'Frothy' Celine Dion parody with 'sparkling' performances

Camp can be a "treacherous element", said Clive Davis in The Times. Too often, it's just "tired nudges and winks coated in a sheen of all-purpose irony". And for the first 10 minutes of this "demented jukebox musical" – a spoof retelling of "Titanic" that raids the back catalogue of the Canadian singer Celine Dion – I felt sure we were heading into this blind alley. "Everybody loves seamen!" shouted one character, prompting me to sink further into my seat. But then, remarkably, I was won over as the action gathered tempo and the jokes came thick and fast, like "'Airplane!' with a musical theatre twist".

You might think this "outrageous production" (already a hit off-Broadway) is mainly for "Celine nuts, 'Titanic' boffins, hen nights and drag parties", said Patrick Marmion in the Daily Mail. "But if you ask me, it has the mass appeal to run for months, even years. Titaníque? C'est fantastique!"

I'm not sure that this "meta-theatrical romp" is "quite as clever or hilarious as it sets out to be", but it's performed with such skill and energy that "it is impossible not to have a good time", said Sarah Crompton on What's On Stage.

Lauren Drew is hilarious as Dion, who is here a passenger on the doomed liner and the show's narrator, said Nick Curtis in London's The Standard. Bedecked in sequins, she delivers expert pastiches of "the singer's lung-busting stylings and yodelling arpeggios", laced with "glutinously-accented asides". Meanwhile, Layton Williams channels Tina Turner as the silver-clad "Iceberg Bitch", who is determined to sink the ship. 

Tye Blue's "frothy" production "has a fantastically brash, devil-may-care spirit and sparkling performances", said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. However, the central joke does start to feel "overstretched".

And there are moments when you don't feel entirely comfortable laughing along, given the scale of the Titanic tragedy, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph. Still, on its own terms – "guying epic cinema with a shoestring theatricality" – this entertainment is "hard to fault".

Criterion Theatre, London W1. Until 30 March

by Elsa Morante     

Elsa Morante was the first woman to win Italy's equivalent of the Booker (for her 1957 novel "Arturo's Island"), and has been cited by Elena Ferrante as a "major influence", said Catherine Taylor in The Telegraph. Yet in Britain, her work has never had much recognition. Now her 1948 debut "Lies and Sorcery" – a "magnificent three-generation family saga" – is set to "receive its due", with this "artful" translation by Jenny McPhee. It is narrated by Elisa, a "singularly eccentric" young woman who tells us, across its 800 pages, the "staggering and absorbing" history of her grandmother, Cesira, her mother, Anna, and of her own, pain-filled childhood in the household of a Sicilian courtesan.

Featuring "mismatched marriages, lives constructed on false pretences", and plenty of broken hearts, the story Elisa tells is sometimes bewildering, said Francesa Peacock in The Spectator. Yet it's "nothing short of a triumph". It succeeds because the writing is "wonderful", said Vivian Gornick in The New York Times. "Deep, dense and psychologically penetrating", this is a "door-stopper of an Italian soap opera".

Author and critic known for his satires of campus life

With his friend Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, who has died aged 89, "more or less invented the modern 'campus novel'", said The Telegraph. Lodge once described Bradbury as his "literary twin": both grammar school boys who hadn't been to Oxbridge, they met as young academics at Birmingham University in the 1960s. Bradbury then moved to the University of East Anglia, where he produced "The History Man", set on the steel and glass campus of the University of Watermouth, while Lodge stayed in Birmingham, and wrote his bestselling "campus trilogy" set at a red-brick university in the Midlands. In these funny but seriously clever books, he ruminated on themes including academia, Catholic doctrine and sex. Two of them – "Small World" and "Nice Work" – were nominated for the Booker (and were later adapted for TV).

David Lodge was born in 1935 and brought up in Brockley, in south London. His father, William, was a musician in a dance band; his mother, Rosalie, was a Catholic, and brought him up in the Church. A voracious reader, he went to the Catholic St Joseph's Academy in Blackheath. His headmaster encouraged him to apply to university, and he won a place at University College London, to read English. He graduated with a first, then spent two years doing his National Service. Back in London, he found a teaching job with the British Council, and married his long-term girlfriend, Mary Jacob.

In 1960, he joined the English department at Birmingham. His first published book, "The Picturegoers", about a young Catholic growing up in the London suburbs, came out that year. Five years later, he produced "The British Museum is Falling Down", about the travails of a young lecturer and his wife who are trying to control the size of their family using the rhythm method, and containing pastiches of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and others. In 1969, he spent a year at the University of California, Berkeley, which inspired "Changing Places", the first book in his campus trilogy. It introduces Philip Swallow, a diligent lecturer at the University of Rummidge, who swaps jobs with the flamboyant Morris Zapp, of Euphoria State University. Famously, Swallow invents a game called Humiliation, in which, to win, players must name the most well-regarded books they have not read. An English professor eventually names "Hamlet", and wins the game but loses his job.

He retired as a professor of English in 1987. After that, he wrote more novels, several books of literary criticism, three volumes of memoir, starting with 2015's "Quite A Good Time to Be Born", and he also worked for TV. He adapted "Nice Work" for the screen and wrote the screenplay for an acclaimed BBC version of "Martin Chuzzlewit". Mary died in 2022; their three children survive him.