In a bid to attract high-end customers to its flight service, British Airways (BA) has put together a brand new offering for travellers, making key improvements to beds, mattresses and their surroundings. BA revealed its contemporary improvements at the same time as a number of other competitors announced their decision to instead focus on economy travel in a bid to attract more individuals while also keeping their heads above water during the downturn. None other than Rachel Weisz, the blockbuster actress, was brought in to promote the launch of the design, which is supposedly inspired by classic British luxury car brands including Jaguar and Aston Martin. BA explained that the first-class seats fold into a flat bed, providing 60 per cent more shoulder room and a leather-bound writing desk/dining table conversion, a USB port for personal electronics and even a personal wardrobe. Source: Silentnight.co.uk

British film actress Rachel Weisz, star of The Mummy and About a Boy, has received glowing reviews for her London stage performance as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, with the Daily Telegraph’s theatre critic Charles Spencer calling it “by some distance, the best Streetcar I have seen”. Weisz rises to the challenge of playing DuBois “magnificently”, says Spencer, who admits he had thought the Oscar-winning actress would “almost certainly fail” in the role of the fragile widow who leaves home to join her sister and brother-in-law in New Orleans. “She has had relatively little stage experience and surely, I reasoned, she was too young, and too beautiful, to play the now fading, hard-drinking and wildly promiscuous Southern belle on the edge of complete breakdown,” Spencer writes in his four-star review. Read full article.

Rachel Weisz returns to the Donmar Warehouse where, 15 years ago, her appearance in Noël Coward’s Design For Living – with Clive Owen and Paul Rhys – won her a best newcomer award. Since then she has appeared there in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer (and more recently won film kudos and awards for The Constant Gardener), and it is to another Williams hothouse drama that she returns for her latest role. Following in the footsteps of Glenn Close at the National in 2002, Weisz plays Blanche DuBois, the slightly deranged, ageing southern belle who arrives at the home of her sister in downtown New Orleans, where her delusions and veneer of respectability are smashed by her brutal brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski (Elliot Cowan). Rob Ashford, the choreographer who made his directorial debut with the Donmar production of Parade, takes charge again.