2. LIVERPOOL writer Robert Farquhar (Bad Jazz, Anthology - A Word Does Not Exist) will premiere his new comedy, Dead Heavy Fantastic, at the Everyman in March. The script received a big reaction from the audience when performed in a rehearsed reading at the theatre's Everyword festival last year.

The play follows lonely heart Frank on a rollercoaster of a night out in Liverpool and will be directed by Matt Wilde (On Tour, Lost Monsters).

DEAD Heavy Fantastic, Liverpool Everyman, March 11 - April 2.

3. TATE Liverpool will focus on one of the world's most revered and popular artists of the 20th century in its big summer exhibition Rene Magritte: The Pleasure Principle. The first major UK exhibition of the Belgian Surrealist in almost 20 years, it will look at the less explored aspects of his life and artistic practice, concentrating on themes including the artist's use of pattern and artifice, ideas and revelation, and visual fracture and eroticism.

RENE MAGRITTE: The Pleasure Principle, Tate Liverpool, June 24 to October 16.

4. OLIVIER Award winning playwright Mike Bartlett won rave reviews for Love Love Love when it premiered last year. Touring to the Liverpool Playhouse in May, it takes on the babyboom generation as it retires and finds it full of trouble.

LOVE, Love, Love, Liverpool Playhouse, May 5-7.

5. PHOTOGRAPHER Paul Trevor came to Liverpool in 1975 as part of the Survival Programmes project looking at inner-city deprivation. Over a period of several months he recorded family life on the fringes of the city centre, concentrating on Granby and Everton. Among the terraced streets and high rise flats, he captured images of a community defiant and proud despite a backdrop of mass unemployment and poverty.

The Walker is holding an exhibition of his work alongside testimony of those featured in the pictures.

LIKE You've Never Been Away, Walker Art Gallery, May 13 - September 25.

6. DIRECT from an acclaimed West End season, Linda Marlowe brings Carol Ann Duffy's collection of poems, The World's Wife, to life, imagining the wives' perspective of famous men through the ages. From Mrs Faust and Mrs Freud to Queen Kong, she slices through history, myth and the modern world in a show laced with dark humour and acid wit.

THE World's Wife, The Unity, March 8.

7. FOR the first time in the history of DC Comics, see Batman as you never have before, in an all-new, live-action arena adventure. The multi-million pound stage production is based on an original story being created exclusively for the show and promises thrilling stunts, acrobatic acts and illusions.

BATMAN Live, Echo Arena, September 7-11.

8. JOHN CLEESE is bringing his Alimony Tour to the Liverpool Empire, in what he describes as "an evening of well honed anecdotes, psychoanalytical tit-bits, details of recent surgical procedures, and unprovoked attacks on former colleagues, especially Michael Palin". One for all Monty Python fans, old, young and somewhere in the middle.

JOHN CLEESE, Liverpool Empire, May 31.

9. ARTS venues will join together to create events throughout the year under the City of Radicals banner. Highlights will include A Winter's Trail, an art trail around the city based on local people's stories, and Art and Revolution, the restaging of the Post-Impressionist exhibition, which took place at the Bluecoat in 1911.

10. TICKETS have been selling fast for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra's award-winning Manfred concert in April, when chief conductor Vasily Petrenko will lead it through Tchaikovsky's formidable Manfred Symphony - a work that earned the Phil major accolades last year.

AWARD-WINNING Manfred, Philharmonic Hall, April 3.