From the quiet despair of Dorothea Lange’s Great Depression-era portrait Migrant Mother, to a final room bustling with dozens of Bruce Davidson’s gritty and glamorous 1980s New York subway riders, Portrait of a City depicts the evolution of American city life through the work of 38 leading photographers. Across five rooms at Dulwich Picture Gallery – including a viewing room with excerpts from films featuring the likes of Saul Leiter talking through his transparencies, and In the Street, Helen Levitt’s 1948 silent short fondly depicting New York’s smiley, smudgy-faced children at play – it’s a joy to see the varying styles and obsessions of so many of the country’s great documentarians on display. The show is curated exclusively from images from one Norwegian collection (the DNB Saving Bank Foundation’s) rather than being an exhaustive survey, and so there are notable absences – only one photograph each from William Eggleston and Peter Hujar, for example – but it’s still a delightful saunter through the streets of 20th-century America in an era before everyone had their heads down looking at a phone.

Imogen Carter, Nerve co-founder

This hit new show from producer Elizabeth Meriwether, based on the 1987 film Black Widow, is anything but your run-of-the-mill cookie-cutter crime drama (which, I’ll admit, I love anyway). Including an unforgettable performance by Lola Petticrew as the show’s female serial killer, the show uses one of the defining issues of our time – child trafficking – to set the scene for a genre-bending part-horror, part-thriller, part-police-procedural. And, best of all, it takes as its primary subject the sheer power of female rage and revenge. 

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Nerve writer

Until now, my relationship to Colson Whitehead has been completely screen-based. I was blown away by the TV and film adaptations of his novels The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, but with the release of Cool Machine this month, I've finally sat down with his prose – and it did not disappoint. The new novel is the third in his Harlem trilogy, but you don't have to have read the previous two to be swept up in this sharp, noirish critique of New York, Black masculinity, and the churn of existence. Whitehead draws a vivid world for his protagonist, Ray Carney, a middle-aged furniture salesman by day and fence (that is, mover of stolen goods) by night, who's embroiled in a high-stakes heist and murder case. With its rhythmic pace, biting social commentary and sensory sketch of an evolving city, Cool Machine makes me want to go back and see what I missed.

Hanna Flint, culture writer

Through 2016’s Yerma at the Young Vic, 2019’s Medea at the Barbican, 2023’s Phaedra at the National Theatre and last year’s The Lady From The Sea at the Bridge, Australian auteur Simon Stone has developed a distinct style: he takes a classic text, reimagines it in a contemporary context, and stuffs it full of wealthy people saying witty things. His latest work, back at the Bridge, is perhaps his boldest yet: a reworking of The Oresteia, Aeschylus’s cycle of tragedies about the murderous fall of the house of Atreus, in which the monarchs of ancient Mycenae are now a squabbling Kent clan grown obscenely rich through a shady defence tech firm doing dodgy deals with Russia. Over three and a half hours and two intervals, Stone’s show jumps around over a 10-year period to graphically depict how they tear themselves apart in an orgy of retributive killing. The inexorable logic of Aeschylus’s original is absent, as is its redemptive final third, but this modern take is utterly thrilling nonetheless, with superb performances from David Morrissey, Mary-Louise Parker, Rosie Sheehy, Tom Glynn-Carney and more. Best of all, though, is Lizzie Clachan’s set: a vast, stylish, glass-walled home, which sleekly spins, revealing blood-stained walls, bodies in baths, and other grisly delights.

Fergus Morgan, culture writer

There was hedonism, and then there was Manumission. It must have been tricky to recall the finer details of the high life at the legendary saucy Ibiza club, what with all the drugs, sex, excess and partying till 10am, but Claire Manumission – one half of the duo behind the night with partner Mike – has done a rip-roaring job of taking readers from the heady days following the Second Summer of Love to the superstar DJ era of the 90s. The memoir is written with an incredible energy and is full of salacious celeb cameos (Robbie Williams, Howard Marks, Irvine Welsh, Kate Moss) and risqué anecdotes that were, how do you say, of their time – like when David Guetta begged Mike and Claire to stop bonking under a sheet onstage at the launch of their Paris club night (co-organised by Pedro Winter, Daft Punk’s one-time manager, no less!). The pair were famed for bringing sex acts to the stage: this is the eyeball-twisting story of club promoters who were in love and making love and starting a “revolution in nightlife” while they were at it. The book sets the scene for the return of Manumission across an entire weekend in Ibiza, from 25 to 27 September.

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

When film-makers Mark Vicente and Scott Altomare decided to make a documentary about narcissistic abuse, they couldn’t know how effectively the finished film would illustrate that phenomenon. Through interviews with psychologists, survivors including actor Evan Rachel Wood (Marilyn Manson’s ex-partner) and four self-aware narcissists, it looks at the hidden manipulation tactics narcissists use and why their toxic influence is everywhere. WhatsApp chats are likely to light up with feverish discussion of “the twist”; part-way through there’s a handbrake turn so abrupt that it changes the film into something shockingly immersive. Early audiences have so far kept the secret, but the less you know going in, the better. Journalist Isla Traquair, who also features in the film, will release an accompanying podcast soon after release, on the usual pod platforms. But see the film first for the full effect. It’s initially available at narcissistsplaybook.com for around £15, but surely a streamer will pounce on this televisual gold.

Julia Raeside, culture writer

THEATRE
Tristan & Yseult
(Theatre Royal Bath, 11-19 September, then touring)

First created in 2003 and staged by Kneehigh Theatre Company in the open air at Restormel Castle in Cornwall, Emma Rice’s influential adaptation of Tristan & Yseult is being revived by Rice’s company for a UK tour this autumn, taking in Bath, Mold, Glasgow and more.

ART
Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector
(Royal Academy, London W1, 21 November-14 March)

This November, the Royal Academy celebrates the pioneering collector and her London gallery, Guggenheim Jeune – a leading venue for surrealist and abstract work between January 1938 and June 1939. This exhibition will reunite work from shows held at the gallery, returning many of them to London for the first time since their original presentation at the space, by artists including Eileen Agar, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Barbara Hepworth, Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and more.

THEATRE
Once Upon a Time in Sokoto
(Royal & Derngate, Northampton, 28 September-10 October, then touring)

Inua Ellams, the poet and playwright behind the acclaimed Barber Shop Chronicles, premieres his new family drama in Northampton before a UK tour taking in Oxford, Nottingham, Warwick, Leeds, Brighton and Bristol.

ART
Zurbarán
(National Gallery, London, until 23 August)

Catch this acclaimed show of works by the Spanish Baroque master before it closes next month.