Alys, Always: A superbly disquieting psychological thriller

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Are her actions motivated by ruthless ambition or is she just doing what anyone might do to help a grieving family? at the Royal Exchange, Manchester; Playhouse Creatures at the West Yorkshire Playhouse; and Be My Baby for Soho Theatre Company.

Frances Thorpe (Froggatt) is a lowly minion on a newspaper books desk, almost entirely overlooked by her confident, condescending colleagues. net, Finding Fatimah, Four Lions, Perfume, Allie Esiri Presents Women Poets Through the Ages and The Wasp and the Caterpillar. At one point, Frances skewers the tedium of Kyte’s fiction – stories about “middle-aged, middle-class men who struggle with the decline in their physical powers, a decline that mirrors the state of the culture around them”. One night driving home, she is the first on the scene of an accident and last to speak to the victim, a woman, "Alice", who then dies.

Harriet Lane brilliantly skewers the sycophancy that surrounds the wealthy and successful, allowing their inner circle to bask in the same intoxicating glow. Earlier this year the Daily Telegraph ran a teaser in its print edition: ‘Jemima Khan: My verdict on the shake-up at Radio 2’. at The Bridge; Husbands and Sons, Emil and the Detectives and Hymn / Cocktail Sticks at the National Theatre; A Cream Cracker Under the Settee at Bolton Octagon; The March on Russia at the Orange Tree; Untold Stories at the Old Laundry; Billy Liar, Pygmalion and Everybody Loves a Winner at Royal Exchange Manchester; Hay Fever at Chichester; Enjoy at Watford Palace; The Merry Wives of Windsor (also UK and US tour) at Shakespeare’s Globe; and work at the Crucible Sheffield, Birmingham Rep, Oldham Coliseum, Manchester Library, Leicester Haymarket, Derby Playhouse, New Vic Newcastle-under-Lyme and Mercury Colchester.

Lane's take on contemporary class is so sharply observed that it becomes almost satirical: the perennial theme of social climbing gets a superb new treatment in her highly entertaining, chilling tale of a cuckoo in the nest. With either her job or one other on the line, she starts to make sure it’s cocksure Oliver (an entertainingly oblivious Simon Manyonda,) coasting on his famous journalist father’s reputation rather than doing any work, who gets the chop. If you enjoyed this then the Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes will undoubtedly appeal to you as well. When Frances is driving back to London from visiting her parents one weekend, she is the first on the scene to a tragic road accident. Film includes I Give It a Year, Is There Anybody There, Blue Money and Experience Preferred But Not Essential.It was as if the author couldn't make up her mind about the character, so she failed to elicit either our sympathy or our revulsion.

Harriet Lane's debut novel, Alys, Always garnered a raft of favourable coverage from the professional reviewers when it was first published in hardback. Driving home at night after Christmas at her parents’, she witnesses a car accident and sits with the injured driver waiting for the ambulance. Film includes The Aeronauts, Journey’s End, Live by Night, Cryptic, Creation, Laissez Passer, The Visitors, All Forgotten, Secret Rapture and Quadrophenia.

Frances is a thirty-something lowly sub-editor, but her routine, colourless existence is disrupted one winter evening when she happens upon the aftermath of a car crash and hears the last words of the driver, Alys Kyte. Theatre includes leading roles at numerous regional theatres, including The Innocents, The Heiress and The Deep Blue Sea for the Royal Northampton; The Rivals, Dear Antoine and The Stepmother at Chichester Festival Theatre; and The Family Reunion, The Importance of Being Earnest and Uncle Vanya for Manchester Royal Exchange.

Though there's a little technological wizardry in the video projections by Luke Halls, it's not as interactive as van Hove's (created with his long-term professional partner Jan Versweyveld). One bitterly cold winter's evening driving back to London from her parents' home, she encounters a car that has skidded from the road and is witness to the last few minutes of the driver's life.It's uneasy but intriguing reading thanks to the accurate illustration of her middle class characters. Rhiannon Lucy Coslett’s reproduced New Statesman article about gentrification and fellow Statesman scribe Helen Lewis’s critique of the demographic make-up of broadsheet journalism make for interesting and important reading, but feel entirely orthogonal to the play’s content. This novel came with brilliant reviews but though I enjoyed it, I felt somewhat cheated because it could have been so much better. Witnessing a fatal car accident involving one Alys Kyte brings Frances into contact with the high-flying Kyte family, including Alys’s famous novelist husband, Laurence (Robert Glenister).