After a few false starts, the big guns are now coming out in force for next year’s Cultural Olympiad. The Royal Shakespeare Company – in partnership with other major theatres such as the National and Shakespeare’s Globe – have unveiled the programme for the World Shakespeare festival, one of the centre pieces of the cultural world’s contribution to London 2012. Highlights include Simon Russell Beale as Timon of Athens, Jonathan Pryce as King Lear, an Iraqi Romeo and Juliet (pictured) and a Brazilian circus version of Richard III Photograph: World Shakespeare Festival
But there's no need to wait until 2012 for your Shakespeare fix. Trevor Nunn’s staging of The Tempest opened at the West End's Theatre Royal Haymarket this week. It stars Ralph Fiennes, fresh from his duties as another wizard in Harry Potter, as Prospero and features Nicholas ‘Rodney Trotter’ Lyndhurst providing comic relief as Trinculo. The production promises to be one of the autumn’s hot tickets, despite decidedly mixed reviews Photograph: Catherine Ashmore
The idea of naming a West End theatre after the late Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter has been in the ether for some time. When the suggestion was mooted a few years ago that the West End's Comedy Theatre be renamed in his honour, Tom Stoppard is said to have quipped to his fellow (then alive) playwright, 'Wouldn’t it be simpler if you changed your name to Harold Comedy?' But there's no longer a need – as of its next show Death and the Maiden, the theatre on Panton Street will be known as The Harold Pinter Theatre Photograph: Gemma Levine / Getty Images
From Pinteresque pauses to total silence – US film-maker Kevin Smith is bringing two of his best-loved character creations across the Atlantic for a live tour of the UK. Jay and Silent Bob (who featured in the films Clerks, Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) will perform their two-man show in London, Manchester and Edinburgh next February. Smith has previously appeared on stage in the UK for a solo standup tour in 2009, but this will be the first time that he’s performed in the UK as Silent Bob, alongside Jason Mewes as Jay Photograph: Darren Michaels
London’s Royal Court isn’t venturing quite so far afield, but it will be upping sticks from its SW1 home and relocating to Peckham for its Theatre Local project. The Sloane Square theatre launched the initiative last year, when it took a range of shows to a shopping centre in Elephant and Castle. This year, from September 29 to November 19, it will take its productions of The Westbridge by Rachel De-Lahay and truth and reconciliation by Debbie Tucker Green to the Bussey Building in Peckham Photograph: PR
A major loss to the opera world this week, with the news that Italian operatic tenor Salvatore Licitra has failed to recover from injuries he suffered in a scooter accident. Licitra had been regarded by many opera aficionados as Luciano Pavarotti’s heir apparent, after he made his international debut in 2002, standing in for an ill Pavarotti at the New York Met. That promise was sadly never fully realised after the 43-year-old died early this week from head and chest injuries suffered in the crash in southern Italy Photograph: Alastair Muir / Rex Features
After a year-and-a-half at the Palace Theatre, Priscilla Queen of the Desert the Musical has announced it will be hanging up its platform shoes and getting its drag on for the final time this New Year’s Eve. The show opened in London in March 2009 and has managed a perfectly respectable run in the West End, even if it hasn’t hit the heights of, say, Chicago. That show announced this week that it would be moving to yet another West End home with a switch to the Garrick Theatre, prolonging its nearly 14-year stay in London Photograph: Tristram Kenton
