Lee Sung Jin returns to unsettle with his engrossing drama series about the seething tensions just under the skin of the bourgeoisie. Changing tack from the road-rage-born feud of season one, this stars Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac as a couple on the edge and introduces Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny as the young, loved-up employees at the high-end country club the older couple runs. Both pairs twang under the pressures of late-stage capitalism, but when they come together, it descends into a sizzling blend of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Parasite, as the poorer duo see an opportunity to exploit the richer. It’s eight episodes of superb acting, emotional fireworks and unnameable dread. Wonderful.

Julia Raeside, TV writer

Michael Frayn’s 1998 play was an unlikely blockbuster: a year at the National Theatre, two in the West End, a Broadway transfer and a TV movie starring Daniel Craig. That’s quite a feat for three people talking intricately about physics, war, friendship and memory, topics united by the theme of uncertainty. Copenhagen springs from a historical mystery: why did the German physicist Werner Heisenberg visit his former colleague Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe in September 1941 and what did they talk about? Heisenberg went on to head the unsuccessful Nazi atomic bomb programme while Bohr escaped occupied Denmark to join the more fruitful Manhattan Project, raising chewy questions about their relative complicity in Hitlerism and Hiroshima. While Richard Schiff and Alex Kingston are fine as the Bohrs, Damien Molony steals the show as the anguished, self-justifying Heisenberg. Framed by dark water and a sky full of lights, they circle the stage looking for answers, both scientific and moral. Director Michael Longhurst’s post-Oppenheimer, mid-Trump revival shows that Copenhagen hasn’t held up quite as well as Tom Stoppard’s brain-teasers (fewer jokes to season the philosophy) but it’s still a fascinating dance of personalities and ideas.

Dorian Lynskey, Nerve theatre critic

If anyone knows what makes great nightlife, it's Honey Dijon. The DJ and producer came up in Chicago's clubs of the mid-80s, when house music was being forged on the city's dancefloors and heavily influenced by Prince; she then moved to New York and finally settled in London, where she has spent the past few years graduating from selector to pop star. Having worked on Beyoncé's house album, Renaissance, in 2022, Dijon returns with her own artist album that spotlights Black dance music but with an unexpected focus on British soul. A superb selection of guest stars pose as the new school of house divas, R&B singer Chlöe and Gabriels' gospel-man Jacob Lusk among them, while Brits like Mahalia and Rochelle Jordan take the moody synth ballads and Greentea Peng lends her vocals to some gritty breaks. With London rapper Bree Runway, Dijon has also made the strongest voguing tunes since Azealia Banks's 212. But there are also songs that sonically reference Soul II Soul, Sade and the lithe jazz-house sounds that you could imagine Theo Parrish dropping on the decks, pulling off the tough trick of sounding both underground and pristine at the same time.

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

The psychological charge of this small but striking exhibition of works by the surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is immediately apparent in the onetime home of Sigmund Freud. During her life, the British-born Mexican artist faced significant mental health challenges and spent time in a sanatorium in Spain. There, Carrington was encouraged to draw and created two paintings, including Down Below (1940), which is on display here. Depicting several figures in states of metamorphosis within the grounds of the sanatorium, the title reflects her experience. 

The exhibition mainly consists of drawings and includes the recurring motif of horses: an obsession of Carrington's and sometimes a symbol for portraying herself. Freud said horses resonated with psychoanalytic ideas about the structure of the mind, and objects from his personal collection feature here. There is also archival material, including photographs of Carrington with her partner, Max Ernst, taken by Lee Miller.

Meg Molloy, arts writer and founder of Working Arts Club

Founded in east London in 2002, and involving a pan-African lineup of first-rank musicians, this versatile ensemble brings the Bob Marley songbook to Liverpool, before continuing its spectacular 40th-anniversary celebration of Paul Simon’s Graceland. Rather than producing straight cover versions, the choir reanimates the songs from Simon’s great apartheid-era album while remaining true to their improvisational spirit, and to the artistry of the many African singers and musicians (and gumboot dancers) who inspired and helped to shape them both in the studio and on the road.

Claire Armitstead, writer

You don't have to be an art lover to be immediately drawn in to Andrew Durbin's impressively researched and lucidly written new duo-biography of two of the most interesting American artists of the latter half of the 20th century, who were also collaborators and paramours, and makers of beautiful - and in Thek's case in particular, wonderfully strange and challenging, funny and sweetly sad - art. But even if you are already familiar with the two men and their work, you'll be delighted and surprised at the rich detail and careful attention to both the lives and the art, so intertwined, of Hujar and Thek - both of whom left us too soon, dying of AIDS months apart. Durbin's narrative immerses us in the past with one foot in the present, gently showing us how important the two artists remain today, both creatively and politically. 

Emily LaBarge, Nerve art critic

THEATRE
Game of Thrones: The Mad King
(Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 20 July-5 September)

The RSC are bringing George RR Martin’s novels to the stage, adapted by Duncan Macmillan and directed by Dominic Cooke. Priority booking from today; public booking from 22 April.

DANCE
The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O'Connor
(Factory International, Manchester, 25-27 June)

A cast of 10 women perform a dance work set to Sinéad O’Connor’s music, devised and directed by the Tony award-winning choreographer Sonya Tayeh.

THEATRE
Glengarry Glen Ross
(Old Vic, London SE1, 4 June-18 July)

David Mamet’s classic drama now with an all-female cast. Booking opens today for the general public.

FESTIVAL
You Are Here
(South Bank, London SE1, Sunday 3 May)

To mark 75 years since the Festival of Britain, the South Bank will stage an immersive day of celebrating culture co-directed and created by Danny Boyle, Carson McColl, Gareth Pugh and Paulette Randall with Sabrina Mahfouz and Natasha Chivers. Two-hour time slots available to book.