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.

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".

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.

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.

"Doubtful it stood..." are the first words spoken, three times over, by Scott Handy playing Ross, a character purloined by director Michael Boyd as his prompt, narrator and voice of conscience in this bloody tale of insurrection, religious fanaticism, child murder and revenge.