Strange drama in a Las Vegas casino misses the jackpot, but its black humour lingers in the mind

Police are investigating the death of a 24-year-old man at the Global Gathering electronic and dance music festival.

The Hammersmith Apollo, which hosted David Bowie's last performance as Ziggy Stardust, has been sold by owner HMV to an American-German joint venture.

The actor Colin Tarrant was a permanent fixture on television for 12 years as the by-the-book, disciplinarian Inspector Andrew Monroe in The Bill. He took the role of Sun Hill police station's third most senior officer at the height of the programme's success, joining itin 1990, six years after it had been launched on ITV.

Struggling retailer HMV today said it was looking to sell its live music division as it bids to bolster its finances after it nearly doubled half-year losses.

Fairyland is missing some magic

When Peter Hall founded the RSC in 1961, one of his guiding principles was that Shakespeare should be presented in dynamic, mutually illuminating relation to new playwrights. Harold Pinter was the linchpin of this policy. So, as the company celebrates its 50th birthday, it's fitting that it should programme a major revival of one the classic Pinter plays premiered under its auspices – even if the Swan Theatre, with its thrust stage and stacked, horse-shoe-shaped seating is an awkward space for such an intrinsically proscenium arch drama as The Homecoming (1965).

A leading British architect has lashed out against designers who are winning major building commissions by offering "suicide fees".

Even playing an academic, Dominic West can't avoid self-destruction and violence. He's the first of many big names to tread the boards this summer

The bodies of a woman and a five-year-old girl were found by a visitor to a house in Stratford-upon-Avon yesterday morning.

Shylock lives it up in Las Vegas

Outsider's view of England's silvery and pleasant land

One man's purgatory is another man's happiness in Philip Massinger's remarkable 1632 city comedy of social climbing and mercenary deceit. Oh, the raptures, for instance, of being hurried in a coach to Brentford, Staines, or Barnet for ten-pound suppers and the shaking of the sheets.

Shakespeare with a stylish Spanish twist