Cindy Sherman predicted the selfie, so goes the claim. From our current standpoint, it is all too easy to analyse her many hundreds of photographic self-portraits made since the late 1970s as cultural forebears of the digital medium. What this BBC Arena film opens up, alongside that bold claim, is a question about the mystery of Sherman as a person: who is she and why has she done what she’s done? Always reclusive, refusing public appearances, and elusive about her work, Sherman seems to have designed the enigmatic tone with which she is publicly discussed. Here, a small but rewarding effort Read more ...

John Malkovich is back in town - and he's starring in the most controversial play of the year. Trouble is, it might well also be the worst. When the subject of veteran American playwright David Mamet's new drama was announced as being about a Hollywood mogul, who, like Harvey Weinstein, is accused of abusive behaviour there was a predictable outcry. How dare Mamet write about this? How dare a man write about sexual abuse? How dare fiction trespass on fact? Although the Garrick Theatre in the West End was besieged by autograph hunters rather than protesters at today's press night, twitter has Read more ...

Productions of The Marriage of Figaro tend to press their thumbs on the comic or tragic side of the scales that hover so evenly throughout Mozart’s inexhaustible work. Director Martin Lloyd-Evans mostly favoured a darker interpretation at The Grange Festival, despite long stretches of niftily managed funny business. In this perspective, we have to gaze hard at the abuse of power – by men over women, the rich over the poor, even the smart over the simple – as it shows its brutal as well as its seductive face. And it wasn’t only the presence in the row behind of Sir John Major – whose political Read more ...

"Waiting is always wearisome," declare the socialites as glitter-and-be-gay Manon Lescaut receives in the home of her nasty old "protector" Geronte. Despite the numerous sugar-plums Puccini weaves into his first fluent operatic masterpiece, waiting is very wearisome in the first half of Karolina Sofulak's new production for Opera Holland Park. Anticipation that glorious soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn will flourish is eventually rewarded; but laryngitis two weeks ago has left her not in best voice. And her love interest, tenor Peter Auty as Des Grieux, seems worried about catching it, since he Read more ...

Let's start with that kiss – the one that propelled Seann Walsh from “Who?” in last year's Strictly Come Dancing line-up to being the “bad boy” of the series after pictures of his drunken late-night clinch with Katya Jones, his married professional dance partner, appeared in the tabloids.The title, After This One, I'm Going Home, is a nod to the laddish behaviour that many of Walsh’s previous shows have recounted and which – who knows – might have been useful advice to take earlier on the evening in question. Actually, the title and the tour were planned before he signed his Strictly contract Read more ...

Most people in the UK know American actor and stand-up Aziz Ansari from Parks and Recreation, where he played the sarcastic and underachieving local government official Tom Haverford. Comedy fans will also know him as a successful club comic on both US coasts, and from his Netflix specials. But in truth, most people now know him for the #MeToo imbroglio he found himself in last year, where a woman accused him of sexual misconduct on a date, which he denies, saying the encounter was consensual.So there is an air of “will he, won't he” in the room as Ansari performs his new show, Road to Read more ...

"Some monsters are real," notes a retribution-minded wife (Matilda Ziegler) early in Downstate, Bruce Norris's beautiful and wounding play that has arrived at the National Theatre in the production of a writer's dreams. But by the time this restless, ceaselessly provocative evening has come to its reflective close, you may find yourself reconsidering the efficacy of the word "monster" to describe any human being. Telling of four paedophiles sharing a group home in "downstate" Illinois, 280 miles south of Chicago, Norris all but demands that an audience see humanity in the round. So successful Read more ...

Not just the Peter Pan of Pop, but also its very own Houdini. With the aid of shed-loads of money, an illusion-spinning PR machine and the most aggressive lawyers that money could buy, Michael Jackson managed to make it to his premature exit in 2009 without being sent to jail. Dan Reed’s sprawling two-part documentary Leaving Neverland comes to bury Jackson, and to do posthumously what nobody managed to achieve in his lifetime.Reed focuses on the stories of two boys who became, for a time – or perhaps forever, considering the terrible emotional legacy it all left them with – Jackson’s pets. Read more ...

Stella Donnelly does not suffer fools gladly. On her debut LP, she calls out all manner of bad behaviours, from crappy bosses to creepy guys, annoying family members to disappointing boyfriends. Donnelly’s very much a part of the new guard of songwriters who aren’t going to sit in silence, and aren’t afraid to stand up for themselves and others. And yet, angry music this is not. There are no pounding drums, no squealing riffs, no hateful growls. Rather, a quiet confidence and self-assuredness defines Beware of the Dogs.  Album opener and first single "Old Man" sets the tone with Read more ...

Some things never change. About 60 per cent of this first show in Strike Back’s seventh series consisted of Mac McAllister (Warren Brown) and his intrepid Section 20 squad mowing down members of a Malaysian triad gang with automatic weapons. The triad people didn’t help themselves by all wearing black suits with white shirts and running like lemmings into the line of fire, where they did a funny little jitterbug dance on the spot as they were pumped full of bullets.But that’s the way they like it in Strike Back world, where there isn’t an imminent global catastrophe that can’t be solved by Read more ...

A musicals-intensive season gets off to a wan start with 9 to 5, a retooled West End version of a 2009 Broadway flop based on the beloved 1980 film that proffered a sisterhood for the ages in the combo of Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin. Parton gets bigtime producing billing on a stage venture for which she has provided a so-so (albeit Tony-nominated) score, and her shining face graces the onstage screens to clue us into the none-too-difficult plot and provide a fairly hoary Donald Trump joke. But it's clear pretty much from the start that Jeff Calhoun's production is aiming low and Read more ...

Two men called "Massimo" face the audience, one very tall, one very, well, minimo. The tall Massimo (Tom Espiner, pictured below) sports wavy shoulder length blond hair and an exuberant pearl rosary, the minimo Massimo (Hemi Yeroham) has dark hair, a beard and glasses, and intense stare. In front of them are two stands carrying all the paraphernalia needed to create sound effects for one of the gruesome slashing scenes in the Italian giallo film on which they are working, not least several sharp implements and a watermelon. What ensues is probably one of the most diverting sequences of absurd Read more ...