It is an astute move, and Byng believes Serota’s taste and “great publishing flair” will benefit a company that has enjoyed a glorious past few years.
*At the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, Val McDermid’s The Torment of Others was Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year – with a £3,000 purse and a hand-turned oak cask as prizes. True, her Macmillan traineeship began on The Dictionary of Art, but she then earned her stripes at the company under the exacting gaze of Maria Rejt. Roland Philipps, another publisher of distinguished lineage (grandmother Rosamond Lehmann, stepfather John Julius Norwich), then hired her to preside over the rebirth of John Murray’s fiction list. Now Jamie Byng, in his new job as MD of Canongate, has poached her to join the company as editorial director, the role he filled before David Graham’s departure for Granta. Once, interviewing Muhammad Ali, she socked him on the jaw to gain his attention.

A remarkable life began in North-West India at the time of Partition and continued, after Oxford, with Leslie’s own column on the Daily Express. Since then she has reported from 70 countries, sauntering through wars “clad in full make-up and false eyelashes”. * Even if Anya Serota’s connections (daughter of Sir Nicholas of Tate fame) have not exactly harmed her career, she has never been one to use them, and her success as a publisher has been on her own terms. * Daily Mail journalist Ann Leslie (below) has decided the time has come to write her memoirs. Naturally, she has engaged agent supreme Ed Victor, who has concluded a deal with Georgina Morley of Macmillan, also home to John Sargeant, Andrew Marr and John Simpson.

Gwynne Edwards’s translation is tactful, acknowledging the play’s verse-form but allowing it to obtrude only in the occasional obvious rhyming couplet.As a whole, though, the production is frustratingly restrained, never rising to the heights of passion that might make sense of the text: the encounters between Mariana (Pandora Colin) and her upright would-be lover Fernando (Geoff Breton), in particular, feel less like Blood Wedding than Brief Encounter.To 19 August (020-7503 1646). Political freedom is mixed up with, and perhaps eclipses, erotic freedom – and this freedom, Lorca suggests, is illusory, because our hearts are so often our enemies.Max Key’s staging treats this uneven but intriguing piece respectfully, and comes up with some properly theatrical gestures, such as the opening of the second half, in which veiled nuns enter in candlelit procession.Jon Bausor’s set – naturalism dissolving into tattered abstraction at the edges – is effective. When she realises that this is not the case – that he loves freedom more than he loves her – she is dismayed; her death is not a triumph, but an act of submission. Though to the outside world it appears that Mariana’s political convictions enable her to maintain dignity in the face of death, it becomes clear that she is not preparing for martyrdom: she is simply convinced that her lover is plotting to rescue her. The other women of the house gossip about her embroidering – “The crimson thread between her fingers seemed a bleeding wound carved in the air” – and a friend tells of a day of dancing and bullfighting – “Each wound a red carnation.”It is in the second half, as Mariana awaits execution in a cell in a convent, that the play takes on real imaginative life, and breaks out into poetry. The play is in two scenes: in the first, which lasts almost an hour, Mariana is seen at home, a widow with two young children, beloved of everyone who knows her, you gather, for her beauty and virtue.
She is visited by three men: the decent, self-sacrificing Fernando, who is in love with her; Don Pedro, her lover, an escaped revolutionary, in whose honour she is sewing the flag; and then the police chief Pedrosa, who is pursuing Pedro, but who also has designs on her.The somewhat melodramatic plot is punctuated by episodes and bursts of overwrought dialogue that seem more characteristic of Lorca. The play seems to illuminate Lorca’s own death at the hands of the Falangists during the Spanish Civil War, although he wrote it a decade before.

Lorca’s first theatrical success, is something of a rarity, but it is an appropriate choice to open the Arcola’s season marking the 70th anniversary of the poet’s death. Pineda was a popular Andalusian heroine – the play opens with children singing a ballad about her – who was garrotted by a repressive regime in 1831 for sewing a banned flag and helping a revolutionary leader to escape. Given the [hot] weather, audiences are pretty good,” he said.Nearly one in 10 of the participants in the Whatsonstage survey said that they intended to see all of the new openings – despite top-price West End tickets being around £55.Shows past, present and futureBEEN AND GONE:* Movin’ Out – Apollo Victoria Theatre* Mack and Mabel – Criterion* Show Boat – Royal Albert Hall* The Rocky Horror Show – PlayhouseOPENED THIS YEAR AND CURRENTLY RUNNING:* Sinatra – London Palladium* Whistle Down the Wind – Palace* Footloose – Novello* Sunday in the Park with George – Wyndham’s* Evita – Adelphi* Avenue Q – Noel Coward Theatre* The Boy Friend – Open Air Theatre, Regent’s ParkLONG-TERM SURVIVORS:* Billy Elliot – Victoria Palace* Lion King – Lyceum* The Producers – Theatre Royal Drury Lane* Phantom of the Opera – Her Majesty’s Theatre* Mary Poppins – Prince Edward* Mamma Mia! – Prince of Wales* We Will Rock You – Dominion* Les Miserables – Queens Theatre* Guys and Dolls – Piccadilly* Blood Brothers – Phoenix* Chicago – Cambridge* The Rat Pack – Savoy* Dancing in the Streets – PlayhouseSTILL TO COME:* Wicked – Apollo Victoria* Spamalot – Palace* Cabaret – Lyric* The Sound of Music – London Palladium* Dirty Dancing – Aldwych* Porgy and Bess – Savoy* Daddy Cool – Shaftesbury Theatre* Seven Brides for Seven Brothers – Theatre Royal Haymarket. “If what is on is strong, you get a strong response, whether musicals or plays. But next year some producers will be licking their wounds, because I don’t think that all these shows will survive.”Richard Pulford, of the Society of London Theatre, said audience responses were a function of the shows themselves. “So many times in recent years, when you walked around the West End, especially in the summer, you saw dark theatre after dark theatre.”Today there’s a real buzz. In 2006, it has been more like three big openings a month.”There were some concerns that musicals were squeezing out “straight plays” “But I think that’s a happy dilemma to have,” she said.

More than a third would like to see more home-grown productions, rather than Broadway imports; 46 per cent would like to see more new musicals instead of revivals; and 68 per cent said that in the wake of the success of We Will Rock You and Mama Mia!, there were too many pop compilation musicals.Venues are at such a premium that many playhouses, small theatres which have normally been the home of plays, have been co-opted for musicals.Terri Paddock, the editorial director of Whatsonstage , said it was remarkable to be experiencing such a boom only one year after the London bombings.”Two years ago, the West End was flying high with three big openings in the autumn season – The Producers, The Woman in White and Mary Poppins. Nearly three-fifths of the survey named it as the production they were most looking forward to. The recently-arrived adult puppet show Avenue Q, and Spamalot, the adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, were also on the must-see lists.The British public has already indicated massive interest in the stage version of the hit film Dirty Dancing, which became the fastest-selling show in West End history when tickets went on sale earlier this year.But theatre fans do have some quibbles about the current glut. It is one of the busiest years for song and dance in living memory, according to a survey.