Hayley Atwell

Further details set for Much Ado About Nothing

The Jamie Lloyd Company has announced the on-sale dates for its production of Much Ado About Nothing.

The new revival of Shakespeare's much-loved comedy stars Tom Hiddleston (Loki, Betrayal, Avengers: Endgame) as Benedick and Hayley Atwell (Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Rosmersholm, Captain America: The First Avenger) as Beatrice, directed by Jamie Lloyd.

Charlie Brooker on "Be Right Back", Black Mirror's softest, saddest, strangest episode

The series creator and writer on the madness of grief, technology manipulating our emotions, and the uncanny valley where those two ideas meet.

Dry Powder review: A razor-sharp comedy

Hayley Atwell takes a glorious relish in conveying the conscience-free capitalist zealotry of Jenny in Sarah Burgess's comedy set in the cut-throat world of high-finance.

Stephen Merchant in car crash in Los Angeles

Stephen Merchant has escaped injury after being involved in a collision in LA. The Office actor, who was travelling with his actress girlfriend Hayley Atwell at the time, was heading down Melrose Avenue when the incident happened, it has been reported.

Radio Times review

Though Black Mirror sometimes lacks subtlety, that's sort of the point - we live in a world of ever-widening extremes. What the show does so cleverly is to merge this present reality with a sci-fi future so convincingly realised it seems more of a prediction than a warning. This series bettered the first, though the final episode, The Waldo Moment, suffered by comparison with the earlier instalments. Be Right Back, starring Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson, was a beautiful, haunting exploration of virtual life after death, while the horror of White Bear, where punishment became entertainment, was hard to shake off.

The second series of Charlie Brooker's technology-based, self-contained dramas Black Mirror kicked off with a chiller set in the near future entitled Be Right Back. Hayley Atwell stars as Martha, a bereaved girlfriend who assuages her grief with the help of a useful telephone app that draws upon the departed's online footprint to offer a virtual form of communication beyond the grave.

Brooker's trademark cynical sense of humour is noticeable by its absence as the first 30 minutes concentrates on Martha's loneliness, desperation and unbearable sense of loss. But then things take a distinct turn for the sci-fi, with Martha taking delivery of what can best be described as a grow-in-the-bath android to give her late boyfriend actual physical form.

Much like Martha and her android, Brooker walked the idea around for a while, realised it was going nowhere and ultimately opted for abandonment. To the writer's credit he resisted the temptation to take the tale into the realms of terror, although I can't help wondering if this would have provided a far more satisfying conclusion than sticking the poor surrogate up in the loft.

But for all its flaws, Black Mirror remains compulsive viewing. Well made, well acted and never less than imaginative, it is one of the few dramas around that explores ideas rather than scenarios, employing a dramatically diverse palette of tones in the process.

There's nothing so showy as the PM getting cosy with a pig in this, the first of three new standalone stories from Charlie Brooker; rather, it's a sad and pensive look at love and loss, with that necessary dystopian twist. Martha (Hayley Atwell) is grieving following her boyfriend's death, until a friend signs her up for a virtual service that creates a version of him based on his online footprint. It is as much about people shaping each other as it is a nightmarish vision of the future, but it is no less compelling for that.

Charlie Brooker stares into the black mirror of modern life - we are all a blank screen - for a fresh trio of dark 'what if' tales. In this first disturbing drama, he toys with the notion that the little bits of ourselves we send out into the ether as tweets and status updates could be engineered to take on a life of their own - a kind of Frankenstein cyber-monster. So switch off your smartphone and settle back for a dystopian vision of life as young lovers Martha (Hayley Atwell) and social media addict boyfriend Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) find their relationship takes an unnerving twist.

Charlie Brooker's fables of the near future return. It was one of the most disturbing and oddly hilarious dramas of last year, but repeating the trick is harder. Shock value in this new instalment comes from the premise that we might soon be able to re-create a dead loved one using their online history.

When a tragic accident robs Martha (Hayley Atwell) of her boyfriend Ash, she is tempted to try a cutting-edge internet service - and a virtual Ash returns to her in an unsettling parable about grief. It's an intriguing idea, chillingly realised.

You'd be hard pushed to call the first part of Charlie Brooker's returning series a comedy. In fact, Be Right Back is often downright sad. Martha (Hayley Atwell, giving a career-best performance in a demanding role) is stuck in an isolated countryside cottage, mourning the loss of her partner, Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) - a guy she loved deeply in spite of his irritating obsession with Twitter. Then the opportunity arises to reconstruct his personality through his online history of emails, tweets, Facebook updates et al. Initially appalled, Martha's resolve starts to crumble as her loneliness intensifies, before some unexpected news forces her hand...

Even if, as with some of the first series of Black Mirror, the denouement can't quite live up to the restless invention and plausible clairvoyance of what's gone before, this is still high-calibre television bursting with ideas and emotional engagement.