'Charming' stage adaptation of hit film is a lot of fun

"Being dead is no barrier to productivity these days – particularly if you are Jane Austen," said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. Improvisation show "Austentatious" is playing in the West End and soon to go on tour; "ingenious comedy" "Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of)" is already touring; and a new musical, "Austenland", is waiting in the wings. Until then, we have "Clueless, The Musical", based on the hit 1995 film. Inspired by Austen's "Emma" and starring Alicia Silverstone, it "wittily spliced Regency matchmaking and friendship angst with the hormone-fuelled politics of an LA high school drama". With "evocative" original songs by KT Tunstall and lyricist Glenn Slater, the musical is also "charming and fun", but alas, it "never quite wriggles free of its celluloid origins".

It's by no means a great musical, said Alun Hood on WhatsOnStage, but its sense of fun is "irresistible" – and fans of the film will love it. Amy Heckerling, who wrote and directed the film, is behind the "laugh-out-loud funny" book; the musical numbers are clever and "infuriatingly catchy"; the staging has a "cinematic fluidity as scenes merge slickly into each other"; and the production features a star-making turn from newcomer Emma Flynn as the main character, Cher. A "scintillating comedienne", she commands the stage, and is "adorable enough to mitigate against most of Cher's more obnoxious characteristics".

Hers is one of several terrific performances, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian, yet the production itself is a "paler version of the film", and has less "creativity and soul". And though there are two "belters" ("Reasonable Doubts" and "I'm Keeping an Eye on You"), most of the songs are a bit "flat-footed".

Visually, too, the adaptation falls short, said Clive Davis in The Times. "If the film is all Beverly Hills swank, the production values on display here are more Bicester Village." The young cast deserve plaudits for their fizzing, committed performances, but overall this is a serviceable spin-off from a much-loved film, not a must-see show.

Trafalgar Theatre, London SW1. Until 27 September

by David Szalay

In David Szalay's Booker-shortlisted 2016 novel "All That Man Is" – about nine European men at different stages of life – one of the best sections centred on a Hungarian former soldier working in security in London's sex industry, said Luke Brown in the Financial Times. In his latest novel, "Flesh", Szalay, who "grew up in Britain and is of Hungarian descent", has "picked a similar man to examine at length". We first meet István in Hungary as a 15-year-old, "isolated after moving to a new town" – where a relationship with a middle-aged woman "reaches a tragic conclusion". Time in a young offender institution follows; then István joins the army and goes to fight in Iraq, where he is traumatised by seeing a "friend die in front of him". He moves to London and becomes a security guard for a rich family – which leads to a "much greater rise and corresponding fall". "Flesh" is spare, but strangely powerful; it feels "refreshing, illuminating and true".

"Inarticulate, passive and emotionally numb, István is an unusual protagonist for a literary novel," said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. He has lots of sex, but the "couplings often feel arbitrary"; even when he (briefly) becomes wealthy, he is "still buffeted by outside events". "Flesh", however, utterly "ensnared me": written in the "terse narrative style of a thriller", it is "tense, unnerving and charged with a sense of the fragility of our lives". Always a writer of "flinty" prose, Szalay here pares things back "even more brutally", said Keiran Goddard in The Guardian. A work of "controlled, austere minimalism", "Flesh" is a searching examination of the "numbing strangeness of being alive".

Dissident playwright who shone a light on Apartheid

In 1967, after his first major play was televised in Britain, Athol Fugard was told that he had a choice: to leave South Africa and never return, or to stay and have his passport confiscated. He opted to stay, said The Times. Fugard, who came to be regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright, felt that he had to write about the cruel psychological impact of the Apartheid regime in the country where it was taking place. And though he was unable to leave for several years, his work travelled: as well as to desegregated audiences at home, it was performed at the Royal Court in London, in the West End and on Broadway, and did much to draw the world's attention to Apartheid's injustices and absurdities.

His plays, which tended to focus on the experiences of his Black compatriots, were not overtly political, said The New York Times. He described himself as "a storyteller", not a "pamphleteer". But he acknowledged that it was impossible to "tell a South African story accurately and truthfully and for it not to have a political spin-off", and his work was "viscerally powerful". In "Blood Knot", two half-brothers, one of whom can pass for white, are divided by their skin colour; "The Island" centres on a pair of cell-mates rehearsing a production of "Antigone" on Robben Island. In "Sizwe Banzi is Dead", a man steals a dead person's identity to get the pass book he needs to survive. Fugard spoke of a need for writers to bear witness; he was determined, however, to produce art not agitprop, and so his plays resonated widely, and continued to be performed after Apartheid had ended.

The son of a jazz musician of Irish descent and an Afrikaner mother who ran a lodging house and tea room, Athol Fugard was brought up in Port Elizabeth. In his journals, he would recall an incident in his teens that haunted him for years afterwards, and which featured in his play "'Master Harold'… and the Boys" (1982). He had befriended one of his parents' Black employees, a man who became almost a surrogate father to him. But one day, after they'd had a rare quarrel, he saw the man in the street – and spat in his face. "I don't suppose I will ever deal with the shame that overwhelmed me the second after I had done that."

He studied philosophy at the University of Cape Town, but he dropped out to hitchhike across the continent, then found work on a tramp steamer. He wanted to be a novelist, but back in Cape Town he fell in love with an actress, Sheila Meiring, who became his first wife, and with whom he started putting on plays. Later, they moved to Johannesburg, where he worked as a court clerk, processing violations of the racist pass laws. "We sent an African to jail once every two minutes," he said of the experience, which he detested, and which inspired his early plays. He then travelled to London, hoping to find theatre work there. He had no luck, but it was in London that he wrote "Blood Knot". Following the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, when many white liberals decided to leave South Africa to escape the crackdown on political activity, he and his wife felt compelled to go home.

Fugard was determined to collaborate with the "wronged community", said Mark Lawson in The Guardian, rather than write about the evils of Apartheid alone in his study in a white neighbourhood. This was not easy: police raided their rehearsals; performances were at secret locations, by invitation. Still, as a white man who'd run a largely Black theatre cooperative, and used his Black actors' experiences in his work, he was bound to attract attention when people started to worry about "appropriation". Fugard, however, had been alert to this: the Black actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona were credited as the co-creators of two of his major plays, "The Island" and "Sizwe Banzi…", with royalties split three ways. They were jailed for performing them in South Africa; and he'd have been the first to acknowledge that they and others were the "theatrical Mandelas of free South Africa". He called himself a "classic example of the impotent, white liberal"; though in fact, he was "an epitome of the good people who, in Hannah Arendt's formulation, must act if evil is not to prevail".