship that always marked his style and which he was to crank up another notch a few years later with the zeitgeisty 90s hit Trainspotting. Shallow Grave is a bizarre Edinburgh noir, centring on cover-ups, disloyalty and incompetent corpse-management in the approximate spirit of Ealing, with touches of Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry and Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane. It’s also a kind of 90s young person flatshare entertainment, but closer to the BBC’s This Life than Friends.

We get an embarrassment of riches in the cast, with Peter Mullan, Ken Stott and Gary Lewis in small roles. But it’s the three stars who jump out of the screen at you: sexy hospital doctor Juliet, played by Kerry Fox, morose bespectacled accountant David, (Christopher Eccleston), and louche and grinning journalist Alex, played by Ewan McGregor. This grisly trio of entirely obnoxious individuals (who incidentally break the relatability rule that would nowadays be imposed on a movie like this) have a huge flat in Edinburgh and need a fourth person to share the bills. After auditioning a few people and variously pranking and humiliating them – behaviour which alone justifies everything they get, including the beating Alex receives in a hotel lavatory – they agree to a certain coolly mysterious applicant, played by Keith Allen, who claims to be writing a novel about the death of a priest. It is this enigmatic new flatmate who is to bring murder and chaos, double-cross and triple-cross, into these hapless people’s lives.

Our new series on transformative theatrical discoveries begins with the surreal 1986 drama set on a street in Lancashire

I must have been about 14. Our English teacher had taken us to a library and set us a task. We were to choose any book from the shelves and start reading. I wandered around, went to the toilet a few times, pretended to look for a book. Eventually, my teacher caught me. He glared: why don’t you have a book in your hand like everybody else? I turned to my right and spotted a small section of books that looked much thinner than the rest. Jackpot.

The first thing that struck me about the thing I had in my hands was how easy it was to read. This was not the kind of language I had come across in English lessons, a language I found impossible on account of some dyslexia, and an inclination towards staring out of windows.