Eline Arbo's 'unmissable' adaptation of Annie Ernaux's memoir transfers to the West End 

A succession of Greek tragedies have been staged in London lately, said Sarah Crompton on WhatsOnStage. But "the play that comes closest to Greek theatre's belief in a communal rite of shared experience is not 'Oedipus' or 'Elektra'", but this adaptation of "The Years", the French Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux's novelistic memoir from 2008.

The Norwegian director Eline Arbo's production was first seen at the Almeida last summer, and has now transferred to the West End with its "alchemical magic" intact. Spanning the years 1941 to 2006, "The Years" is a memory play that builds "layer upon layer of allusive" feeling to create an "entire portrait of a world". It's an "emotional, coruscating experience"; a meditation on the "failure of liberation truly to liberate", and on the "ongoing hopefulness of love". It's profoundly moving yet also "incredibly funny".

In this sometimes shocking production, five exceptional actresses (Anjli Mohindra, Harmony Rose-Bremner, Romola Garai, Gina McKee and Deborah Findlay) play the main character at different stages, from childhood to old age, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph. One scene, in which Garai as Annie graphically describes a backstreet abortion, has caused audience members to faint. It's an extraordinary sequence, which on its own makes the evening "unmissable". Yet the drama from then on becomes even more potent, weaving "intimate minutiae" and the grand sweep of social history into "one spellbinding, ruminative whole".

This is unquestionably an "acting masterclass", said Clive Davis in The Times. The storyline, though, is thin and punctuated by "predictable landmarks"; the dawn of rock'n'roll, the 1968 student unrest, and so on. Still, there's plenty of humour to leaven the "bien pensant" social commentary. 

Ultimately, "The Years" "quietly assures its audience that the history of the 20th century is the history of women's liberation", said Georgia Luckhurst in The Stage. It is a "joy to see such emphatically feminist theatre on the West End stage".

Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1. Until 19 April

by Han Kang  

Han Kang's first novel since winning the Nobel Prize is narrated by Kyungha, an author obsessed with a terrible episode in South Korea's history, said Houman Barekat in The Sunday Times. In 1948, government forces brutally suppressed an uprising on the island of Jeju, killing some 30,000 people. Kyungha's friend, Inseon, comes from the island, and when she's suddenly hospitalised she begs Kyungha to brave a snowstorm and travel to her house to feed her pet bird. There, confronted by ghosts, Kyungha discovers how the massacre devastated Inseon's family. The eerie detail is a little overcooked, but Han's book is "sensitive" and "suspenseful".

The second half shifts into magical realism, said Megan Walsh in The New Statesman, opening the possibility that Kyungha is herself a ghost. But the details of the massacre are all too real. Han doesn't flinch from describing human cruelty, but balances this with "delicate, miraculous moments" of hope. Seeking out people who have died needlessly, she "gently awakens them in her readers' imagination – ensuring that we cannot look away either".

Costume designer who won an Oscar for Doctor Zhivago

Phyllis Dalton was one of the great costume designers of late 20th-century cinema. Acclaimed in particular for the attention to detail she brought to period dramas and historical epics, she won two Oscars, said The New York Times. The first was for "Doctor Zhivago", for which she had to design more than 3,000 costumes – from the elegant outfits worn by the social elite before the revolution to the tattered greatcoats worn by Russian soldiers in the First World War. To add to her difficulties, scenes set in the Russian winter were filmed in Spain during the summer, so having fitted the extras with their heavy coats, she then had to persuade them not to disrobe. Her work on "Zhivago" – particularly the fur hats and fur-trimmed "Zhivago collar" – influenced couturiers across Europe, but her job, she said, was not to make beautiful outfits. It was to make the characters look real by ensuring – for instance – that their clothes had "mud in the right place", as she put it of her work on Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V", for which she won her second Oscar.

Dalton, who has died aged 99, was born in Chiswick, west London, in 1925. Her father worked for the Great Western Railway; her mother in a bank. She became interested in costume design while studying at Ealing Art College and, in 1944, she was employed as a wardrobe assistant on Laurence Olivier's "Henry V". Soon after, she joined the Women's Royal Naval Service and was posted to Bletchley Park. Her role was to operate the Bombe code-breaking machines, and she confessed that she found it "unbelievably boring". After being demobbed, she entered an art contest for Vogue and, though she didn't win it, the editor recommended her for a job at Gainsborough studios. The films she worked on over the next few years included "Rob Roy", "Our Man in Havana" and "The World of Suzie Wong".

In 1961, David Lean asked her to design the costumes for "Lawrence of Arabia" – for all the main characters but also for more than 1,000 extras. She spent months researching local textiles and tribal custom, and even the shades of sand in the desert (not all deserts are yellow, she pointed out). She dressed Peter O'Toole in an Army uniform that was too small, to convey T.E. Lawrence's discomfort with military duty; and to contrast with his flowing white robes – which in later scenes become steadily thinner, to reflect his deteriorating mental state. She helped convey a sense of Dickens' London for Carol Reed's "Oliver!" (which garnered her an Oscar nomination); she helped recreate the look of postwar England for "A Private Function" (1984); and produced fairy-tale-appropriate costumes for "The Princess Bride" (1987). For his "Henry V", Branagh asked her to make the clothes look "real and old, as if the characters had slept in them". She worked with him again on "Dead Again" (1991) and "Much Ado About Nothing" (1993), her last film.

Her own view was that unless the film was about fashion, the costumes should go unnoticed. She said that if anyone admired her work, she saw it as "a bit of a backhanded compliment".