The first survey show of Lahore-born, New York-based Toor’s work in the UK, indeed in Europe, this is the perfect introduction to his singular world. Toor holds in tension a reflection of contemporary life in New York – and particularly scenes of young, queer and often South Asian men – with riffs on the history and languages of painting. Much of what we see is deliberately celebratory: domestic or club scenes that picture what Toor has called "deeply comfortable spaces” for his fictional figures. But there is darkness, too: Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug (2019) depicts the humiliation of a search at airport immigration. While Toor has developed an entirely distinctive painterly universe – with a colour sense and approach to handling paint that is immediately recognisable – it is shot through with nods to great paintings, including, in The Bar on East 13th Street (2019), a direct response to Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), which hangs in the neighbouring room at the Courtauld. This historical playfulness is evident, too, in a magnificent display of related drawings downstairs in which Toor’s marvellously fluent technique is seen in full effect; make sure you catch both shows.

Ben Luke, Nerve art critic

If only all remakes were as stylish and contemporary as Prime Video’s new eight-part series based on Stephen King’s horror classic. Mike Flanagan’s confident re-telling brings the sheltered teen, played delicately by Summer H Howell, to a middle-American high school in 2026. After years of home schooling with an abusive mother, Carrie is thrust into active shooter drills and surrounded by mean girls who crow when she starts her period in phys-ed and assumes she’s dying. Starting slowly, Flanagan’s story builds beautifully and incorporates a true-crime-doc framing device where surviving characters are interviewed retrospectively about how the school prom ended in such a bloodbath. It’s the ultimate wish-fulfilment fantasy for bullied kids everywhere.

Julia Raeside, writer

In a recent list of his favourite 13 albums of all time, Brian Eno included Meshell Ndegeocello’s 1993 debut Plantation Lullabies. “I think she is one of the great musicians alive at the moment,” he wrote; “she plays bass but she plays it with such ferocity.” She’s also a great producer. Best known for her sympathetic interpretations of Prince, Sade and the words of James Baldwin, Ndegeocello’s new album Synonym deploys more of a statement-making concept, assembling what is basically my dream festival of special guests for a collection of gender-flipping, genre-blurring reworks of famous duets. She takes the Kenny Rogers part to Chaka Khan’s Dolly Parton on Islands In The Stream; her voice intertwines with fellow bassist/singer Lianne La Havas for 80s R&B gem Don’t Look Any Further, while Americana types Bill Callahan and Chris Thile join her for Bob Dylan’s With God On Our Side. Cynthia Erivo, ANOHNI, Cat Power, Moses Sumney, Brandi Carlile and many more pitch in to go cover-to-cover too.

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

Held in Middlesbrough for the first time, this edition of the Turner prize feels particularly strong, with each of the four artists drawing on a variety of media to create installations that engage all the senses. There are rubber floors, scaffolding, drapes, mist, shifting lights and otherworldly horns. Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau and Tanoa Sasraku certainly have a knack for immersing viewers in their varied practices that all mine memory, materiality, spirituality and human connection. Freije and Barclay – in particular – stand out. Blending the spoken word with a collage of footage, Barclay’s installation, The Ruin, takes us on a journey to his childhood and across the M62, while Freije invites us to commune with her array of steel figures and animals as they embrace, leap and struggle through life. 

Hannah Clugston Wilson, writer

Known for her dizzying stage sets, Es Devlin was sure to pull off something special for this celebratory mid-career retrospective. Starting with a meticulous and narrated recreation of her studio – transported in crates from Peckham – visitors are led to “Archive Unboxed” or Devlin’s early years, which show childhood scrapbooks and art-school life drawings (many salvaged in black bin bags from an ex-boyfriend’s flat). The centrepiece is the 30 Year Desk, a circular display referencing her first commissions for fringe theatres, then drawing after drawing detailing projects including large stadium sets for the likes of Beyoncé, Pet Shop Boys and Lady Gaga, and the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics. I would have loved a little jeopardy that exposed any wrinkles or stumbling blocks she faced along the way, but there’s little sign of those here. For the finale, there’s the show-stopping Infinite Library installation, an eight-metre-wide bookshelf containing 2,000 books that made the designer who she is. 

Jane Ferguson, Nerve co-founder

The slowly rotating living room in Marianne Elliott’s revival looks a bit like an arena, which is perfect for Edward Albee’s three-hour verbal cage fight. Transporting the toxic marital dynamic of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death to 1960s academia, Albee drops us into the forever war between George, a bitterly thwarted scholar, and Martha, the boss’s ferally unhappy daughter. Billy Crudup and Gillian Anderson – marquee names who began in the theatre – have at it with an almost festive cruelty, at first hilarious, then horrific and finally tragic. They have gamified hatred: is anything real or are they just bored? Josh Dylan and Phoebe Horn hold their own as the junior couple, Nick and Honey, who begin as shocked witnesses but become co-combatants. In the intimacy of Soho Place you can feel the night lengthening and the alcohol rising. This claustrophobic, unforgiving play requires the finest acting to make its misery compelling. This production has what it takes.

Dorian Lynskey, Nerve theatre critic

I’ve never been a huge fan of historical fiction – except when it’s written by AK Blakemore. Her debut novel, The Manningtree Witches, announced her as an essential new voice in literary fiction back in 2021 and her third novel, Doom Painting, had me rapt from the get-go. Doom Painting takes us back to 1831, when a peasants’ revolt swept across the south of England. Set across just 16 days, the novel is riveting and pacey while also featuring Blakemore’s signature prose – dazzlingly elegant, deft and poetic. It’s a stunning novel and an epic achievement. 

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Nerve writer

This swift, stylish and sweary adaptation by Lulu Raczka distils Sophocles’s ancient tragedy into the story of two teenage sisters. Antigone is older, bolder, bossier, and determined to bury the body of her brother, which has been left to rot outside the gates of Thebes following a civil war. Ismene is younger, shyer, quieter, and terrified of the consequences. Over 90 minutes, trapped in a kitschy living room, the two girls play drinking games, sing karaoke, bicker about boys, imagine adventures, and ultimately confront mighty themes of grief and justice. Finn den Hertog, who recently staged David Ireland's The Fifth Step with Jack Lowden and Martin Freeman in the West End, directs with typically vivid style, while Eilidh Loan and Holly Howden Gilchrist, two rising stars of Scottish theatre, provide superb performances as Antigone and Ismene.

Fergus Morgan, writer

ART
Mad Bloomsbury
(Charleston, Lewes, East Sussex, 4 November–11 April 2027; tickets on sale Friday 8 October)

Virginia Woolf described herself as “mad” and in her 1926 essay On Being Ill argued that illness, like love, ought to be one of the great subjects of literature. A century on from that essay, a new group exhibition featuring artworks, photographs, documents and personal objects explores how the Bloomsbury group engaged with evolving ideas of insanity. Tickets go on sale this Friday and will be priced on a “pay what you can” basis.

THEATRE
The Pelicot Trial
(The Chamber at London County Hall, Monday 30 November, 6-10pm)

A cast of 30 artists and public figures including Adjoa Andoh, Lorraine Ashbourne, Jordan Stephens, Juliet Stevenson, Samuel West and Olivia Williams will come together on 30 November to take part in a special one-off performance of The Pelicot Trial, a piece of documentary theatre comprising testimonies and written accounts from the trial, police files, social commentary and psychiatric reports on the 51 men who were prosecuted as part of Gisèle Pelicot’s case. Public booking starts tomorrow, 7 October, at 11am and the show will be live-streamed worldwide.