麻豆社

The Year of Magical Thinking
Vanessa Redgrave stars in this solo show adapted from Joan Didion鈥檚 memoir of grief. Didion experienced the loss of her husband, the writer John Gregory Donne, and her daughter in a two year period. As part of trying to come to terms with her grief she published a book about her state of mind and called it The Year of Magical Thinking. The well-known Broadway producer Scott Rudin persuaded her to adapt it for the stage and it was first performed in New York with Redgrave as Didion and directed by David Hare. Now the show has been brought to the National theatre.

Iron Man
Robert Downey Jr stars as Marvel comic鈥檚 Iron Man in a piece of off-centre casting. Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, is the head of a vast weapons-making firm and has a predilection for women, alcohol and killing but undergoes a change of heart as a result of being captured by terrorists. The casting of 43 year old Downey Jr with his checkered past contributes a certain resonance to the film. In the original Marvel comic story Stark is captured by communists in Vietnam but the film has relocated to Afghanistan where he is captured and tortured by insurgents. Kept in captivity in a cave and commanded to use his engineering genius to build the terrorists a devastating weapon he instead uses the materials he鈥檚 given to build himself an iron suit in which he can make his escape.

The Undersea World and Other Stories
An exhibition of the work of Simon Patterson
The National Maritime Museum has invited the British artist and former Turner Prize nominee Simon Patterson to hold an exhibition of his work as the next exhibition in the New Visions series of contemporary art commissions and exhibitions. The Undersea World and Other Stories is an anthology of the artist鈥檚 work made over the last decade and features a newly commissioned work that takes as its starting point the figure of Jacques Cousteau.

The Old Bailey online
This website makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from from 1674 to 1913. It allows access to over 210,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 3,000 men and women executed at Tyburn. In addition to the text, the website provides digital images of the 190,000 original pages of the Proceedings.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
Brock Clarke鈥檚 book is the story of Sam Pulsifer, who has spent ten years in prison for accidentally burning down poet Emily Dickinson's house - and unwittingly killing two people in the process. When he emerges at the age of 28 he sets about creating a new life for himself, goes to college and gets married and has two children. Then one day, his secret past catches up with him, right at his own front door.