Emma Rice's 'effortlessly chic' staging of Hitchcock's classic spy thriller 

Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 classic "North by Northwest" "really ought to be unstageable", said Patrick Marmion in the Daily Mail. The film is about a slick Manhattan ad man who's mistaken for a spy and pursued across America in a chase that features trains, planes and automobiles, and culminates on the summit of Mount Rushmore. But all this proves to be "just grist to the mill of director Emma Rice in her effortlessly chic new adaptation".

It shares some DNA with Patrick Barlow's stage version of Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps", said Ron Simpson on WhatsOnStage. There's the same "madcap switching of parts", clever use of props and breaches of the fourth wall. "What it does not share is the comedy of incompetence." On the contrary, in Rice's show – which contains several song-and-dance numbers – one "finds oneself in awe at the slickness of timing between the actors", the sound and lighting design, and the "frequently glorious choreography".

The script sticks closely to the original, but the tone is "more Rice-esque than Hitchcockian", said Holly Williams in The Telegraph. This is a bravura "spy caper with the emphasis on capering, rather than suspense or thrills", and which goes for "larky, knowing stagecraft and theatrical silliness" rather than big-budget special effects (the crop-dusting biplane is represented by banners and spray from an aerosol can). The "heroic cast of six play umpteen suitcase-swapping roles with wit and swagger" – Ewan Wardrop is reliably entertaining as Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant in the film) – and the production's sheer inventiveness will keep you grinning.

It's all "delightfully playful" and entertaining, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian – but "there is not quite enough charge underneath", and the serious themes of "global crisis, security and the toxic legacies of war are raised rather too late, like an afterthought".

The show also lacks the jeopardy and sense of confinement that Hitchcock "brought to even the flippest moments", said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Still, it is for the most part a really good ride – and at its best it is "glorious".

York Theatre Royal until 5 April. Then touring until 22 June.

by Ian Leslie

"Another Beatles book?" said Simon Schama in the Financial Times. "Honestly, do we need it? Yes we do, when it's as revelatory as Ian Leslie's 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs'." Leslie, a journalist, is no "pop hagiographer"; instead, he sets out to "rescue" Lennon and McCartney from the "tone-deaf stereotype" perpetuated in countless biographies, which casts their relationship in terms of "gladiatorial opposition": Lennon as a "take-no-prisoners visionary", McCartney as a "crooning balladeer". Such a view, Leslie contends, was "largely the self-serving fiction" of Lennon during the band's break-up. The reality is more nuanced – Lennon wrote "soft ballads", McCartney could be "tonsil-shreddingly raw" – but in any case, Leslie writes, focusing on their differences means missing the "whole glory of Lennon-McCartney", which lay in their "interconnectedness". His book is an extended hymn to their creative partnership – a "romantic epic of the starlit, star-crossed, outrageously gifted pair, both inseparable and incompatible". At once "poetically exuberant and musically analytical", "John & Paul" is "brilliant".

Leslie opens his story in 1957, with a 15-year-old McCartney "making his way to a summer fête in Woolton to see a skiffle band called The Quarrymen, fronted by a charismatic teenager called John Lennon", said Deborah Levy in The New Statesman. The pair meet and a friendship develops: soon they are bunking off school and writing songs together at Paul's house. Grief, as well as music, united them: both lost their mothers in their teens. Much about the "journey from there – via Hamburg, the Cavern Club, London and America" – is familiar, said Alwyn Turner in The Times. Yet there's a "freshness" to Leslie's telling, a "wonder at the sheer implausibility and novelty of it all". Full of psychological insight and "lovely writing", his book is "tremendous" and "fascinating".

Above all, Leslie has a knack for describing Beatles songs in a way that reveals "new and unsuspected shades of meaning 50 years later", said Anthony Quinn in The Observer. "She Loves You", while seeming to cleave to the conventions of a "boy-girl love song", is actually a song "about friendship between boys". In "Strawberry Fields", the "listener is oriented just enough to take pleasure in being lost". Penny Lane is McCartney's "toytown diorama". Up to now, I had considered Ian MacDonald's "Revolution in the Head" (1994) to be the "gold standard of Beatles books". With this "enthralling narrative of friendship, creative genius and loss", Leslie has, I think, surpassed it.

Clean-cut actor known as the 'king of the mini-series'

Richard Chamberlain, who has died aged 90, made his name in the early 1960s playing the "sensitive young hospital medic" Dr Kildare in the TV series of that name, said The Telegraph. He was 27 years old and it was his first significant role, but the show – co-starring veteran actor Raymond Massey as Kildare's gruff mentor – proved a massive hit, and made him a star: it was said that Chamberlain received more fan mail during the five-year run of "Dr. Kildare" (from 1961 to 1966) than Clark Gable had at his career peak. Its theme song (which Chamberlain sang) became a chart hit, and the merchandising included a range of Dr Kildare dolls. Over time, however, Chamberlain came to resent being identified with the clean-cut doctor, and longed to be offered more serious roles. Part of the problem was that he was just too good-looking "for his own good", with his fair hair, blue eyes and gleaming white teeth. But it was also the case that his acting could be "painfully wooden".

The English actor Cedric Hardwicke pointed out to him that he had become a star before he'd had a chance to learn to act. So when "Dr. Kildare" came to its end, he resolved to give up TV and focus on stage work, said The Times. His Broadway debut, a musical adaptation of "Breakfast at Tiffany's", co-starring Mary Tyler Moore, was a notorious flop: it closed before it had even opened. But Chamberlain persevered, acting in repertory productions in America before decamping to the UK to hone his craft. He turned in fine performances in Richard Lester's film "Petulia", and in a BBC adaptation of "The Portrait of a Lady" (both 1968). He also surprised the critics with his "Hamlet" at the Birmingham Rep. "Anyone who comes to this production to scoff at the sight of a popular American television actor, Richard Chamberlain, playing Hamlet will be in for a deep disappointment," read the review in The Times. His confidence much boosted by write-ups he described as "quite good", he then played Octavius in a film of "Julius Caesar", with John Gielgud, and starred in Lester's "The Three Musketeers" and its sequel.

By the mid-1970s, he felt ready to "face American audiences" again. "People back in the States were saying, 'He played Hamlet? What?' It changed the way people thought about me," he observed. He appeared in the disaster movie "The Towering Inferno", and returned to Broadway. But it was back on the small screen that he re-established himself as a major star – and, in particular, as the "king of the mini-series". He won a huge following with his role in "Shogun" (1980), and then starred as the tortured priest in the steamy Australia-set melodrama "The Thorn Birds" (1983). At 49, he was a bona fide heart-throb again. "I'd forgotten about being besieged in supermarkets," he said.

Richard Chamberlain was born in Los Angeles in 1934, where his father worked as a salesman. He was educated at Beverly Hills High. He caught the acting bug at college, where he was spotted by a Paramount scout; and started appearing in small TV roles after being discharged from military service in Korea. In Hollywood circles, it was fairly well known that he was gay, but he only "came out" publicly in 2003, having decided that he no longer had "an image to defend". He had, he told the Los Angeles Times, always hated himself for being gay. "And now, suddenly, I'm free. Out of the prison I built for myself. It's intoxicating. I can talk about it positively because I'm not afraid anymore." He is survived by Martin Rabbett, his partner of more than 40 years.