Simon Rattle’s farewell season as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra has inscribed a sort of artistic memoir as he moves from one of his beloved blockbusters to another. Last night, he closed his account at the Barbican (though he will regularly return as “Conductor Emeritus”) with Messiaen’s mighty Turangalîla-Symphonie.

As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London.

Buildings can hold memories, the three dimensions of space supplemented by the fourth of time. Ten years ago, I started every working week with a meeting in a room that, for decades, had been used to conduct autopsies – I felt a little chill occasionally, as we dissected figures rather than bodies, ghosts lingering, as they do. 

Brecht – as I suppose he intended – is always a shock to the system. With not a word on what to expect from his commitment to the strictures of epic theatre in the programme, a star of West End musical theatre cast in the lead and a venue with a history of more user-friendly shows, some are going to have to sit up straight in their seats from the very start – including your reviewer.

Is there really such a thing as an unmissable show? Depends on your taste of course, but for sheer hype this event takes some beating: two-time Olivier Award-winning star Ruth Wilson (last seen doing her sinister stuff in the BBC’s His Dark Materials) has teamed up with boundary-smashing director Ivo van Hove (whose A View from the Bridge was a decade highlight) to stage Jean Cocteau’s 1930 monologue about a woman waiting for her lover to phone.

Isamu Noguchi may not be a household name, yet one strand of his work is incredibly familiar. In 1951 he visited a lamp factory in Gifu, a Japanese city famous for its paper lanterns. This prompted him to design the lampshades that, for decades, have adorned nearly every student’s bedsit.

Manchester’s Psappha have been proudly flying the flag of new and radical music right through the year of lockdown, and last night’s livestream, with two-and-a-half world premieres, one of them by Mark-Anthony Turnage, showed they haven’t given up making waves.

When you try to get rid of something, it comes back to bite you – so says Naomi Booth in her new novel Exit Management. It’s one of those books that you want to read very quickly, its writing slickly modern and its characters compellingly flawed. Lauren is a graduate HR employee specialising in the tricky task of making people redundant. She comes from humble beginnings, but wants to put all that behind her, focusing on the dream apartment and the adjoining shiny City life.

There was a moment in the 1930s when it seemed that contemporary art, as practised in Britain, might join the mainstream of the Western avant-garde. Caroline Maclean makes a lively examination of this uneasy decade, centring mostly on the circle of visual artists who lived in Hampstead and Belsize Park, in an account that approaches an artistic and personal concatenation of Carry On.

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” Director Richard Jones has certainly taken Beckett’s words to heart in this vividly comic, star-cast Old Vic double bill, pairing Endgame with a lesser-known short play – which acts as a sort of stylistic and thematic amuse bouche.