Yet Marlowe shouldn't get complacent about the success of her formula. Some reviewers of her latest show have suggested that the narrative coherence is sometimes a little sacrificed by multiple role-playing. Still, if required, Linda Marlowe is well worth working hard for.

Jim Crace, a novelist who John Updike has described as 'a writer of hallucinatory skill', is also on Saturday's bill for the Lewes live literature festival. He reads from his new as yet unreleased novel, ‘The Pesthouse’, which imagines a retrogressive future for America, in which central Government has collapsed. The eery nostalgia which concludes the first chapter resonates with a not so distant dystopian reality, 'This was America,' he writes, 'it used to be the safest place on earth.' Another highlight is the poet-sculptor Pascale Petit who speaks alongside the Pakistani poet Imtiaz Dharker. Petit's last two collections, The Zoo Father and The Huntress, were both short-listed for the TS Eliot prize and were books of the year in the Times Literary Supplement. She was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation Poets in 2004. Petit reads from her latest collection this afternoon, The Wonderful Deer - fourteen poems after Frida Kahlo, accompanied by projected visual images. ER