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Victor Spinetti heads the cast in the Agatha Christie spoof comedy Murdered To Death

We love a good murder mystery and what could be better than one starring Victor Spinetti? Spinetti, a one-time Brighton resident, has had a glittering career on screen and stage working at times with The Beatles and the Royal Shakespeare Company. In Peter Gordon’s comedy mystery, Murdered To Death, Spinetti joins Norman Pace and Sandra Dickinson for the first play of the new Worthing Theatres drama season. The Agatha Christie-inspired comedy thriller is set in a country manor in the 1930s, where Bunting the Butler, stiff upper-lipped Charles Craddock, the bumbling local inspector and constable, as well as local sleuth Miss Maple, are joined by a debutante and a shady French art dealer and his moll in a comic combination of murderous fun and hysterical occurrences.

Murdered to Death Connaught Theatre, Union Place, Worthing, Tuesday 10–Saturday 14 August, 7.30pm, matinees 2pm Wedensday and 2.30pm Saturday, £14–£23, 01903 206 206, www.worthingtheatres.co.uk

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang we love you, sings Andrew Kay as the hit show flies into Eastbourne

The concept of the stage musical is a rapidly changing thing. Where once upon a time a show would start on stage and, if successful, make a transfer to the silver screen, now they are likely to have started life as film and make the reverse journey. Some even start life on screen without songs and in the transfer have them added.
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Award-winning performer George Dillon is part of a stunning season of Edinburgh previews at The Nightingale Theatre with The Man Who Was Hamlet writes Andrew Kay

Who really wrote Hamlet? Award-winning performer George Dillon returns to The Nightingale with his new play, The Man Who Was Hamlet, which tells the comical, tragical, romantic and utterly scandalous history of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the leading alternative candidate for the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare.
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Lost siblings, rich sexuality and infinite compassion: actor Simon Callow talks to Bella Todd about the real William Shakespeare

Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford follows the success of your one-man show about Charles Dickens. You’ve written that it is Shakespeare’s treatment of sex and love that elevates him above Dickens…
I think it’s what you don’t find in Dickens. Of course, Dickens is always interesting, even in what he doesn’t do. But with Shakespeare you have this astonishing garden of delights – and, of course, of disgust sometimes. Whether Dickens would allow himself to be really overwhelmed by another human being I doubt. He was too frightened of the black waters inside himself to let that happen.
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