What is the effervescent new boss at Pitlochry theatre planning for his first season? Huge names, undersung stars – and a King Lear played by ‘the woman who changed my life’

‘Holy shit!” This was the instant response of one venerable theatre critic when Pitlochry Festival theatre sent round embargoed copies of the plan for Alan Cumming’s inaugural season. The man himself sits back in the cavernous workshop behind the theatre building, dapper in a grey plaid suit. “I loved that,” he says gleefully.

When the Hollywood star was announced as the new artistic director of Scotland’s only major rural theatre last September, there was widespread shock – not least that Cumming answered an open recruitment call – followed by feverish speculation over which A-list pals he might charm away from London or New York to perform in Highland Perthshire.

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Borough Theatre, Abergavenny
Mid Wales Opera continue to survive against the odds, and this small-scale but lively evening is full of wit and strong singing

Leonard Bernstein began composing his satire on a dysfunctional marriage when on honeymoon and, by his own admission, the one-act opera was based on the bickering nature of his parents’ relationship. Sam and Jennie Bernstein were very much alive in 1951 and can’t have been thrilled to know they’d spawned such an unhappy pair. Names were barely disguised: Sam was still named Sam and Jennie only became Dinah because it worked better musically. In Mid Wales Opera ’s new staging, it’s the true-to-life element that gives the work its disquietingly contemporary feel, along with Bernstein’s particular combination of punchy word-setting and jazz-inflected score.

MWO’s continued survival against the odds is ample testimony to their gutsy approach and, while this SmallStages touring production is necessarily done on a minimal budget, it manages to realise an authentic 50s vibe as well as the claustrophobia of Sam and Dinah’s marital treadmill. Bernstein’s device of a sassy trio – here sung by Kirsty McLean, Sam Marston and John Ieuan Jones – with lively Greek chorus-style eulogising of the suburban American dream heightens the contrast between the couple’s consumerist aspirations and their all-too-evident personal despair. Director Richard Studer reinforced this by having the trio interact closely with Sam and Dinah, sometimes setting up further tensions, but also bringing a lighter, wittier touch to the dark irony of the narrative.

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The Royal Ballet’s Perspectives brings together a George Balanchine classic, a new work by Cathy Marston and Peck’s Everywhere We Go, with music by Sufjan Stevens

All photographs by Tristan Kenton

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The director has revealed suitably epic scale of his forthcoming Homeric adventure, which was shot with Imax cameras and stars Matt Damon as Odysseus

Christopher Nolan says he has used over more than 2 million ft of film for his adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, which is in post-production, after the director finished shooting in August.

In an interview with Empire magazine , Nolan said: “I’ve been out on [the sea] for the last four months. We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’s ship out there on the real waves, in the real places … We really wanted to capture how hard those journeys would have been for people. And the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world.” Then he added: “We shot over 2 million ft of film.”

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With his murder conviction overturned, the Jamaican star is back performing. He talks about his illness, regrets, and how he felt about dancehall going global while he was behind bars

There’s a moment when I’m interviewing Vybz Kartel in the courtyard of the Four Seasons hotel in Tower Bridge, London, and the UK government emergency alert test rings on my phone. He is panicked by it and jumps up. “Me ready fi run you know!” he says, which has us both laughing.

It is a funny moment, but also a jolting one considering that it arrives in the middle of him discussing the lasting psychological effects of prison. Kartel, 49, real name Adidja Palmer, had been incarcerated across different institutions in Jamaica following his conviction for the 2011 murder of his associate Clive “Lizard” Williams. Following a lengthy appeal process, he was released in July last year after the ruling was overturned by the UK privy council (which is the final court of appeal for Jamaica due to the nation being a former British colony).

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Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
Is the pranksy artist’s latest show a worrying comment about Britain’s discarded rope problem – or a joke at the expense of the buy-anything art world?

How long is a piece of string? David Shrigley can’t answer that, but he can tell you how much it weighs: 10 tonnes, apparently. His latest installation is literally an exhibition of 10 tonnes of old rope, accumulated by him over months, and left in towering mounds in this swanky gallery in London’s Mayfair. Most of it is marine rope, destined for landfill. It’s hard to recycle this stuff, it seems, and there’s an endless supply of it dumped around the world. So Shrigley scooped up as much of it as he could find, piled it up and put a massive price tag on it.

The work can be yours for £1m. And that’s the point of the show: this is literally money for old rope. It’s not that deep – it’s just an idea taken to its logical conclusion, an idiom taken too far, a pun taken too literally.

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Written in 1974, the Bowie-influenced songs on Trixies are set in a fictional south London nightclub, but were shelved when punk took the band in a new direction. Now, after Squeeze’s 50th anniversary, they’re seeing the light of day

In September 1974, when they were hopeful teenage unknowns in Deptford, Squeeze created a concept album, Trixies, set in a fictional south London nightclub. Believing they had come up with a substantial work, they recorded the 10 tracks on a borrowed Revox tape machine and expected the world to fall at their feet. But nothing happened. “All our friends liked it,” says singer and lead guitarist Glenn Tilbrook, who turned 17 just before the recording. “But that was the only feedback we had.”

The album was shelved, but less than five years later, the band began a run of classic hits, including Cool for Cats and Up the Junction, which had songwriting duo Tilbrook and fellow guitarist and vocalist Chris Difford hailed as heirs to Lennon and McCartney. Now, after recently celebrating 50 years as one of British pop’s best-loved bands, the pair have finally done their teenage vision justice. A fully rerecorded Trixies will be released in March 2026. Taster track, Trixies Pt 1, arrives this week and suggests that all the Squeeze hallmarks of melody, romance and storytelling were there from the beginning, even if few people heard them.

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(Young)
After 2018’s mellow Honey, the beloved Swede’s heady comeback pairs production worthy of Daft Punk and Moroder with deep romantic realism

At the end of last year, during her triumphant gig at the O2, Charli xcx brought Robyn out onstage. In a sense, it was just the latest in a series of guest appearances on the Brat tour: a string of collaborators from the album and its ensuing remixes – Lorde, Billie Eilish, Troye Sivan and Addison Rae among them – had turned up at different shows to perform their parts live. But as well as contributing her verse to their remix of 360, Robyn also took centre stage, performing her peerless 2010 single Dancing on My Own. Released when at least some of Charli xcx’s audience were still in nappies, it didn’t sound remotely like a throwback even in the context of a gig based around one of 2024’s most acclaimed and agenda-setting pop albums: the star of the show’s willingness to cede the spotlight to her felt like evidence of Robyn’s influence over contemporary pop.

You can see why the Swedish singer-songwriter carries so much clout among pop stars of the mid-2020s. When she opened an album with a track called Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do, she wasn’t joking: after launching as a 90s teen-pop star produced by Max Martin, she rejected the usual strictures placed on female pop – walking away from not one but two major label deals due to lack of artistic control – and seemed intent on following a more idiosyncratic, complex, messy path. She never saw being in the centre of mainstream pop as antithetical to making music with depth, or that touched on contentious issues. Despite the worldwide success of her debut, Robyn Is Here, her second album, My Truth, went unreleased outside Sweden because her US-based label baulked at Giving You Back, a song about an abortion she’d had in 1998: when asked to remove the song, Robyn refused.

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Bush theatre, London
Performed by an exceptional cast, Sophia’s Griffin’s debut play paints a vivid picture of men – and a system – in crisis

The heat rises slowly, and then suddenly reaches boiling point, in Sophia Griffin’s debut play. Set in a secure hospital in Birmingham – walled off from the rest of life – occupational therapist Naomi (Aimée Powell) starts hosting weekly Caribbean cooking classes. Believing in the meditative power of food, she hopes to engage the men with memories of home-cooked meals and maybe even provide a space for difficult conversations to flourish. But, with Ty, Leroy and Daniel’s simmering histories at play, the room can tip into conflict with one wrong step.

Over the course of the sessions, the men’s pasts gradually become less hazy. The youngest, Ty (a witty, bravado-infused performance from Corey Weekes), is desperate to get out and return to prison. Leroy (David Webber) has been on the ward for what feels like for ever and fears leaving as much as he longs for freedom. The newest arrival, Daniel (Darrel Bailey), just wants to get fixed quick and reconnect with his family. Griffin holds back the details of the characters’ offences until just the right moment, letting us get to know them first. When we finally hear snippets of them, it feels like a punch to the skull.

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