Performance

(re-broadcast) Les Dawson donned a stringy wig and voluminous black dress to play the title role in Roberto Cossa 's grim satire of post-Falklands Argentina. First shown in 1991, it is repeated here as a tribute to the comedian, who died earlier this year. Nona, "the old one", is the 100-year-old matriarch of a city family, whose gluttony reduces her kinfolk to beggary, prostitution and death. The role is traditionally played by a leading male comic. Dawson chomped his way to an 181b weight-gain during the filming, but was glad of the opportunity to extend himself theatrically. "It's good that people can see me doing something other than a game show. There comes a point when you're not stretching yourself any more - hence my little excursion into the heavier theatre."

When Tennessee Williams wrote Suddenly Last Summer in 1957 he described it as" a kind of catharsis, a final fling at violence"; and the story of a mother who will stop at nothing to protect the memory of her dead son is indeed one of Williams's bleakest visions. In the first of this major new season of studio drama, Maggie Smith plays Mrs Venable , whose grief at the loss of her beloved poet son Sebastian turns to rage against her niece Catharine (Natasha Richardson ), his last companion and witness of his gruesome death. Determined to erase the memory of Sebastian's loss, she tries to persuade her pet doctor (Rob Lowe) to perform a lobotomy on Catharine.

Currently starring in Machinal at the Royal National Theatre, Fiona Shaw was known more for her comedy roles until theatre director Deborah Warner cast her as Elektra and The Good Citizen of Szechuan and then as Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. This was In an acclaimed production in Dublin, which moved to London's West End. Shaw re-creates the role for Performance with a new supporting cast, Including Stephen Rea as Ejlert Lovborg , but still directed by Warner. Nervous and agitated rather than haughty and frigid, Fiona Shaw 's Hedda breaks with tradition. "Hedda is often called strong-willed," she comments, "but where is the evidence in the play for this? To me, Hedda is terribly ordinary."

Michael Gambon (Maigret, The Singing Detective) plays Archie Rice , the role made famous on stage (1957) and on film (1960) by his illustrious first mentor, Laurence Olivier. Gambon was 23 and still working as a toolmaker when he was auditioned by the great man for a role in the National Theatre's opening production of Hamlet, and cast as spear-carrier. A year later, on Gambon's opening night as Othello in Birmingham, Olivier sent him a good luck telegram: "The other actors thought I'd sent it myself," Gambon recalls. As the central character in John Osborne 's drama, he plays a drunken, lecherous, egotistical vaudevillian whose act is on the downward slope.

Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's tragedy has been called "the most convincing picture of uninhibited sexual desire in Elizabethan drama". In this version, edited by Michael Hastings, much of the original sub-plot has been cut to concentrate on a dark story of lust and revenge between two ambiguous, guilt-ridden individuals. Bob Hoskins stars as De Flores, the "ominous ill-fac'd fellow" led by his desire for the imperious virgin Beatrice Joanna (Elizabeth McGovern) into murder and adultery. "It's a play I've always been fascinated by," says Performance producer Simon Curtis. "I saw Helen Mirren in a BBC production of it in the 70s, and that was a seminal experience for me. The Changeling is far more psychologically accurate than most plays of its period, and it has this taut, claustrophobic atmosphere that lends itself well to the screen."