Donmar Warehouse, London
The 28 Years Later star joins the impressive Anastasia Hille in Anna Ziegler’s two-hander about grief and family

There are many ingenious ideas in Anna Ziegler’s spare, sensitive two-hander, which features a sensational stage debut by screen star Erin Kellyman. She could not be more confident as Delilah, a bolshie, half-American daughter in mourning, who has a spiky relationship with her buttoned-up British stepmother, Jennifer (Anastasia Hille).

Artfully directed by Diyan Zora, the play is both a telling (the women narrate in third person) and an enactment of their developing relationship within a circle on stage, which revolves as the two psychologically orbit each other. We see them meet, clash and misunderstand each other while confessing their inner worlds to us, just outside this dramatic circle.

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My father, Gregory de Polnay, who has died aged 82, was an actor, director, voice teacher and performance coach.

In all he had more than 100 television and 350 radio broadcasts to his name, most notably as detective sergeant Mike Brewer in the Dixon of Dock Green TV series in 1974-75. He also appeared alongside Peggy Ashcroft in his own touring production of You Can’t Shut Out the Human Voice at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, west London, in 1984. In the 1977 Doctor Who serial The Robots of Death he provided the voice of D84.

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Òran Mór, Glasgow
An anecdote about a trip to find Paul McCartney’s Scottish retreat turns into a sweet-natured two-hander

M illy Sweeney is a young writer gaining traction. Staged in Pitlochry last year, her play Water Colour, about the changing states of mind of two Glaswegians, earned her the Stage debut award for best writer . Here, she kicks off the lunchtime spring season of A Play, a Pie and a Pint with a sweet-natured two-hander that turns a family anecdote into a quiet study of love, ambition and the pain of growing apart.

It is about Jack and Kathy, who log in separately to online chats with their granddaughter to help with a school assignment about “untold Scottish stories”. They have a particularly good one: on a holiday to Campbeltown in the hot summer of 1976, they made an impromptu attempt to find Paul McCartney’s rural retreat .

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The late actor’s writing was overshadowed by roles in blockbusters. Now, Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu is giving his play about grief the audience it deserves

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Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. Last week I went to watch the play Deep Azure , written by the late actor Chadwick Boseman, at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, part of the Globe theatre in London. It’s a show full of verve, poetry powered by hip-hop, Jacobean verse and beautifully choreographed movement. I spoke to Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu, the play’s director, about the importance of reviving Black work and the responsibility of not only honouring Boseman’s memory but also showcasing the full spectrum of the Black experience globally. First, this week’s news.

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In Josh Safdie’s film, the worlds of sport and stage are aligned – with the stakes higher for Gwyneth Paltrow’s former screen star, now on Broadway, than Timothée Chalamet’s hotshot

• This article contains spoilers about Marty Supreme

Josh Safdie’s ping-pong nerve-jangler Marty Supreme races through ambition, vanity, humiliation, deception, soaring glory, crushing failure and the deathless allure of an 11th-hour comeback. All of this I recognise from hours of playing table tennis in our local park. But I recognise it, too, from nights at the theatre – not so much the plays themselves, perhaps, rather the stage as a crucible for the careers of those involved. The film’s subplot, about a Broadway play’s fraught opening, becomes an inspired parallel to Marty’s frantic story and Safdie’s wired style matches not just the adrenalised world of a tournament but also the sensation of stepping out on the stage. I’m a sucker for theatre scenes in films and Safdie’s are brief but certainly supreme.

Halfway into the movie, Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser sneaks into New York’s Morosco theatre. That’s a real playhouse – or was, until it got demolished in the 80s. The film is set in 1952, the year that Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea was put on at the Morosco, which would soon have a hit with the premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Those plays about failing marriages find a counterpart in the film’s story of Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a silver-screen star of the 30s who is now making a risky return to acting in an overheated play bankrolled by her husband, Milton Rockwell.

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Hampstead theatre, London
Elizabeth Dulau is terrific in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s new play as the young woman set to become a daring pioneer in fiction and real life

This is a play about George Eliot when she was known only as Mary Ann Evans, in her 20s and living in a respectable corner of Coventry in the 1840s with her father. Played by Elizabeth Dulau, she is not yet the formidably unconventional woman she would become.

Evans would later scandalise the genteel society that her upwardly mobile father, Robert (Owen Teale), was so desperate to please, not least so he could get a decent marriage secured for this clever, spirited daughter. Evans would go on to befriend free-thinkers, cohabit with a man and write some of the most celebrated and humane works of fiction in the English literary canon. Playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell shows the seeds of all those facets of her life here, in her family home of Bird Grove.

At Hampstead theatre, London , until 21 March

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Exclusive: Canon now includes domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham, which is attributed solely to Kyd and ‘not at all’ to Shakespeare

The number of plays attributed to the 16th-century playwright Thomas Kyd has more than doubled in a major new edition.

The forthcoming second volume of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd makes a substantial case for his sole or part-authorship of plays previously attributed to William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe.

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