Has Gyles Brandreth – witty man of many parts though he is – met his Waterloo (“the line is immaterial”) with this attempt to portray Lady Bracknell in a new musical version of The Importance of Being Earnest? Well, not quite.

Bard of the bath is making a big splash

Once upon a time, this book was considered ideal for every child's bedroom.

'For King and cocktails!" cries Marley, the aristocrat whose futile life is dissected in the novel Piracy.

In the 1950s, as conductor of ITV's immensely popular Sunday Night at the London Palladium, Cyril Ornadel possessed the most famous back of the head on British television. He was also musical director on the West End productions of some of the greatest of all musicals, twice won a Novello Award for his own compositions and was awarded the prestigious Gold Badge of Merit by the British Academy of Songwriters and Authors for services to British music. His song "Portrait of My Love" is a standard as is "If I Ruled the World" from his musical Pickwick, which had the distinction of being, for a time, the longest-running British musical on Broadway.

Noël Coward's celebrated repartee is elusive in this drawing-room tosh. But Shakespeare conjures up real magic

The best Chekhov productions that I've ever witnessed have, not unnaturally, been performed by Russian actors – Lev Dodin's matchless troupe at the Maly Theatre, St Petersburg and the Russian outfit directed by our own semi-expatriated Declan Donnellan. So I'm sorry to report that I was disappointed by the two Chekhov stagings that Moscow's Sovremennik Company brought to its now-completed residency at the Noël Coward Theatre, especially after the ensemble's masterly evocation of life in a Soviet prison camp in Into the Whirlwind.

Galina Volchek's striking account of Three Sisters – the second production in the short nine-day residency in London by Moscow's renowned Sovremennik Theatre – begins with a determined departure from tradition. The titular trio are discovered standing at the crest of a large curved wooden bridge, their white scarves buffeted by an icy wind, in a tableau that offers an eerie premonition of that icon of stoic endurance which these siblings constitute at the end of Chekhov's masterpiece. Then the atmosphere suddenly switches to febrile gaiety. The circular revolve goes into overdrive; lights flicker as though in an electrical storm; and the Prozorov's drawing room whirls round with a wild abandon in preparation for the tensions of Irina's name day and the hectic lassitude (so to speak) of the play.

Expats flock for enduring home truths

From Aristophanes, who attacked Euripedes in his play The Frogs (Euripedes was safely dead by that point), to the critic Harold Bloom, who recently consigned Harry Potter to the "vast concourse of works that cram the dustbins of the ages", Gary Dexter's book compiles pithy put-downs and waspish jibes from writers.

I like to think that I would walk through fire to watch Simon Russell Beale recite the Argos catalogue. All the same, I did wonder how desperate I was to see him in this revival of Ira Levin's 1978 mega-hit, Deathtrap. But even if you're the kind of person for whom the term "comedy thriller" normally has all the appeal of, say, "morris dancing" or "make-over programme", you'll still find much to enjoy in Matthew Warchus's well-judged, witty production, which expertly balances the teasing tension and the arch, tongue-in-cheek humour.

'We say that the ampersand is the only thing that comes between us'

These diaries confirm Palin's TV image as intelligent and self-deprecatory, but can he be so modest if he's willing to publish diaries from 30 years ago? His entries from this distant era tend to bland geniality with spots of interest.

His reputation languished after the arrival of the Angry Young Men in the 1950s. But the National Theatre's production of 'After The Dance' promises to right a theatrical wrong, says Paul Taylor