This navel gazing film from Richard Linklater is witty and well written but tries too hard to give the illusion of spontaneity

To the River belongs to that happily renascent tradition of literary nature writing.

1. Quebec.

Moving through time from modern madness to the Great War

All work and no play makes the world a poorer place

Where are you now and what can you see?

To modern readers, many 1930s writers might as well be using Shakespearian English, such is the grace and complexity of their language. Is this why Elizabeth Jenkins has disappeared from bookshops?

Eight years ago, in their excellent Spanish Golden Age season, the RSC presented the English premiere of House of Desires, a surprising event on several levels.

Adapting Virginia Woolf's fantastical novel, which follows the title character through four centuries and a sex change, is no mean feat.

Most writers are poor. Virginia Woolf, high priestess of modernism, had to earn her living like anybody else. These days, her kind of fiction, richly figurative, with her characters' narratives floating dreamily between inner and outer life, is not fashionable. During her lifetime, and until only recently, Woolf was hailed as a genius. Despite her success, however, she still had to make sure she could pay the bills. Her expenses, unlike ours perhaps, included paying for live-in domestic help (a difficult situation for both mistress and maid, brilliantly analysed by Alison Light in Mrs Woolf and the Servants).

Edward Albee's 1966 country house comedy is a still startling mix of bizarre story-telling, sozzled sarcasm, unnamed terror and ruminations on friendship and alcohol.

Lovers of TV's Mad Men will feel very much at home amid the styling and fashions of this excellent Northern Stage and Sheffield Theatres co-production of Edward Albee's early 1960s American-dream-about-to-turn-sour classic.