Before last night I’d managed 25 years on this planet without watching The Rocky Horror Show on stage or screen. I don’t mean to imply that I was averse; it’s just one of those things I never got to. Effete aesthete that I am I knew I ought to rectify this lacuna. Whether or not one is likely to be seduced by the pop-culture cultiness of it all, one has to know what the proverbial fuss is all about. About 12 seconds in I found out.

To be a woman with a pen in your hand has always been an act of daring. For these women, holding their pen was on a different level, as they began to pave the way to the literary landscape we see today. 

An inventive new production of Shakespeare’s Richard III comes to Oxford Playhouse from Tuesday 7 to Saturday 11 May. John Haidar directs Tom Mothersdale as Shakespeare’s most notorious and complex villain. This imaginative new staging is a co-production between Headlong, Alexandra Palace and Bristol Old Vic, in association with Royal & Derngate Northampton and Oxford Playhouse, and is the final Oxford Playhouse co- production in celebration of the theatre’s 80th year.

Internationally recognised artist Karólína Lárusdóttir, whose paintings and printmaking have been much influenced by an Icelandic childhood, is celebrating her 75th birthday this year with an exhibition in Oxford (runs until 30 March). It offers a window into the simplicity of life in an Iceland of the past with colour, charm and an imaginative nostalgia.