Theatre

There's really no need to switch off your phones and iPods and iPads next time you are on a plane. Over to James Fallows: - 100% of the pilots making those landings and approaches have GPS receivers right there next to them in the cockpits, of the kind you would have to turn off if you had one in your lap in seat 38F; [...]- More and more pilots have iPads turned on through the entire flight, including United pilots who are being switched en masse from paper to iPad navigational charts. I now use an iPad extensively when flying, because the program I use, Foreflight, is so much more adaptable and informative than the paper charts it replaced. It would make things riskier, rather than safer, if I had to turn it off at arbitrary times.

Hugh Leonard has died. His Telegraph obituary reeks of boozy afternoons in Dublin's finest hostelries: Indeed, Leonard relished quarrels. "An Irish literary movement," he used to say, "is when two playwrights are on speaking terms"... Leonard resented what he saw as his exclusion from the Irish arts world, and poured vitriol on lesser performers. The trouble with Ireland, he said, was that it was "a country full of genius, but with absolutely no talent". His critics were equally forthright about the Leonard ego. He was, said one, not an original playwright, merely "an adapter always in search of a plug". Leonard retorted in kind. He eagerly debunked other famous names, including Brendan Behan, who, he said, owed all his success to Joan Littlewood's editing.

Condensed Shakespeare: nation's tabloids report modern repeat of story of Romeo & Juliet under headline: KNIFE CRIME TOFF IN PAEDO SUICIDE PACT.

Courtesy of Sarah Schmelling at McSweeney's: Horatio thinks he saw a ghost. Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies. The king thinks Hamlet's annoying. Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better. Hamlet's father is now a zombie. - - - - The king poked the queen. The queen poked the king back. Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends. Marcellus is pretty sure something's rotten around here. Hamlet became a fan of daggers. V droll.

Lovely story told by Simon Hoggart in his Guardian column at the weekend: The death of Simon Gray lets me reprise a favourite story. He was a close friend of Harold Pinter, a great cricket lover. Once Pinter wrote a poem about his hero Len Hutton. It read, in its entirety "I saw Hutton in his prime / Another time, another time." He sent it to several of his friends. Soon afterwards Pinter and Gray were at the same dinner party and Pinter asked what he thought of the poem. "I don't know, Harold," said Gray. "I'm afraid I haven't finished it yet.

Sad news. Simon Gray, the playwright and memoirist, has died. Just last month I read the latest, and, I suppose, final installment of The Smoking Diaries, a wonderful, funny, poignant set of memoirs that I recommend without the slightest reservation. More importantly, sad because he was one of my father's oldest friends from Cambridge days way back when. Not many of them left. Booze and tobacco and all that. Telegraph obituary here. The Guardian's Michael Billington here. And a characteristically good Simon Hattenstone interview here. Understandably Gray rather disapproved of the notion that his memoirs may outlive his plays, but that's the nature of the respective genres. But I can't think of a better thing to read in what remains of this dismal summer than Simon Gray's diaries.