A clutch of top-notch new novels has just been published, all of them by ­literary heavyweights, all dealing with theatrical performances of various kinds.

Anne Enright’s Actress (Jonathan Cape, £16.99; Tablet price £15.29) tells the story of a fictional stage-and-screen star, Katherine O’Dell, who initially seems a kind of Maureen O’Hara figure. O’Dell is a red-haired beauty who plays Irish parts in post-war Hollywood, socialises with the cultural elite of Dublin and supports the republican cause. But the story is told from the perspective of O’Dell’s daughter, who reveals that O’Dell is actually the London-born “Katherine Odell”, and that the actor’s English identity was forever altered by a reviewer who mistakenly introduced a Hibernicising apostrophe to the surname. At times, the book reads like a genuine biography, with Enright including the names of several real-life critics and actors, and telling a story of the Hollywood Irish that is broadly familiar from the work of researchers such as Adrian Frazier. But writing a novel allows Enright to create a compelling narrative arc, which traces O’Dell’s decline into poverty, then madness and criminality. Enright also depicts the mother-daughter relationship as a true love story. Numerous lovers and flunkies accompany O’Dell in her glory days, but only her daughter remains to help with the frailties and indignities of old age.