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Comedy is what we need right now, says Nicholas Hytner, who ran London’s National Theatre for a decade.

It’s fine to have heavy-lifting dramas by Ibsen or Schiller, but boy-oh-boy laughter is an increasingly uplifting necessity.

Which is where Guys & Dolls and James Corden, post his life on The Late Late Show, come in.

Hytner, partnered with longtime executive Nick Starr, now own and control London’s Bridge Theatre and is overseeing a fully immersive revival of the classic Broadway musical Guys & Dolls, choreographed by Dame Arlene Phillips (Strictly Come Dancing) and now in early previews.

It stars Daniel Mays as Nathan Detroit, Andrew Richardson (A Call to Spy) as Sky Masterson, Celinde Schoenmaker (Rocketman) as Sarah Brown and Marisha Wallace (Aladdin) as long-suffering Miss Adelaide. Cedric Neal plays Nicely-Nicely Johnson. Also in the cast are Jordan Castle,...

Alec Baldwin’s President Trump spends a paranoid night in Argentina during the cold open for Saturday Night Live‘s first December episode. The commander-in-chief, sulking about the Mueller investigation on his hotel balcony, consults former lawyer Michael Cohen (Ben Stiller), a shirtless Vladimir Putin (Beck Bennett), the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia (Fred Armisen), current attorney Rudy Giuliani (Kate McKinnon) and wife Melania (Cecily Strong) – none of whom ease his legal concerns.

The clip opens with Trump recounting a bad dream. “Melania, I’m having trouble sleeping,” he says.

Student revue group helped launch careers of Peter Cook, Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson

Considering how successful Cambridge has been as a theatrical training ground for writers and performers, outsiders may be surprised to find that the university has no drama school.

The whole thing, Marlowe Society and Adc (Amateur Dramatic Club) presenting the classics, and Footlights tickling the comic muse, is kept going by the initiative of generation after generation of undergraduates. There are of course senior members of the university to advise and guide, but the various clubs lurch from flop to triumph with only ticket sales and members' enthusiasm and talent to sustain them.

Next week Cambridge celebrates the centenary of the Footlights, which came into existence on June 9, 1883. The Footlights has certainly lived off its wits. And what wits they have been. Skimming through Robert Hewison's centennial history of the club, the eye catches names like Ian Hay,...

I was very much in two minds about this project. I’m a huge fan of the original and it forms a real bridge back to my youth. A very unique album and something I felt no attempt to duplicate or “reinvent”, “reimagine” or whatever buzzword they’re using this month, should be made. It’s perfect as it is, I said, leave it alone. But then I began thinking about it another way. Would it not be great, not only for a whole new generation (pun intended) of fans to gain access to Jeff Wayne’s music, and perhaps even begin to appreciate the novel, but for the project to open up and speak to me in new ways, ways I had perhaps never considered? Seems this was Wayne’s intent when he decided to tackle this.

The idea being to dig deeper into the characters, and of course...

Author and playwright best known for his literary drama Tom and Viv

Michael Hastings, who has died aged 74, shot to prominence in the first wave of new playwrights at the Royal Court in the 1950s. His best known play, Tom and Viv, about the difficult marriage of Ts Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, was presented there in 1984, by which time he was well established as a novelist, biographer and author of short stories. He was an unclassifiable writer, despite his sporadic allegiance over the years to the Royal Court. Much of his work is imbued with his experience of travelling in Spain, Kenya and Brazil. The fractured domestic relationships which he documented in Tom and Viv, and in his last West End play, Calico (2004), reflect his own difficult childhood and a lifetime interest in psychoanalysis.

Hastings was brought up by his mother, Marie, in a council flat in Brixton, south London.