Tiff Stevenson ★★★★“I identify as a 10!” Tiff Stevenson tells us in Bombshell. It’s a strong opener, particularly as she follows with: “And if you don’t agree you’re beauty-phobic.” It’s not to boast, though, more marking her territory in a show about the shifting sands of modern sexual politics. Why should women identify with a male view of the world?She playfully sets up the seeming incongruity of loving to dress in leopardskin while being able to talk about the semiotics of feminism - the two aren't mutually exclusive, after all, and how you see yourself is not necessarily how others Read more ...

There are two approaches to a triple bill: make all three pieces similar so you get one crowd with definite tastes, or make them very different so you have a chance of pleasing everyone. The Contrasts bill that the Mariinsky ballet showed at the Royal Opera House was, as its title suggests, firmly in the latter camp. Its three pieces spanned over a hundred years of ballet history, from the Imperial classic Paquita via a stylised 1960s Carmen all the way to Wayne McGregor's 2008 Infra.Carmen was created as a vehicle for Maya Plisetskaya, the great Soviet ballerina who died in 2015, and it Read more ...

Eve ★★★★Transgender issues are high on the agenda at this year’s Fringe, with the energetic Testosterone at the Pleasance and the breezy You’ve Changed from Northern Stage at Summerhall among the stand-outs. In addition, the National Theatre of Scotland brings two trans-themed shows to the Traverse Theatre. Eve is a deeply personal, autobiographical work from playwright Jo (formerly John) Clifford, co-written with Fringe regular Chris Goode, that reflects on the challenges and joys of her life from a fearful young boy – before being transgender was even considered as a concept – to the Read more ...

When you’re next strolling through Washington Square Park, or SoHo, or the West Village, you can thank Jane Jacobs that those New York neighbourhoods have survived (though she'd blanch at the price of real estate). Four-lane highways almost dissected and ruined them in the mid-Fifties, but her grass-roots activism saved those higgledy-piggledy streets. This film has some great archival footage that brings those days to life, though it could have done with fewer talking heads and more detailed interpretation.Vanity Fair writer and director Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for Read more ...

The road to hell is paved with brilliant ideas in Berlioz's idiosyncratic take on the Faust legend. John Eliot Gardiner proved better than anyone in last night's Prom that this splendidly lopsided "dramatic legend" can only be weakened by its many stagings; all the drama is in the music, and especially in the orchestra, from rollicking country dances and fanfaring Hungarians through to the shrieking night birds on the ride to the abyss and the six harps dappling the plains of heaven in what for modern tastes is a quite unnecessary "Epilogue in Heaven" for redeemed Marguerite.Gardiner is a Read more ...

Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” plays as Charlize Theron’s Lorraine Broughton makes her entrance. She’s the last Cold War super-spy, a female Bond sent to Berlin as the Wall crumbles. “Killer Queen”, prominent on early trailers, would have done just as well. Daniel Craig in Casino Royale is the last time an action star made such a startling bow.We meet Broughton before her post-Berlin debrief from suspicious spooks including her harassed MI6 boss Eric Gray (Toby Jones) and CIA counterpart Kurzfeld (John Goodman). As she immerses her bruised body in an ice-bath which she scoops to put Read more ...

 Rhinoceros ★★★★★Marketed by an image of a Trump-quiffed and -besuited pachyderm, Zinnie Harris’s new version of Ionesco’s absurdist 1959 comedy is one of the International Festival flagship shows for 2017, a collaboration between Edinburgh’s own Royal Lyceum Theatre and Istanbul’s DOT Theatre. And with its wild, scabrous humour and its blazing, furious energy, it doesn’t disappoint. This is a Rhinoceros very much for our times, with fake news, mistrust of immigrants and even a USA gone to the dogs under a tinpot dictator all firmly referenced, in amongst Ionesco’s tale of the Read more ...

Even the canniest scheduler at BBC One couldn’t have arranged things so propitiously. Jodie Whittaker was already filming the medical drama Trust Me when she was cast as you know Who. Trolls unhappy at a female i/c the Tardis will have their quips ready: spot the difference between a woman who passes herself as a doctor and a woman who passes herself off as a Doctor.Trust Me, among other things, is a timely shop window for Whittaker’s abilities. The plot requires her to play her own private game of doctors and nurses. At the start she’s Cath Hardacre, a ballsy ward sister who makes the Read more ...

Only man is vile, goes the hymn, and yet humankind has always imagined ideal societies where people care for one another, everyone has access to anything necessary physical and emotional well-being, and all is for the best – without irony – in the best of all possible worlds.It may never have been achieved in reality, but in the first of a three-part documentary Utopia: In Search of the Dream (BBC Four) Professor Richard Clay, an art historian and Newcastle’s first professor of digital humanities (sic), led us through a memorable discussion of the ideas and ideals of utopias and importance of Read more ...

A Prom of unrelenting momentum began promisingly with Beethoven, and the false start that opens his First Symphony. On this showing, Kirill Karabits has coached his Bournemouth musicians in the classical repertoire with a dash and flair that brings to mind a golden era for the orchestra under the stewardship of Rudolf Barshai in the 1980s. Metronome-mark tempi even outstripped his Russian predecessor, though diligent observance of accents, and delight in some of Beethoven’s naughty-boy antics, did not fully compensate for a pervasive lack of weight. We didn’t get much beyond the idea of the Read more ...

"Ura!" as soldiers cry in Russian epic opera's last fling, Prokofiev's War and Peace: supertitles have arrived at the Proms, after much special pleading here and elsewhere. They're needed more than ever in Musorgsky's typically quirky survey of rival interest-groups at the beginning of young Tsar Peter I's reign, though I like to think that newcomers to Khovanshchina ("The Khovansky Business") would have got the message about each formidable personage and scene without them, so vivid was this realisation of the way Musorgsky characterises roistering princes, humble scribes and calm Old Read more ...

James Hamilton’s wholly absorbing biography is very different from the usual kind of art historical study that often surrounds such a major figure as Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Hamilton is positively in love with his subject, and writes with verve and enthusiasm, yet grounds it on vast research with primary and secondary sources, all impeccably noted.The whole, organised into 40 pithy chapters with titles such as “In the Painting Room”, is like a piece of stage craft come to life. Hamilton sweeps the reader into the world of 18th century Suffolk, smoke-filled Bath – all those coal fires Read more ...