Our roundup of drama to enjoy at home includes the National Theatre’s Pearl Cleage revival and David Tennant taking on the Scottish king for the first time

Strong emotions rule in a candid and well-judged Somerset Maugham comedy twisting romantic fates across generations of squabbling society

A new revival of The Circle is a reminder of a dramatist who smuggled vital messages into broad crowdpleasers

From Tom Wolfe’s ‘master of the universe’ to George Eliot’s vengeful pedant, these are some of the hardest characters in literature to love

Closed off for half a century by the generals, there is a shortage of writing about this richly diverse country available in English – but there are some gems

Maugham’s 1933 play – about a man whose charitable giving horrifies his family – beautifully skewers the self-interestedness of society then and now

Imelda Staunton bustled brilliantly through Gypsy and Shaw’s Superman soared. But it’s a celebrity hangman who tops our theatre critic’s pick of this year’s best shows

The most un-American of all American cities is bathed in literary culture. Anisse Gross investigates Hawaiian detective novels and alerts us to stories of Pearl Harbor, examines Hawaii’s oral tradition and sifts through the many writers who spent time on its sands – from marathon correspondent Hunter S Thompson to novice surfer Mark Twain

It's the end of Shakespeare's birthday week, but the playwright has provided year-round inspiration for writers from Herman Melville to Patricia Highsmith

From Joseph Conrad to John le Carré, intelligence historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones picks the fiction that best reveals the secrets of espionage

Somerset Maugham's whiplash 1920s comedy of manners is shamelessly old-fashioned but has some cracking parts for women, writes Lyn Gardner