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

As this comedy shows, Alan Ayckbourn realised in 1977 that the legacy of the Seventies was not just sex but solipsism.

The actresses Kim Cattrall, Fiona Shaw and Natascha McElhone attended the Almeida's fundraising gala, which this year raised £115,000 for the theatre.

A starrily-cast Noel Coward farce fails to strike the right balance between gaiety and bad behaviour

For half a century I have been hooked on diaries – my own and other people's. I began to keep a journal in 1959. I wrote my first entry on my first night at boarding school, by torchlight, underneath the blankets. My inspiration was the diary of Samuel Pepys. I had been given a copy, "suitably edited", for my 11th birthday.

He blew like the legend he is – so why am I blubbing?

The theatre world is littered with self-styled gurus and shamans, but it is rare to find a director who is also an Anglican priest. In this charming and insightful memoir, 82-year-old James Roose-Evans takes us on a spiritual and creative journey from his literally tortured adolescence (he was prone to self-flagellation) to the twin heights of ordination in Hereford cathedral and Broadway success.

Camus thought that, in philosophy, suicide is "the only problem". It may not be the sole preoccupation of the six bored, sexually entangled medical students in the 1920s Vienna of Ferdinand Bruckner's brilliantly odd 1923 play Pains of Youth. But it is seen as one of only two alternatives open to the young in a post-First World War Austria of widespread social disillusion and personal instability. The play receives a very rare revival now in a Cottesloe production by Katie Mitchell that will, I suspect, divide critics in the manner that is traditional with this controversial director's work. I thought the play blackly exhilarating in its ruthless (often mordantly amusing) anatomy of anomie. I thought the strategic take-it-or-leave-it stealth production (as usual with Mitchell, one might have chanced upon a tribe that is so mesmerically intent on its own practices that it has not noticed the "concealed" observer) arrestingly pivoted at that point where the different leylines of painful tragicomedy exruciatingly cross.

The funny side of heartbreak

Now we're only five places above South Korea in the contentment charts

When Troy Kennedy Martin created Z Cars in 1962, he brought to British television screens for the first time an image of the police very different from the homely one depicted in Dixon of Dock Green. The result was a warts-and-all portrayal in which the guardians of the law were seen as not infallible – and no angels.

There's a problem in 'versions' rather than translations of foreign plays

The funeral of female impersonator Danny La Rue, described as a "true showbusiness legend", has taken place.