Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith bring their darkly comic BBC series to the stage

Over nine series and 55 episodes, "Inside No. 9" became a TV phenomenon, said Sarah Crompton on WhatsOnStage. Written by and starring Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, this darkly comic BBC anthology series was made up of 30-minute-long stand-alone vignettes that, with their combination of the eerie and the absurd, "sit somewhere between 'Hancock's Half Hour' and 'The Twilight Zone'".

The series finally came to an end last year, making this spin-off the duo's "final hurrah". "Stage/Fright" is not as "groundbreaking" or radical as the TV show, but it is "great, all-encompassing fun" – and, owing to the TV original's legions of devoted fans, it is already sold out in the West End. However, a nationwide tour will surely follow at some point.

This is an "end-of-the-pier show meets Grand Guignol, a fond farewell meets Michael Frayn-ish metatheatre", said Dominic Maxwell in The Sunday Times. It "gives you the willies one moment and makes you giggle the next" – and is as packed "with ideas as anything on the London stage". Superbly acted by its two creators and a small supporting cast, and deftly directed by Simon Evans, the show features, in its first half, a reworking of one of the TV episodes, "Bernie Clifton's Dressing Room", about a comedy double act reuniting after 30 years; the second half, set partly in a Victorian asylum, is "even better". And the jokes, scares and illusions come thick and fast from the start: the "remember to switch off your phone" warning may be "the greatest, certainly the bloodiest, yet staged".

I was disappointed, said Clive Davis in The Times.  Given the talent involved, the show is surprisingly uninventive; the dialogue is lacklustre; and much of it feels recycled. It may be best regarded as an "add-on collectible", rather than "a stand-alone pleasure", said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph, and perhaps the "spiralling tricksiness eclipses the emotional impact"; but it's a satisfying piece of theatre nonetheless: audacious, ingenious, clever and fun. "Bravo."

Wyndham's Theatre, London WC2. Until 5 April

by Joe Tucker      

Eric Tucker – the uncle of this book's author, Joe Tucker – was a labourer from Warrington, Lancashire. A bachelor who spent decades living with his mother, he "cultivated a dishevelled look", said Houman Barekat in The Guardian: he wore a "faded bomber jacket held together by sticky tape" and used a rope to hold up his trousers. Although generally solitary, he could be sociable, and "enjoyed carousing in disreputable drinking dens".

And he harboured a secret. When he died, aged 84, in 2018, his nephew Joe, a screenwriter, discovered more than 500 paintings in the attic of his council house. Joe knew his uncle painted "in his spare time", but was still astonished by what he found. Eric's "vignettes of working-class life" – scenes from pubs (such as "Two Smokers"), theatres and nightclubs; portraits of pigeon fanciers, carnival workers and down-and-outs – struck Joe as evidence of a serious talent. In "The Secret Painter", he "unpacks the eccentric life behind this remarkable story". The result is a "tenderly affectionate, witty and touching" memoir – and a "fitting tribute to its subject".

Joe's "fascinating portrait" of his uncle contains scenes that "will make you wince", said Miranda Green in the Financial Times. Eric's childhood was deprived and marked by bereavement. He had no formal art training, and in early adulthood suffered "upsetting" art-world rejections, which convinced him to put his paintings "out of sight", and to settle into poorly paid manual labour. Yet Joe also recounts the efforts the family made to win recognition for Eric's talent. After his death, they converted his "modest former home into a gallery for a weekend". Some small shows followed, at which many locals cried at seeing "their world celebrated". Eric's paintings are now highly sought after, giving "Joe and his family belated recognition for their enigmatic, brilliant relative".

Eric's paintings have been likened to those of L.S. Lowry, who was famed for his depictions of the industrial North, said Michael Bird in The Telegraph. The comparison, however, "rings false": Eric's "ruddy-cheeked working-class cast" are quite different from Lowry's "matchstick" figures. While he "certainly had a gift", it's harder to argue he had the kind of "intensely distinctive personal vision" possessed by some self-taught artists. Still, "The Secret Painter" is perhaps less about his art than it is about the "hidden life that expressed itself through its making". And, as such, it's a "wry yet moving account of how the creative imagination can flourish in the most inhospitable circumstances". 

Sixties icon who became a symbol of female resilience

"A blonde-haired, blue-eyed convent girl with aristocratic forebears and a heart awash with romantic decadence," Marianne Faithfull was just 17 years old when she was spotted by the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham at a party for the band in London, said The Telegraph. It was 1964, and the Stones were still mainly covering old blues numbers. Oldham had recently ordered Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write a song of their own. The result was a wan and wistful ballad called "As Time Goes By" (the title ripped off from the song in "Casablanca"). Richards called it a "terrible piece of tripe"; and it was, as Faithfull observed, an odd song for a pair of 20-year-old R&B stars to have written. So Oldham gave it to his new protégée to record. Renamed "As Tears Go By", and performed in her quavering, folk-inflected voice, it entered the top 10 in September 1964, and the following year she had three more top 10 singles.

Before long, Faithfull had had an affair with Richards and a one-night stand with Brian Jones; then, in 1966, she began a four-year relationship with Jagger. Faithfull released five albums in the 1960s, and also acted: she starred alongside Glenda Jackson in a production of Chekhov's "Three Sisters" in 1967, and with Alain Delon in the film "The Girl on a Motorcycle". In 1967, she hit the headlines when police raided Redlands, Richards' country house in Sussex, and arrested her naked save for a fur rug. The salacious coverage of the drugs bust caused her considerable anguish, and contributed to her mental decline. She was angry, too, that while she was branded a slut and a bad mother (she'd had a son, Nicholas, in 1965, during her short-lived first marriage to the artist John Dunbar), Jagger and Richards emerged "with an enhanced bad-boy varnish".

Her influence over the Stones was considerable, said The New York Times. She inspired some of their biggest hits, including "You Can't Always Get What You Want". But she was frustrated by Jagger's snobbery (the way he'd accept invitations from "any silly thing with a title and a castle") and, later, she'd describe him as overly fastidious, tight-fisted and secretly in love with Richards. Neither of them was faithful. Nevertheless, they moved in together, and when she miscarried their baby at seven months in 1968, she was plunged into despair. In 1969, within days of Jones being found dead in his swimming pool, she attempted suicide by swallowing barbiturates. It is said that her first words on coming round from a coma were "Wild horses wouldn't drag me away". This supposedly inspired the Stones' song – but Faithfull and Jagger's relationship was over. She was 23.

She had never tried heroin when she co-wrote "Sister Morphine" (for which she finally received a credit on the reissue of the Stones' "Sticky Fingers", in 1994), but by the early 1970s, she was sliding into serious drug addiction. She temporarily lost custody of Nicholas, and for two years she was homeless: living in squats and spending her days "sitting on a wall" in Soho. Then, in 1979, aided by Island Records' supremo Chris Blackwell, she made an extraordinary comeback with the post-punk album "Broken English", said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. 

Marianne Faithfull was born in Hampstead in 1946. Her father, Glynn Faithfull, was a former British intelligence officer and the son of a sexologist; her mother was an Austrian baroness and dancer. The couple had married in haste, and when Marianne was six, her father left the family. Marianne grew up with her mother and grandmother in a terraced house in Reading. But her parents' colourful backgrounds had rubbed off on her, and at her convent school she read volumes of writing by Huysmans, Genet and Baudelaire, disguised as religious texts. By the age of 17, she had left school and was singing in folk clubs.

She didn't manage to conquer her addictions until 1986, said The Times. There followed a period of remarkable creativity, in which she starred in "The Threepenny Opera" at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, and made several more albums. She collaborated with a range of other artists, including PJ Harvey, Nick Cave and Damon Albarn, and came to be seen by a younger generation of women as a symbol of female resilience in a sexist industry. She had surgery for breast cancer in 2006, was hospitalised with Covid in 2020, and then contracted pneumonia. Eventually, she moved into Denville Hall, the actors' retirement home. It bothered her that more than 60 years later, she was still associated with Jagger and the Swinging Sixties, said the Daily Mail. But she was philosophical about the way her life had turned out. "I could have made better choices," she said. "But when I first came to London, walking down the street, I just got this feeling that I was in the right place at the right moment."