The stars of theatreland were out in force this week for the opening of the new theatre and performance galleries at London's V&A. Having been dusted down and moved from the rather dingier Theatre Museum in Covent Garden into an airy suite of rooms, the assorted props, costumes, playbills and trashed guitars looked resplendent in their new home.

As the museum prepares to raise the curtain on its new galleries next week, Charlotte Cripps gets a sneak preview of the star turns waiting in the wings

1936: The Great Terror looms over a Russian family gathering, while in Ireland, old certainties are crumbling

My big fat bleak wedding

During the interval of the press night for Joe Sutton's new play Complicit at The Old Vic, a journalist asked me whether I had spotted the earpiece being worn by the lead actor, Richard Dreyfuss (pictured). I hadn't, as a matter of fact, but most of my colleagues had – and in the following day's papers, almost every reviewer took him to task for committing this cardinal sin.

David Tennant missed out on an Olivier award nomination for Hamlet today, but two of his fellow cast members were more successful.

A new play about political shenanigans in America has been pipped to the post by the new presidency

Hollywood stars on the West End stage are not new. But none is haunted by a past of quite such drug-ravaged turmoil as this one

Last Monday was to have been the world premiere of an American political play Complicit at the Old Vic. It was a major event in the theatrical calendar. The main attraction was Richard Dreyfuss, pictured; one-time Hollywood star of films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The artistic director of the Old Vic, Kevin Spacey, was directing.

Few actresses are so identified with one role as Kathleen Byron, who will always be remembered foremost as the passionate, wildly neurotic nun Ruth in the Powell-Pressburger masterpiece, Black Narcissus (1947). Driven mad with repression and her hopeless love for the District Commissioner (David Farrar) in a remote Himalayan convent, she piles on the lipstick and puts on a clinging red dress before trying to push Deborah Kerr to her death from the convent's bell-tower. Such displays of eroticism were rare in British films, and the effectiveness of the scene, and Byron's performance, gave her a reputation as one of the screen's great bad ladies.

'The head grossly disapproved of me'

Peter Copley was a leading British character actor whose career spanned an astonishing eight decades. Alongside a prolific stage career dominated by Shakespeare and other classics, he notched up more than 150 screen performances in a range of roles from the meek to the villainous.

Spacey redeemed himself at the Old Vic with 'The Norman Conquests' – but the year belonged to another star turn