She notices his need to maintain an unvarying routine; every evening he brushes his overcoat before ensuring it is hung at a precise angle, before reversing his turn-ups in the conservatory. He surrounds himself with a sea of dictionaries, desperate to define each word he finds in the newspaper. Bass found herself "alone on an unknown planet which I was plainly not equipped to explore". When the couple move to a cottage in Devon, the eccentricity of Gerald's behaviour becomes more severe. Gerald had given his wife a clue while standing on a platform, waiting to catch the train home, when her "charming, masterly lover" let drop that he had been "mentally ill". The admission left her frightened, but there were many former servicemen like Gerald in the 1950s, struggling with their demons For their wives, it was a problem they kept to themselves. Then, Gerald's behaviour presented a terrifying and shameful problem without an obvious solution. Drawing on her vivid recollections, Bass has written a powerfully compelling book that captures the searing loneliness of marriage to a man trapped within his illness.

With the encouragement of Fay Weldon and a creative-writing course, Elaine Bass has, at the age of 83, published her first book: a memoir about life with her first husband in postwar Devon. Buried in the English countryside, far from family or friends, Bass slowly realises that her husband is suffering from a psychiatric condition which would now be recognisable as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Its greatest strength is to remind us that the play is indeed the thing.To 22 April (0870 060 6627). Clarity here would have benefited Anita Dobson's Gertrude; her high-wire act, balancing her role as attentive new wife with strong maternal instincts, is compelling.To call this Hamlet unpretentious would make it sound stolid, and this brisk production has much more snap than that. The cinematic detail in the performances that has so enriched the night becomes muddied just at the moment where one wants to flick from face to face to gauge reactions. Alice Patten is a touching Ophelia, convincing in those difficult mad scenes.Only once does the small playing area feel crowded, during the play within the play, The Mousetrap (trivia buffs may remember that, 54 years ago, this house was the first home to the Agatha Christie play).

He creates an excellent trajectory, starting as the stroppy yet cosseted prince at court, his youthfulness revealed in a wounded, verge-of-tears first soliloquy. In delicious contrast, Ben Warwick's brittle man-boy Laertes is a picture of Nordic wholesomeness. In an unremittingly dark environment designed by Michael Vale and lit by Michael Rippeth, nothing is allowed to fudge the issue of clarity.Stoppard's is an intellectually nimble Hamlet. But it's also rewarding for the seasoned Hamlet watcher who had perhaps forgotten how refreshing - and illuminating - a break from the many excellent "concept" Hamlets can be. There is a well-crafted generation gap, evinced in Michael Cronin's harrumphing Polonius, his usual verbose self at court, but a distant, draconian authority figure to Ophelia and Laertes.

Stephen Unwin's straight-ahead staging for his English Touring Theatre Company clears the decks for a production of some clarity, traditionally dressed by Mark Bouman. Unwin will surely snare the attention of the teenage student with his switch of focus away from the epic to the accessible territory of dysfunction and isolation within the family In this respect, it's an ideal production for the beginner. It's a night that has, if not a modern feel, then certainly a young one. The detail in the relationship between Claudius (an often fierce David Robb) and Hamlet (Ed Stoppard, son of Sir Tom), particularly the usurping king's pre-emptive strikes of hatred in the direction of his new stepson, sets the tone for a thoroughly domestic staging. She openly supported Dreyfus and raised funds for victims of pogroms.When she died, at least a million people followed her coffin to the cemetery - more, even, than had turned out for the great Victor Hugo They knew her as "divine".