'Vivacious' revival of the April De Angelis play  

"April De Angelis goes time travelling again," said Clive Davis in The Times. Last year, her portrait of Sarah Siddons, a star of the late 18th-century London stage, premiered at the Hampstead Theatre in London. Now, a "vivacious" revival of 1993's "Playhouse Creatures" – her drama about the pioneering women who were the first to be allowed to tread the boards when the theatres reopened during the Restoration – has opened at the Orange Tree in Richmond.

This is a fractured, "dream-like" piece, in which we eavesdrop on the women backstage as they discuss their lives and their work, and also see them perform in front of an invisible audience – which, channelled through the production's "nuanced sound design", sometimes responds with "ripe misogynistic abuse". The historical figures are arguably one-dimensional. But the cast, led by Anna Chancellor as Mary Betterton, the "imperious" wife of a theatre owner, "invest their characters with so much passion and humour that you are content to overlook the minimal plotting".

The play is more a "snapshot" of a moment in time than a "coloured-in portrait", said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Still, it is an "entertaining and enlightening ensemble work" about that period in the 17th century when the first cohort of female actors emerged and were "regarded simultaneously as trailblazers, renegades and oddities akin to dancing bears". Chancellor gives a "glinting performance" as Betterton. Zoe Brough is a spirited Nell Gwyn. And there's strong support from Katherine Kingsley as Mrs Marshall, whose affair with an earl has left her vulnerable to audience abuse; Nicole Sawyerr as Mrs Farley, a "soapbox Christian" turned actress; and Doña Croll as Doll Common.

The play evokes a "heady sense" of a new profession "for the young, poor, female and brave", said Libby Purves on TheatreCat.com. And Michael Oakley's deftly staged and handsomely designed revival is "lively, funny, sharp-witted" and thought-provoking. 

"Playhouse Creatures" moves from Richmond to the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford (22-26 April) and the Theatre Royal Bath (28 April-3 May)

by Saou Ichikawa

This debut novel by Saou Ichikawa was a "literary sensation" in Japan, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. And it's easy to see why: the story of a disabled woman in her early 40s who has a "secret online life writing pornographic stories for money", it is "one of the boldest and most unusual books to emerge from a mainstream publisher in years". Shaka, the narrator, who is "stuck" in a wheelchair, lives in a care home near Tokyo. By day, she works on a thesis about "disability in various art forms"; by night, she pens articles detailing erotic adventures she hasn't herself experienced. A "stark, unforgettable examination of who gets to experience pleasure and culture", "Hunchback" is "modern, subversive" and "brilliant".

Shaka also tweets prolifically, believing no one will see what she writes, said Camilla Grudova in The Guardian. But when a male careworker hints he's read her tweets and erotic stories, this gives her a chance to act on "her own needs" – and "things go darkly awry". Full of "mischievous and nihilistic humour", this is a "gloriously transgressive" novel.

Double agent credited with preventing a third world war

Oleg Gordievsky was a senior KGB agent who spent 10 years spying for MI6. His most "valuable achievement", said The Guardian, was reassuring a paranoid President Andropov that the Nato exercise Able Archer 83 was not a cover for a nuclear strike on the USSR. Via his handlers, Gordievsky also warned Margaret Thatcher (and by extension Ronald Reagan) that the Kremlin's anxiety about a pre-emptive strike was genuine: after Reagan doubled defence spending, Andropov had sent agents all over the world, to look out for signs of an imminent strike. (In London, Gordievsky recalled that they were told to check for the NHS stocking up on blood supplies.) By convincing the Kremlin that Able Archer really was just a war game, Gordievsky, who has died aged 86, was credited with averting a third world war.

Born in Moscow in 1938, he was the son of an officer in the NKVD, which became the KGB. His mother, a statistician, was far more sceptical. A talented student with a gift for languages, Gordievsky studied at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, joined the foreign service, and was recruited to the KGB in 1962, running agents in east Berlin and Copenhagen. He found aspects of his role – the dead drops, disguises and so on – exciting, he said. But after the brutal crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, he started to send signals that he might be willing to betray the Soviet regime. He began work for MI6 in 1974. Over the next few years, he identified various Russian spies in Britain and elsewhere – including the MI5 officer Michael Bettaney – and confirmed that John Cairncross had been the "fifth man" in the Cambridge spy ring. He also advised Thatcher that Mikhail Gorbachev was a genuine reformer.

In 1985, he was suddenly recalled from London – where he had become the KGB's bureau chief. It became apparent that his cover had been blown by a Russian mole in the CIA, Aldrich Ames, so Gordievsky triggered Operation Pimlico, an elaborate pre-arranged plan to "exfiltrate" him by smuggling him to Finland in the back of a car. The signal that he needed rescuing involved him standing on a specific street corner in Moscow while holding a Safeway bag; the acknowledgement was an MI6 agent walking past eating a Mars bar. In London, he continued to advise the government, and wrote books. But he had been sentenced to death in absentia; and following the Salisbury poisonings, he seldom left his safe house in Surrey.