2023’s hot 100: the essential shows, exhibitions, books and theatre to see in the New Year
From Donatello to Steven Spielberg’s self-portrait to Salman Rushdie’s new novel, our critics have got your start to the new year sorted
January 1
TV | Happy Valley
Sarah Lancashire’s Sergeant Cawood is ready to retire, but there is a murderer (James Norton) back on the scene. Love and hate are very much at the forefront of Sally Wainwright’s searing Yorkshire police drama, returning after seven years for its final series.
BBC One
January 6
Exhibitions | Giorgio Morandi
Fifty works on loan from a private collection, including lots of characteristically enigmatic still lifes by the restrained yet intense 20th-century Italian painter.
Estorick Collection, London N1 (estorickcollection.com), until April 30
TV | The Rig
What’s worse than being trapped on an oil rig? Being trapped on an oil rig that’s being stalked by a murderous supernatural being. This is addictive, rollicking binge-fodder, starring Martin Compston.
Amazon Prime Video
Pop | Iggy Pop: Every Loser
The first big album of 2023 is the 25th offering from the seemingly indestructible James Osterberg, 75, still rocking harder and fiercer than any punk on the planet.
Gold Tooth
Film | A Man Called Otto
Tom Hanks gets cantankerous as a widower whose forced retirement leads him to a series of failed suicide attempts, in a US remake of Swedish comedy-drama A Man Called Ove.
Cinemas
January 7
Theatre | George Takei’s Allegiance
Aged 85, Takei (Star Trek’s Mr Sulu) makes his London stage debut in his autobiographically inspired musical about Japanese-Americans interned during the Second World War.
Charing Cross Theatre, London WC2 (charingcrosstheatre.co.uk), until April 8
Comedy | Daniel Sloss
Cynical beyond his years, the Scottish Netflix star is back in the UK for just seven shows on his world tour.
Alhambra, Dunfermline (danielsloss.com), and touring
January 8
Pop | The 1975
Britain’s most self-conscious millennial band are clearly enjoying themselves with their At Their Very Best tour, playing all their hits in the style of souped-up 1980s yacht rock.
The Brighton Centre (the1975.com), and touring
January 9
Film | Empire of Light
A faded picture palace on the south coast is host to Olivia Colman’s fling with a young usher (Micheal Ward), in Sam Mendes’s tribute to the lost art of film projection.
Cinemas
January 11
Comedy | Alex Edelman: Just For Us
Edelman revisits his Orthodox Jewish upbringing and tries to find the lighter side of anti-Semitism in a story about how he infiltrated a neo-Nazi group.
Menier Chocolate Factory, London SE1 (menierchocolatefactory.com), until Feb 26
TV | Welcome to Chippendales
The gripping story of the founder of the male-stripper empire. A true-crime saga of dodgy dealings, dancing and murder.
Disney+
January 12
Dance | Swan Lake Derek Deane’s staging of the 1895 Petipa/Ivanov/Drigo classic for English National Ballet is the genuine article, conveying its time-honoured narrative as elegantly and economically as possible. London Coliseum, WC2 (ballet.org.uk), until Jan 22
Comedy | Emily Wilson: Fixed
A decade ago, aged 15, Wilson made it to the finals of The X Factor. She tells the hilarious, troubling story of what went on behind the scenes.
Soho Theatre, London W1 (sohotheatre.com), until Jan 21
January 13
Film | Enys Men
Mark Jenkin follows his acclaimed breakout hit Bait with this spine-fingeringly eerie folk horror, about a botanist on a deserted Cornish isle brushing up against the place’s many ghosts.
Cinemas
Theatre | Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee’s 1962 classic of academic marital hell, revived with Elizabeth McGovern (Downton Abbey) going head-to-head with Dougray Scott (Mission: Impossible II). Lindsay Posner, David Mamet’s regular collaborator, directs. Theatre Royal Bath (theatreroyal.org.uk), until Feb 11
Film | Tár
Little Children director Todd Field returns with a There Will Be Blood-level knockout: an uproarious, unnerving psychological drama with Cate Blanchett as a gifted conductor hurtling towards personal and professional collapse.
Cinemas
Classical | BBC Symphony Orchestra
A chance to fly the flag for Ukraine: the pianist in Rachmaninov’s heart-melting 3rd Piano Concerto, the 3rd Symphony by Boris Lyatoshinsky and conductor Kirill Karabits all hail from the embattled country.
Barbican, London EC2 (barbican.org.uk)
January 15
Theatre | The Unfriend
A joyously funny debut play from Sherlock’s Steven Moffat, about a pain-in-the-ass American traveller (a fabulous Frances Barber) who befriends a couple on a cruise, then invites herself to stay. Mark Gatiss directs, Amanda Abbington and Reece Shearsmith star.
Criterion Theatre, London W1 (theunfriend.com), until April 16
Opera | Least Like the Other
Irish National Opera’s challenging show tells the story of John F Kennedy’s older sister, who suffered debilitating seizures and was mistreated by doctors.
Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London WC2 (roh.org.uk), until Jan 19
January 16
Comedy | Crybabies
The latest madcap hour from sketch trio Crybabies is a superb sci-fi spoof, poking fun at The X Files, ET and The Wicker Man.
Soho Theatre, London W1 (sohotheatre.com), until Jan 21
TV | The Last of Us
The team behind Chernobyl adapt The Last of Us – widely considered the greatest video-game series ever made – into 2023’s most anticipated TV series. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey lead the cast as survivors of a virus that has turned most of the world’s population into zombies.
Sky Atlantic
Dance | The Sleeping Beauty
A company favourite, this 2006 Royal Ballet staging of the classic ballet – with additional choreography by Frederick Ashton, Anthony Dowell and Christopher Wheeldon – is nothing if not opulent.
Royal Opera House, London WC2 (roh.org.uk), in rep until June 6
January 18
Theatre | Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons
Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner star in Sam Steiner’s cult 2015 two-hander about “what happens when we can’t say anything” after the government caps daily speech at 140 words per person.
Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1 (lemonstheplay.co.uk), until March 18
January 19
Theatre | Noises Off
Felicity Kendal and Matthew Kelly star in the 40th anniversary revival of Michael Frayn’s ingenious, metatheatrical farce about a farce.
Phoenix Theatre, London WC2 (atgtickets.com), until Mar 11
Dance | How Did We Get Here?
Julie Cunningham & Company serve up “an intimate evening of dance”, with Cunningham as choreographer, award-winning dancer Harry Alexander and none other than former Spice Girl Melanie C.
Sadler’s Wells, London EC1 (sadlerswells.com), until Jan 29
Theatre | Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Kathryn Hunter takes the lead as a Polish environmentalist caught up in a rural murder mystery in this new Complicité production, adapting Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel.
Bristol Old Vic (bristololdvic.org.uk), until Feb 11 and touring
January 20
Film | Babylon
Picture Singin’ in the Rain crossed with Jackass and you’ll be in the region of Damien Chazelle’s epic about Hollywood’s debauched silent age. The superb ensemble includes Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie.
Cinemas
TV | Maternal
Parminder Nagra, Lara Pulver and Lisa McGrillis team up for this six-part drama about three working mothers trying to hold it together on the NHS front line.
ITV, date TBC
Film | Holy Spider
This riveting, horrifying crime thriller from Iran’s Ali Abbasi (Border) dramatises the capture of a real-life serial killer, who claimed to be on a jihad to strangle sex workers in the holy city of Mashhad.
Cinemas
January 21
Exhibitions | Spain and the Hispanic World
More than 150 treasures, including silk textiles, silverwork, paintings and sculptures, chart Spain and its colonies across four millennia.
Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (royalacademy.org.uk), until April 10
Theatre | 2:22: A Ghost Story
Following in the role-inaugurating footsteps of Lily Allen, pop star turned X Factor judge Cheryl Cole plays Jenny, a woman convinced she has seen a ghost, in Danny Robins’s spine-tingler.
Lyric Theatre, London W1 (222aghoststory.com), until April 23
January 22
Classical | Rosary Sonatas
Music is mingled with a sense of the sacred in these dawn-to-dark performances of the 17th-century German composer Heinrich Biber’s Rosary Sonatas, given by violinist Daniel Pioro and harpsichordist James McVinnie.
Southbank Centre, London SE1 (southbankcentre.co.uk)
January 23
TV | Shrinking
Jason Segel is a grieving therapist who decides to start telling his clients what he really thinks, while Harrison Ford co-stars as his boss and mentor, in this comedy from the makers of Ted Lasso.
Apple TV+
January 24
Theatre | The Lehman Trilogy
Ben Power’s Tony-winning account of the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers returns with a new cast: Michael Balogun, Hadley Fraser and Nigel Lindsay. Sam Mendes directs.
Gillian Lynne Theatre, London WC2 (thelehmantrilogy.com), until May 20
January 26
Theatre | The Tempest
Shakespeare’s fable of the usurped, vengeful, castaway Duke of Milan gets gender-flipped by Elizabeth Freestone, with Alex Kingston taking the lead.
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (rsc.org.uk), until Mar 4
January 27
Theatre | Sylvia
Beverley Knight plays Emmeline Pankhurst in a new musical that throws hip-hop, funk and soul at the story of Sylvia, “the lesser-known Pankhurst at the heart of the Suffragette movement”.
Old Vic, London SE1 (oldvictheatre.com), until April 1
Film | The Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg reflects on his formative years in this elegant and charming piece of cine-self-portraiture, about an aspiring filmmaker navigating his teens with a camera in hand.
Cinemas
Pop | Sam Smith: Gloria
Coming off the back of monster global hit Unholy, Smith’s fourth album pushes into frisky George Michael territory. It’s likely to confirm the singer-songwriter as one of the UK’s pop superstars.
Capitol
Film | All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
The Venice Film Festival gave its top prize to this splendid documentary about American photographer Nan Goldin, who very nearly became a victim of America’s opioid epidemic.
Cinemas
February 1
Theatre | Phaedra
Simon Stone retells the tragedy of Theseus’s stepson-fixated wife. Janet McTeer stars, with Assaad Bouab (Call My Agent) making his London stage debut as Hippolytus.
National’s Lyttelton Theatre, London SE1 (nationaltheatre.org.uk), until April 8
TV | Nolly
Helena Bonham Carter is transformed into Noele Gordon, star of the long-running Crossroads TV series, in Russell T Davies’s portrait of the actress who was abruptly sacked from the soap.
ITVX, date TBC
Comedy | Catherine Cohen
Expect glitz, glamour and egomania from this young star of the New York cabaret scene on her first UK tour. Cohen’s songs, poems and stand-up all make hay with her hilariously self-absorbed persona.
Norwich Playhouse (catherine-cohen.com), and touring
Books | Colonialism by Nigel Biggar
In 2017, Oxford professor Biggar began a five-year project called “Ethics and Empire”, to weigh the critique of empire against the historical facts. He stirred up further controversy with a newspaper article headlined “Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history”. Now he tackles this hotter-than-ever issue in book-length form.
William Collins
February 3
Film | The Whale
Brendan Fraser is already Oscar-tipped for this comeback performance as a 42-stone recluse in Darren Aronofsky’s riveting, religiously charged chamber piece.
Cinemas
February 4
Exhibitions | Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way
Combining video, music, collage and sculpture, Boyce’s feel-good, Golden Lion-winning exhibition for the British Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale arrives in Margate, for the first leg of a nationwide tour.
Turner Contemporary, Margate (turnercontemporary.org), until May 8 and touring
February 7
Dance | Dance Me
Set to the music of the late Leonard Cohen, Ballets Jazz Montréal team up with tech wizards Robomagic Live for three pieces by Andonis Foniadakis, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Ihsan Rustem.
Sadler’s Wells, London EC1 (sadlerswells.com), until Feb 11
February 8
Comedy | Leicester Comedy Festival
Now in its 30th year, England’s biggest comedy festival returns with a bumper line-up including Stewart Lee, Olga Koch, Fern Brady, Ivo Graham and Ahir Shah.
Various venues, Leicester (comedy-festival.co.uk), until Feb 26
February 9
TV | Funny Woman
Gemma Arterton is a 1960s Blackpool beauty queen who breaks into the world of stand-up, in this adaptation of Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl.
Sky Max
Books | Tomorrow Perhaps the Future by Sarah Watling
Move over, Hemingway. This is the Spanish Civil War from the point of view of the women: tough journalist Martha Gellhorn, child runaway Jessica Mitford, heiress Nancy Cunard, cross-dressing poet Valentine Ackland, and more.
Jonathan Cape
Theatre | The Winter’s Tale
A canny concept for Shakespeare’s play of jealousy gone mad; audiences will move between aristocratic Sicilia indoors at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and pastoral Bohemia in the al fresco main-house.
Shakespeare’s Globe, London SE1 (shakespearesglobe.com), until April 16
Books | Victory City by Salman Rushdie
This novel, which Rushdie had already finished before the assassination attempt in August, is now awaited with a frenzy not seen since the peak of his 1990s notoriety. It ticks a lot of Rushdie boxes: a story about storytelling, starting in 14th-century India, where “a woman ... breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuries”.
Jonathan Cape
February 10
Film | Women Talking
A Mennonite colony’s womenfolk respond to a string of sexual attacks in this sharp ensemble drama from Sarah Polley. Stars Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara and Claire Foy.
Cinemas
Classical | The Golden Road to Samarkand
The Britten Sinfonia brings together the fantasy Orient of Frederick Delius’s Hassan with real Eastern music performed on the Arabic lute by Joseph Tawadros.
Milton Court, London EC2 (barbican.org.uk), then Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden (saffronhall.com), Feb 11
Film | Blue Jean
A lesbian gym teacher (a perfect Rosy McEwen) is plunged into an existential crisis by the homophobic law Section 28 in director Georgia Oakley’s stunning debut.
Cinemas
Exhibitions | Peter Doig
New paintings, drawings and prints by the immensely influential Scottish-born artist, who has been hard at work since moving a year ago from Trinidad to London.
Courtauld Gallery, London WC2 (courtauld.ac.uk), until May 29
Film | Magic Mike’s Last Dance
Channing Tatum returns as male stripper Mike – and gives Salma Hayek a raunchy ride – in this bump-and-grind finale to Steven Soderbergh’s disarming trilogy.
Cinemas
Exhibitions | Labyrinth
The first British show devoted to the palace of Knossos on Crete – the centre of the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation, and according to legend, the site of the Minotaur’s labyrinth.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (ashmolean.org), until July 30
Theatre | Medea
At London’s newest theatre, Sophie Okonedo stars in a fresh take on Euripides’s tragedy of a spurned wife who turns to filicide.
@sohoplace, London W1 (sohoplace.org), until April 22
February 11
Exhibitions | Donatello
After stints in Florence and Berlin, this blockbuster show about the versatile and original renaissance sculptor finally arrives in London.
V&A South Kensington, London SW7 (vam.ac.uk), until June 11
February 12
Comedy | Weird Al Yankovic
America’s king of musical spoofs, having just made his mock-biopic, returns to regale fans live with hits such as Another One Rides the Bus.
O2 Academy, Glasgow (weirdal.com), and touring
February 16
Theatre | Oklahoma!
Daniel Fish’s bold, bravura rethink of the 1943 musical is an Oklahoma! for the age of American self-doubt, with folksy onstage strumming and pronounced darkness.
Wyndham’s Theatre, London W1 (oklahomawestend.com), until Sept 2
Books | Politics, Poverty and Belief by Frank Field
In 2017, a journalist came up with a test for any new political party: would Frank Field MP fit in? A veteran campaigner for working-class interests, admired by Left and Right for his moral consistency, he looks back at his life in a memoir written while terminally ill.
Bloomsbury Continuum
Exhibitions | Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle
Portraits of members of New York’s underground by the self-professed “collector of souls” Alice Neel (1900-1984), who stuck with figurative painting when abstraction was in vogue.
Barbican Art Gallery, London EC2 (barbican.org.uk), until May 21
February 17
Theatre | Shirley Valentine
Sheridan Smith plays Willy Russell’s trapped Liverpudlian housewife, who casts her cares (and hubby) aside for a holiday in the sun.
Duke of York’s, London WC2 (shirleyvalentineonstage.com), until June 3
February 18
Exhibitions | Golden Mummies of Egypt
Following a £15 million transformation, Manchester Museum reopens with a crowd-pleaser that has already toured America and China. It features more than 100 artefacts, including eight astonishingly well-preserved mummies, and their brightly painted sarcophagi, while cutting-edge technology offers a peek under the bandages.
Manchester Museum (museum.manchester.ac.uk), end date TBC
Opera | The Rhinegold
The second instalment of English National Opera’s new Ring Cycle to be presented is the opening opera of the Ring, introducing the gods and mortals who will interact turbulently through the cycle. ENO music director Martyn Brabbins conducts Wagner’s magisterial score.
English National Opera, Coliseum, London (eno.org) to March 10
Jazz | Ezra Collective
This quintet pulsates with a very distinctive London energy but is also suffused with memories of West African pop and great African-American jazz iconoclasts like Gil Scott-Heron and Thelonious Monk.
O2 Academy Bristol (ezracollective.com), Feb 18 and touring
Opera | Ariadne auf Naxos
Opera North’s recent successes might be topped by this wacky take on Strauss’s two-part Greek myth opera. It is transposed into an Italian film studio by director Rodula Gaitanou, with creative clashes galore as two films are amalgamated into one. A hit at Gothenberg Opera, it explores the clash between high art and popular art.
Grand Theatre, Leeds (operanorth.co.uk), until March 1 and touring
February 21
Opera | Rusalka
A new production of Dvořák’s famous fairy-tale opera of 1900 about a water nymph. The outstanding soprano Asmik Grigorian sings the title role, with its famous Song to the Moon.
Royal Opera House, London WC2 (roh.org.uk), until Mar 7
February 22
Theatre | Song from Far Away
Will Young puts all memories of Pop Idol shiny-floor frivolity behind him to star in a new production of Simon Stephens’s 2015 monologue about a Dutch banker who returns to Amsterdam after the death of his younger brother, and faces a family reckoning.
Home, Manchester (homemcr.org), until Mar 11
Exhibitions | Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons
One of Britain’s most exciting artists, renowned for his epic installations assembled out of finds from salvage yards and flea markets, reprises several important works for this retrospective.
Hayward Gallery, London SE1 (southbankcentre.co.uk), until May 7
February 23
TV | Fleishman is in Trouble
The savagely funny debut novel of American journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner made quite the splash in 2019. This adaptation stars Jesse Eisenberg as the eponymous Toby Fleishman, an unlikeable New York doctor whose ex-wife (Claire Danes) suddenly vanishes, leaving him to take care of his children full-time.
Disney+
February 24
Pop | Gorillaz: Cracker Island
Blur are back for a summer of Britpop nostalgia, but before then the band’s singer Damon Albarn leads his cartoon avatars Gorillaz out for their eighth star-studded, genre-bending sci-fi pop album, with the latest cast of collaborators including Stevie Nicks, Thundercat, Tame Impala, Bad Bunny and Beck.
Parlophone
Exhibitions | Being an Islander
The first British showing for a group of antiquities from three of the Mediterranean’s largest islands (Cyprus, Sardinia and Crete), revealing how “island life” shaped the region across three millennia, and asking questions about our own island culture.
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk), until June 4
February 27
Comedy | Sam Campbell
The reigning Edinburgh Comedy Award winner brings his logic-defying brand of Aussie absurdism to London. This is comedy at its craziest, a whirlwind of sketches, videos, prop gags and surreal one-liners. Recommended for fans of Sam Simmons and Harry Hill.
Soho Theatre, London W1 (sohotheatre.com), until March 4
Theatre | The Merchant of Venice 1936
Tracy-Ann Oberman plays Shylock as a Jewish widow in the East End during the rise of the British Union of Fascists in 1930s, in this reimagining, inspired by her own grandmother and uncles, who were at the 1936 Battle of Cable Street.
Watford Palace Theatre (watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk), until March 11, then Home, Manchester (homemcr.org), March 15-25
TV | Beyond Paradise
Kris Marshall’s bumbling detective has swapped the island of Saint Marie for the British Isles in this Death in Paradise spin-off, which sees him settle down in a not-so-sleepy Devonshire town. A new series of Death in Paradise also begins on BBC One on January 6.
BBC One, date TBC
March 1
Classical | Hallé
While deep in lockdown, the Hallé commissioned and performed Huw Watkins’s 2nd Symphony online. Now we can hear this terrific piece live, alongside Brahms’s Violin Concerto and Vaughan Williams’s Norfolk Rhapsody.
Bridgewater Hall, Manchester (halle.co.uk), then March 2 & 5
March 2
Books | Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
In 2013, aged just 28, Catton became the youngest ever Booker winner with her historical epic about gold-mining in New Zealand, The Luminaries. No wonder it has taken her a decade to write this follow-up, which moves Macbeth to modern New Zealand, with a guerrilla gardening collective and an American tech billionaire.
Granta
March 3
Theatre | Guys and Dolls
Nicholas Hytner directs an immersive staging of Frank Loesser’s 1950 “musical fable of Broadway”, in the same carnivalesque mode as his hit A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Bridge Theatre, London SE1 (bridgetheatre.co.uk), until Sept 2
March 5
Opera | The Magic Flute
Welsh National Opera promises a “modern twist” on Mozart’s story about the quest for wisdom and truth. The ingenious Daisy Evans directs, and WNO’s fine music director Tomáš Hanus conducts the gloriously memorable score.
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff (wno.org.uk), until March 17, and touring
March 8
Pop | Lizzo
The US singer, rapper and flautist goes into arenas to promote last year’s breakout fourth album, Special. About damn time, as Lizzo herself might put it.
Ovo Hydro, Glasgow (lizzomusic.com), and touring
March 10
Film | 65
Adam Driver stars in this intriguing science-fiction thriller from the writers of A Quiet Place, about an astronaut who crash-lands on a dinosaur-infested prehistoric Earth.
Cinemas
Pop | Lana Del Rey: Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
The media-savvy US singer-songwriter maintains a quality of artistic mysteriousness almost unheard of in the social-media age. This will be the 37-year-old’s ninth album of gorgeous songcraft, suspended between soulful profundity and Instagram gloss.
Interscope
March 11
Opera | Il Trittico
This strongly contrasted trio of brilliant one-act operas by Puccini presents a love-triangle melodrama set in a boatyard, Il Tabarro; an emotional betrayal in a religious setting, Suor Angelica; and a family drama of greed and deceit, Gianni Schicchi. This new production by the ever-inventive David McVicar should be unmissable.
Theatre Royal, Glasgow (scottishopera.org.uk), and March 15 & 18; Festival Theatre, Edinburgh (capitaltheatres.com), March 22 to 25
March 17
Film | Pearl
Ti West’s terrific 1918-set prequel to his raucous slasher-horror X recasts that film’s star Mia Goth (who has once again co-written the script) as a dewy-eyed Texas farm girl, who’s trying to make it as a Hollywood starlet by fair means or otherwise.
Cinemas
Film | Allelujah
Richard Eyre directs this sparky screen adaptation of Alan Bennett’s serio-comic 2018 play about a struggling geriatric ward, revived for the 75th anniversary of the founding of the NHS.
Cinemas
March 19
Pop | Biig Piig
One of the year’s rising artists, Biig Piig is charismatic Irish Londoner Jessica Smyth. Her artful blend of delicate pop and narcotic hip-hop is already picking up millions of streams. Catch her in small venues while you can.
King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow (biig-piig.com), and touring
March 24
Film | John Wick: Chapter 4
At 58, Keanu’s still at it, with Chad Stahelski again directing face-offs galore between Reeves’s bereaved hitman and foes old and new.
Cinemas
Theatre | Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece of family dysfunction and long-steeped sadness in the Deep South gets a fresh staging by Roy Alexander Weise, who had a thundering success with The Mountaintop.
Manchester Royal Exchange (royalexchange.co.uk), until April 29
March 25
Exhibitions |After Impressionism
The National Gallery puts the tumultuous period from the 1880s to the outbreak of the First World War under the spotlight, with over 100 works showing how the risk-taking of Cézanne, van Gogh and Gauguin lit a fire under younger painters such as Matisse, Klimt, Picasso, Kokoschka and Mondrian.
National Gallery, London WC2 (nationalgallery.org.uk), until Aug 13
Opera | The Dead City
The 23-year-old Erich Korngold’s weird and wonderful 1920 opera about a widower’s delusional grief, a huge hit in its day, comes to English National Opera for the first time. Annilese Miskimmon directs a cast that includes Rolf Romei and Sarah Connolly.
English National Opera, Coliseum, London (eno.org), until April 8
March 27
Theatre | A Little Life
English-language premiere of Belgian director Ivo van Hove’s acclaimed adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling 2015 novel following the lives of four university friends, one of whom – a lawyer, Jude (James Norton) – is physically and psychologically damaged. Cast also includes Omari Douglas and Elliot Cowan.
Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1 (atgtickets.com), until 18 June (previews at Richmond Theatre, March 14-18)
March 27
Dance | Cinderella
In a major buffing-up of Frederick Ashton’s much-loved 1948 adaptation of Prokofiev’s score, the Royal Ballet has enlisted the help of (among others) stage-magic expert Chris Fisher (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child).
Royal Opera House, London WC2 (roh.org.uk), in rep until May 3
TV | The Gold
The Brink’s-Mat heist of 1983, by six south London robbers who stumbled upon £26 million worth of gold bullion in a west London warehouse, was described as “the crime of the century”. Hugh Bonneville, Jack Lowden and Dominic Cooper gang up to tell the tale. Oscar-winner Aneil Karia directs.
BBC One, date TBC
March 29
TV | Great Expectations There’s no stopping Peaky Blinders and SAS: Rogue Heroes writer Steven Knight, who follows his 2019 A Christmas Carol with a second Dickens adaptation. Olivia Colman is his Miss Havisham; Dunkirk’s Fionn Whitehead is Pip; Shalom Brune-Franklin (Line of Duty, The Tourist) is Estella.
BBC One, date TBC
Theatre | Operation Mincemeat
Predating the po-faced film of the same name, this wry stage musical – first seen in 2019 – tells the story of how British military intelligence duped the Germans into believing they had no grand plan to invade Sicily by using a tramp’s corpse disguised as a Royal Marine courier. The songs flit between stiff-upper-lip wit and pangs of pathos.
Fortune Theatre, London, WC2 (operationmincemeat.com), until July 8
Exhibitions | Faithful and Fearless
This ingenious show assembles over 50 British portraits of dogs, from Old Masters by Stubbs and Gainsborough to Lucian Freud’s whippet and Hockney’s dachshunds, with the odd Fabergé bauble thrown in – and even some taxidermy.
Wallace Collection, London W1 (wallacecollection.org), until Oct 15
TV | Better
The pairing of Leila Farzad (I Hate Suzie) and Andrew Buchan (Broadchurch) should elevate this crime drama above the rest. Farzad is the DI whose career has blossomed while overlooking the wrongdoing of career criminal Col McHugh (Buchan) – until her family is brought to the brink of tragedy.
BBC One, date TBC
March 30
Classical | A Festival of Brahms
Many different sides of Brahms – the rumbustious, the secretly romantic and nostalgic, and the sternly tragic – are represented in the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s mini-festival, which includes his 2nd and 3rd symphonies and Academic Festival Overture.
Perth Concert Hall (rsno.org.uk), and touring