With a boating lake at its heart, it is a century-old Utopian escape, says Kate Simon

Who knows what goes on behind closed doors? But for a rain-battered Brighton Festival banner on the gate you'd never guess that the nondescript lock-up on a industrial estate in Shoreham-by-Sea was playing host to one of the most eagerly anticipated theatre events of the year.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Or at least in the rubbish tip of Shoreham-by-Sea, which forms the malodorous backdrop for an ambitious new take on Hamlet, opening this weekend.

Amid traditional thatched West Country cottages, Sophie Lam discovers an elegant Modernist homage to space and light

This radically different pronunciation is, according to a new scholarly recording of Shakespeare's works, much closer to the way the line would have been spoken

From the West End to Sheffield...you've been Frayn-ed!

It's not just the return of Edina and Patsy – there's Downton, the Doctor, and Dickens. Gerard Gilbert presents his pick of the seasonal small screen

Prince Zi Dan, the Peking Opera version of Hamlet, considers his next move. To show that he's thinking, he stretches one foot up past his ear and goes into a deep crouch on his supporting leg. He does this while wearing an embroidered costume, high platform shoes and a headdress with waving peacock plumes. Having finished his contemplative stretch, he cries, "Let's go!"

The title and the name of the venue create more excitement than is warranted for a 70-minute routine cut-up job in a tiny hotel function room in the city centre.

An account of the London plague is a strong choice of subject for a song cycle, and this Traverse production is already a festival highlight and a triumph for the singer Marc Almond, writer Mark Ravenhill, composer Conor Mitchell and director-designer Stewart Laing.

Trevor Nunn has realised a forty-year dream by at last directing Tom Stoppard’s first masterpiece Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, as the second production of his captivating season at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.