The playwright Bathsheba Doran has blazed a stellar trail ever since graduating from Cambridge at the same time as David Mitchell and Robert Webb. After writing for them on the sketch show Bruiser, she earned her spurs as a comedy writer on Smack the Pony, won a Fulbright Scholarship, and eventually became a playwriting fellow at the Juilliard School.The fact that she has subsequently been festooned with prizes for playwriting as well as being award-nominated for her work on the Martin Scorsese-produced HBO series Boardwalk Empire means hopes are high as you descend into the charmingly Read more ...

If you're going to write a play that traffics in bafflement, it's not a bad idea to have on hand one of the most beady-eyed actresses around. That would be Dame Eileen Atkins, whose keen-eyed intelligence cuts a swathe through the deliberate obfuscations of The Height of the Storm, the latest from the ever-prolific Frenchman, Florian Zeller. More than any of his previous works, the fractured storytelling at work here adds up to an elaborate puzzle that is sure to leave audiences debating over post-show drinks what the hell actually happened. Such discussions need not be rushed, by the way, Read more ...

The first release from Jess Glynne’s new album, “I’ll Be There” confirmed the North London singer as the first ever British female artist to have seven no.1 singles in the UK Chart.She’s been winning MOBOs, Grammys, Brit, Ivor Novello and MTV Awards for the last four years, and while some of the above successes have come from collaborations (major hits with Clean Bandit’s "Rather Be" and Route 94’s "My Love", for example) Jess has become a household name in her own right, with a distinctive sound of big vowels, mad vibrato, gospel underlay and a housey beat. Which is clearly a reliable Read more ...

So Wanderlust (BBC One) has ceased wandering and its angsty parade of characters have left a sentence unfinished for the last time. In the end, where were we, compared to where we’ve been? The final episode opened with Joy, like King Alfred, burning the pancakes. Seemingly her boats had suffered the same fate, atomised under the centrifugal forces of love and lust, but also a mass break-out of grief. She tried filling the void with muffins.Nick Payne’s six-part drama has sought to test the strength of longstanding relationships and decided to find in favour of the devil you know. Alan’s ( Read more ...

Latvia is fighting fit. The recent elections did not see the expected victory for the pro-Kremlin Harmony party; support for the European Union and NATO will be well represented. Last week the feisty Lavtian Ambassador to the UK, Baiba Braže, landed a perfectly diplomatic punch on the smug mug of our latest apology for a Foreign Secretary, taking former Remainer Hunt to task for his outrageous parallels between the EU and the Soviet gulag by reminding him how Latvia had suffered under the USSR and how eagerly it has adopted the best European values. And last night's second Royal Festival Hall Read more ...

Whatever you might think about Brexit, the dreaded B word, the current climate certainly seems to be reinvigorating both feminist playwrights and political playwrights. So welcome back, David Hare, the go-to dramatist for any artistic director wanting to stage a contemporary state-of-the-nation play. His latest, with the rather downbeat title of I'm Not Running, opened at the National Theatre, but it may be a disappointment to anyone looking for answers to burning current questions because it is more concerned with an imaginary female contender for the Labour leadership than with Brexit, Read more ...

During his quarter-century in charge of the Gewandhausorchester in Leipzig, the late Kurt Masur nobly held out a musical hand of friendship and collaboration from the other side of the Iron Curtain. So how heartening to hear that the Southbank Centre has inaugurated a five-year partnership with the venerable Saxons – just when, as Bob Geldof, Simon Rattle, Ed Sheeran, John Eliot Gardiner and other celebs have warned in their recent open letter, the “serious madness” of Brexit threatens to shut British music into an East German isolation of its own.For all his versatility as a conductor, Masur Read more ...

What better way to celebrate a homecoming than with a party? That is the capacious-hearted thinking behind this new musical version of Twelfth Night, which additionally marks Kwame Kwei-Armah's debut production at the helm of that undeniable dynamo otherwise known as the Young Vic. Resident of late Stateside where he was running Baltimore's Center Stage, Kwei-Armah has posited as his opening production a show that celebrates London in a giddy spirit of inclusion that seems a necessary antidote to our mean-spirited times.And if Kwei-Armah's production, credited to him and the powerhouse Read more ...

Baroque repertoire doesn’t seem to register on most British opera company’s schedules these days, so it is good to see ETO devoting their autumn season to Handel, Purcell and Bach, with some additions from Carissimi and Gesualdo for good measure. Their first production, Handel’s Radamisto, is a good choice for touring, a compact six-hander with strong characters and great music. The staging, by General Director James Conway, with designs by Adam Wiltshire, is colourful and atmospheric, though clearly on a scale for touring. And musical standards are generally high, with a strong and engaging Read more ...

Re-casting a beloved character always carries a measure of risk. Solo: A Star Wars Story relied on the willingness of fans to buy in to Alden Ehrenreich as a younger incarnation of Harrison Ford: the film bombed (you know, in Star Wars terms, since it barely made $400 million). New Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall had an even bigger risk on his hands, casting the first northerner in the titular role since Christopher Eccleston in 2005 – but Jodie Whittaker did not disappoint.In fact, by her first “what?” – delivered to half the supporting cast after she dropped through the roof of an Read more ...

Pitched as “a tale of two artists”, the National Gallery’s big autumn show promises a history woven in shades of friendship and rivalry, marriage and family, privilege and hard graft. Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini were brothers-in-law, Mantegna’s marriage to Nicolosia Bellini in 1453 a strategic match that brought fresh blood to Venice’s greatest artistic dynasty. The marriage kept commissions, and so money and prestige, safely within the family, but the two artists pursued entirely separate careers, Bellini distinguishing himself as a painter of landscapes and Mantegna as a master of Read more ...

You get a lot of notes for your money in a two-piano recital - especially when seven pianists share the honours for two and a half hours' worth of playing time. Well, they did call it a marathon, crowning the London Piano Festival so shiningly planned by Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen, and the baton passed seamlessly from two pairs of hands to the next. All the more remarkable when nothing seemed likely to surpass the infinite poetry of the opening couple, young Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy in Debussy's arrangement of Schumann's Six Pieces in Canonic Form. Nothing did, but there were Read more ...