The standup on being a vibe killer, studying Richard Pryor and why comedy isn’t for good-looking peopleWho is your comedy hero?I grew up idolising a lot of standups: Chris Rock, Maria Bamford, Bridget Christie. I followed Ross Noble around (that soun...
As she takes the words of Grenfell Tower fire survivors to the New York stage, the playwright talks about being drawn to painful subjects, and the disaster’s worldwide relevanceThe night I saw Grenfell, the play by Gillian Slovo based on interviews w...
Robyn Malcolm is incredible in this morally complex drama, as a woman who believes she saw her ex-husband sexually assault a minorSome fraught and morally complex spaces are entered in the six-part New Zealand drama After the Party, which is executed...
As people play their hearts out on station platforms, this is undoubtedly stirring stuff – but there’s always been something terribly odd plaguing it tooThe new series of The Piano confronts the obvious problem head on. “I thought we were one and don...
Usher Hall, EdinburghThe indie artist deploys her songs like controlled explosions as she turns the stage into a cabaret, a circus, a cageA curtain hangs centre stage, as if set for a magician’s disappearing act. Mitski, barely visible in a black dre...
In the bestselling novelist’s latest, Anna Walsh moves back to Dublin and falls for an old flame in a comical tale of grit, growth and self-acceptanceSince she first introduced them to readers in her 1995 debut, Watermelon, Marian Keyes has been draw...
Chichester Festival theatreMike Poulton’s adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s novel shows how the sisters refuse to be passive victimsWife Number 2 to serial husband, King Henry VIII, first to be beheaded and a marital trigger for the Reformation, Anne...
The socialite and collector prioritised art over family and claimed she had 1,000 lovers. But a new UK exhibition tells another tale – that of the five years she spent in Hampshire and Sussex leading a relatively ordinary life, as her granddaughter e...
Dundee RepMorna Young’s new adaptation, directed by Finn den Hertog, captures the earthiness of rural life in early 1900s Scotland, but it needs to dig deeperIn front of a backdrop suggesting a sunset-streaked sky is set a square of bare brown earth....
Royal Festival Hall, LondonJurowski’s attention to detail across four-and-a-half hours brought the darkness of Wagner’s score thrillingly to lifeWagner’s Ring cycle is famously long. Even so, a cycle that has lasted more than six years is some kind o...
Brighton DomeRanganathan’s Hustle delivers laughs, but not the shock of the new. It is at its best when we glimpse something meaningful beneath the standard-issue curmudgeonliness‘I’ll be honest with you: I’m getting sick of me too.” His TV ubiquity...
As Luca Guadagnino’s acclaimed tennis film Challengers makes its case for sporting immortality, critic Guy Lodge chooses 20 of the genre’s undisputed heavyweightsChallengers reviewed by Wendy IdeAnalogies of life as sport have been exhausted by every...
The story of Edgardo Mortara, removed from his family by the Catholic church in 1850s Bologna, is told with elegant restraint by veteran director Marco BellocchioPope Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon, excellent) has a smile that could freeze a chalice of comm...
The solicitor, campaigner and feminist reflects on her notable cases, from overturning Sally Challen’s murder conviction using the defence of coercive control, to the bid to stop the release of serial rapist John WorboysFeminist Harriet Wistrich had...
Old Vic; Battersea Arts Centre; Bush theatre, LondonRichard Jones’s supercharged staging of Sophie Treadwell’s 1920s masterpiece hits like a fist; Emma Rice subverts a dark fairytale with circus gaiety; and a young couple unravel beautifully in Bijan...