The National Lottery have announced that they have awarded a grant of £10,000 to the Hampshire-based theatre company Prime Theatre to support their work in providing work for older actors, and encouraging groups of older people on an outing to the theatre.

 Unless you’ve been living on a desert island for the last few years, you’ll be aware of the stratospheric rise of stand up comedian, actor and writer Ricky Gervais.  Fresh from presenting the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, Gervais now returns to the UK with his brand new stand up tour, ‘Science’.

 The 17th International Gilbert & Sullivan is set for a sizzling summer of wonderful Gilbert & Sullivan with 33 full-scale productions over 28 days in the Buxton Opera House and includes more shows than ever from the Festival’s own highly acclaimed Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company.

The plays of the Victorian era are much neglected nowadays. Only Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan and Arthur Wing Pinero  are revived with any regularity.

So it’s good to have the opportunity of seeing a play by the prolific Irish-born Dion Boucicault. He wrote over 200 plays, including The Shaughraun and the Colleen Bawn.

Noel Coward’s best play, premiered in 1930, is the epitome of the flippancy and bitch among the smart set between the wars. Amanda and Elyot are not only trivial and superficial, but selfish and nasty with it. Their constant bickering bristles with vindictiveness. The dialogue, "jagged with sophistication”, has the unmistakable Coward stamp: brittle, clipped, staccato rudeness.

The Gambler was originally going to be premiered in 1917 but the performance was cancelled. Then, what with one thing and another, including a revolution, it wasn’t seen until 1919 when Prokofiev had rewritten it.

After a two-year long, £15M spruce up, it's wonderful to see the huge thrust stage of Sheffield's Crucible offering impressive theatre-in-the-round entertainment once more. Ibsen's An Enemy of the People earns keen applause with its drama (reminiscent of Jaws), in which a town rubs its collective hands together as it anticipates raking in mega-bucks from health tourism to its wonderful new Spa facilities, until deadly bacteria and toxins are discovered in the water source, threatening total ruin. When the powers-that-be conspire to cover up this inconvenient truth to ensure financial gain, and the masses, out of self interest, gullibility or sheer ignorance, back them up, will the truth be told before it's too late?