Fiona Shaw leads her audience a surprisingly merry dance to Coleridge's bleak epic poem

Those venturing to Covent Garden in London this week may be in for a theatrical surprise. Visitors to the area could receive their own "pop-up" performances of Shakespeare from performers hidden in the crowds.

Heralded as the new Sam Mendes ever since he got the job as associate director on Mendes' Richard III, starring Kevin Spacey in 2011.

No one saw this coming. A couple of years ago, when Paul Heaton was still doing pushbike-powered tours of rural pubs and turning out gentle country & western albums, nobody would have guessed that the former Housemartins and Beautiful South leader would soon be turning his songwriting skills to a rock-soul opera that sounds like Leonard Bernstein meets Public Enemy.

Children are the in subject for scriptwriters this year

1. Ramone.

He was the 1980s golden boy who won all our hearts. Then his career tailspinned as drugs and scandal took hold. Now Jason Donovan is back in the hunt for pop glory again, he tells Craig McLean.

The first American film made by the British film director Peter Yates was one of the screen's most successful thrillers, Bullitt (1968), which included a car chase that is sometimes cited as the most exciting committed to film, partly because Yates and his cinematographer William Fraker decided to strap cameras to the cars themselves to give an added sense of involvement and immediacy. Because of Bullitt, Yates is sometimes thought of as an action director, and his most successful films included such thrillers as The Deep and The House on Carroll Street, but he worked (with varying results) in a variety of genres – his first film was a musical, Summer Holiday (1963), one of Cliff Richard's most popular hits.

Waiting for exam results is, I recall, a time of intermittent anxiety. There are occasional palpitations, but my memory is of a merciful period of enforced stasis – no more work could be done to change my destiny; it was now in the lap of the gods. But unlike those teens who received their grades on Thursday, I didn't endure daily debate and gloomy pronouncements about the qualification I was hoping to achieve.