Mark Strong and Lesley Manville star in 'devastating' production

Surely the most powerful production the UK will see this year, Robert Icke's adaptation of "Oedipus" turns Sophocles' fifth-century BC drama into an electrifying "play for today", said Susannah Clapp in The Observer. I already knew how this most shocking of tragedies would end, yet I "found myself not only wishing but almost believing that things might turn out differently".

Featuring "tremendous" performances from Mark Strong as Oedipus and Lesley Manville as his wife Jocasta, the evening is "as gripping as a thriller, yet weighted with the terrible sense of what might have been", said Sarah Crompton on What's On Stage. It's a "devastating" production, which brilliantly restates the "power of Greek tragedy to lay bare all the grief of the human soul".

The classicist John Tresidder Sheppard deemed Sophoclean language "hard to analyse, impossible to translate", said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Yet Icke has done an "astonishing job in both departments. An old play is masterfully analysed and made newly devastating."

In this version, Oedipus is a smooth-talking, modern-day politician, who has gathered with his family on election night while a huge digital clock counts down the hours to... what exactly? A modern audience could find this ancient story – with its prophecies, hubris and climactic revelation – far-fetched, "preposterous", even. But here, it is riveting from beginning to end.

It's a slick production, but it seemed to me that for all the doominess of the counting down clock, the play's "sickening implacability" didn't grip to the extent that it should, said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph. "The liberal use of ironic foreshadowing in the dialogue – references to mothers, knowledge and the like abound – came across as more of a knowing comic device than a horrifying tragic one", and there is a flabbiness to some of the dialogue. Still, Strong and Manville are "desperately moving in the extraordinary final scenes, which play out as the most unbearable of love stories".

Wyndham's Theatre, London WC2. Until 4 January 

by Rachel Clarke    

"In 2017, a nine-year-old girl from Devon was involved in a car crash that left her with a catastrophic brain injury," said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. Knowing the person Keira was – someone who'd go "out of her way to rescue insects in distress" – her family immediately asked if she could donate her organs. Meanwhile, another nine-year-old lay on a hospital bed in Cheshire, "painfully thin and being kept alive with a mechanical heart pump". Max's heart had become "dangerously enlarged" after he'd developed acute cardiomyopathy; he and his family knew that only a transplant could save his life.

"In 'The Story of a Heart', Dr Rachel Clarke writes about the feat of modern medicine that allowed Keira to give life to Max by donating her heart." Her book is many things: "a tender account of two families linked by tragic circumstances"; the race-against-time tale of the "transfer of a human organ from one body to another"; a history of the surgical innovations that made this possible.

Written in "evocative, empathetic" prose, it's a work of startling power. By the time I'd finished it, "I was in pieces". Known for her dispatches from the medical front line (notably "Breathtaking", about working in a Covid ward), Clarke skillfully blends the "arresting and the informative", said Isabel Hardman in The Spectator.

The story of Keira and Max keeps spooling back: to the first human heart transplant in South Africa in 1967, performed by Christiaan Barnard; to the development of life-support machines in the 1950s. Such diversions enrich rather than disrupt her story.

She also intelligently unpicks the ethics of organ donation, said Kate Womersley in the Financial Times. Should donating be seen as an act of "radical kindness", or a civic responsibility? What regulations can ensure a "transplant does not become a transaction"? Combining drama, scientific precision and "characteristic warmth", this is Clarke's "finest book yet".

The word "heart-rending" doesn't begin to cover many aspects of this story, said Helen Rumbelow in The Times. We see Max, "in the prison of his hospital bed", telling his parents that he no longer wants to live. We see Joe, Keira's father, standing outside the ambulance bay as his daughter's heart – newly cut from her chest – "speeds away from him for ever".

Nothing, of course, can make up for his loss, but the transplant does at least give "Keira's death meaning". Months later, Joe visited a now recovered Max, and put a stethoscope to his chest. "The ba-boom ba-boom of his daughter's heart sent him a Morse code of love."

Talented singer who became a pop sensation at 16

Liam Payne, who has died aged 31, was a floppy haired schoolboy, contemplating an apprenticeship at the aerospace factory where his father worked, when he auditioned for "The X Factor" in 2008. Just 14, he impressed the judges with his rendition of "Fly Me to the Moon". But ultimately, Simon Cowell decided he wasn't mature enough, and told him to go home and try again in two years. Payne did just that, and in 2010 he had a rapturous reception from the studio audience and the judges. And though he was ejected from the solo category, he was then put together with four other young hopefuls in a band. One Direction came third in the contest, but won out overall by becoming the most successful act ever to come out of "The X Factor", and the biggest boy band of the era: in five years, they had four No. 1 albums in the UK and the US, toured the world several times, sold 70 million records, and won a devoted army of fans known as Directioners.

Cowell, who had signed them, wanted One Direction to have a bad boy edge, to broaden their appeal to teenagers (with more spending power than pre-teens); but it fell to Liam to be the "sensible one", said The Times. He didn't relish this, saying it made him look like "a dick", and he eventually rebelled. But when he turned to "booze and pills", it was also, he said, a reaction to the desperate loneliness of being on lengthy tours, the punishing schedule, and the relentless attention of the media and the public. He admitted that he was relieved when One Direction went on an "indefinite hiatus" in 2016, saying it would have killed him if it had gone on any longer.

Born in 1993, he was the son of Karen, a nurse, and Geoff, a factory fitter. Money was tight. "Dad was in debt, but they did the best they could," he said. "It makes you dream a bit, you know?" Although he was born with only one working kidney, he grew into a promising long-distance runner and took 11 GCSEs before "X Factor" fame whisked him away from a normal teenage life.

Having co-written many of One Direction's later songs, he was estimated to be worth well over £50 million, and other leading musicians were keen to work with him. But he struggled with his solo career. He released a single, "Strip That Down" (with the line "I used to be in 1D, now I'm out, free"), and it was a massive hit. His first album, however, did not sell especially well. He spent time in therapy and in rehab, and his personal life was rocky: he had a son with former "X Factor" judge Cheryl Tweedy, but they'd split up in 2018 after two years; and his ex-fiancée had recently alleged that he was harassing her with phone calls.