Beckett’s 1958 one-act play is like a ghost story about an old man haunted by his younger self, so it’s a potent vehicle for Gary Oldman to return to the theatres that made him in the 1980s: first York Theatre Royal, where this production opened, and now the Royal Court. The voice on the tape has an arrogant snap, the one on stage a weary sigh. Oldman is the designer as well as the director and the star, and Krapp’s office is a mausoleum of clutter. You have to lean into the details: the clunk and whirr of the tape machine, the fading light, the microscopic precision of Oldman’s gestures and intonations as he buckles under the terrible weight of memory. It pairs nicely with 19-year-old Leo Simpe-Asante’s witty opener Godot’s To-Do List, which puts a surveillance-state spin on Beckett’s themes of impotence and paralysis. Sold out, but there are returns and rush tickets if you’re lucky.

Dorian Lynsey, Nerve theatre critic

I was a latecomer to BBC sitcom Motherland, not understanding why parents would want to spend time with fictional mums after a day wiping bums. But then I fell for it, including Lucy Punch's fabulously dreadful Amanda, whose spin-off series won a Bafta last week and is my new comfort watch. Is it because I'm delighting in schadenfreude watching her hapless attempts to be an influencer? Or enjoying her endless comeuppances as she tries to take advantage of her neighbours? Partly. But it's also because her character is sweetly vulnerable, as is her wonderfully awful mother, played to perfection by Joanna Lumley. Props to the surrounding cast too, especially the brilliant Philippa Dunne as Anne, a modern Mrs Malaprop, who is getting ballsier this season at long last. But my favourite moment yet? Lumley sitting in her shed – sorry, her garden house – reading Miranda July's All Fours.

Jude Rogers, writer

I must confess I read this novel because Patti Smith told me to. “An exquisite and masterly pronouncement that a gifted young writer walks among us,” says the punk priestess on the cover of this epic family saga. Then I discovered that its Swiss-born author was 22 years old when he wrote it and his buzzy book had sold to 29 different territories and spent almost 30 weeks on the German bestseller list. It’s a wild ride, from inside the crumbling castle of Hungary’s aristocratic von Lázár family where a strange baby with “translucent skin” is born at the beginning of the 20th century through two world wars and into Hungary’s Communist 1950s. Fortunes rise and fall, madness lurks around every corner and the whole eccentric Lázár brood would not be out of place in a Wes Anderson film. Weird and quite wonderful.

Imogen Carter, Nerve co-founder

Few exhibitions welcome their visitors with a Code of Care, but given the polarised opinions around the topic today, you can see why the curators of Gender Stories at the Walker Art gallery would set a tone of respect from the moment you enter. The show explores how society’s ideas around gender have changed over decades through an extraordinary range of artworks, personal stories and objects by artists including David Hockney, Grayson Perry, and photographers Catherine Opie and Zanele Muholi, right through to an ancient Greek wine jug. My curiosity was caught by Daniele Tamagni’s photographic series Playboys of Bacongo about dandyish young men in Congo – an anti-colonialist subculture that’s increasingly appealing to women wanting to protest against patriarchal norms. While there, don’t miss John Akomfrah’s mesmerising Listening All Night To The Rain – three of his works from the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Laura Davis, writer

Ghanaian-Australian rapper Genesis Owusu is back with his third studio album and it’s absolutely infectious as well as being arguably his most political yet. It blends fun, uptempo hip-hop with punk vibes to match the political outrage that underscores the whole album, which takes aim at the alt-right, billionaires, rising racism and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It’s soulful, empowering, brilliantly written – and totally addictive.  

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Nerve writer

Gallerist Hannah Barry’s Bold Tendencies – the arts and performance programme that takes over a multi-storey car park in Peckham every summer – is celebrating its 20th year with the theme of “Euphoria”. New artworks on display across the rooftop include Last Chance Saloon, Emma Hart’s joyous ceramic sculpture celebrating pubs, a large-scale work by Andreas Gursky, and Louis Morlæ’s Euphoria Rover, an unsettling but intriguing Robot Wars-style computerised mobile sculpture and soundsystem that periodically roams the site. Among my highlights is I have often walked down this street before, but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet, a two-sided shopfront by artist duo Athen Kardashian and Nina Mhach Durban, inspired by south London’s high street aesthetics. Alongside the visual arts programme, live performance includes choreographer Oona Doherty’s award-winning performance Hope Hunt, which dismantles stereotypes of working-class men.

Meg Molloy, writer

I came across the book Dear Sondos when Shadia, the founder of indie micropublisher Carcazan, DMed me online. I'm so pleased she did – Dear Sondos is one of those labour-of-love, hope-giving projects that tend not to happen at the big publishing houses. It is a record of online messages between two young women: Sondos Al-Saqqa, an award-winning Palestinian poet and writer living under siege in Gaza, and Davie, a secular Jewish writer from New York, who started corresponding in 2024 after Davie discovered Sondos's poetry via an online fundraiser. As they write, they delve into one another's lives, Davie keen to understand the trauma of Sondos's daily existence and Sondos gaining succour from this connection to a more peaceful world. The writing is full of empathy and a youthful lack of inhibition, and really moving. This Saturday, 23 May, Shadia hosts an event celebrating the book, with Davie joining online and a prerecorded video talk from Sondos at Books on the Rise in Richmond, London. Tickets are available here.

Sarah Donaldson, Nerve co-founder

THEATRE
The Yard Theatre
(Hackney Wick, London E9, July 2026-April 2027)

Conceived in 2011 as a six-month pop-up theatre space in an east London warehouse, the Yard became a pioneering destination developing exciting new work and putting on sold-out shows for over a decade. This summer it reopens in a brand new 220-seat home designed by Takero Shimazaki Architects with a season of six shows – including the huge coup of Ian McKellen returning to the stage in Lear and the London premiere of Malmö Stadsteater’s adaptation of Jackie Collins’ bestselling debut novel, The World Is Full of Married Men. Tickets go on sale to Yard members first (Yard Residents, 21 May; Yard Regulars, 22 May) and to the general public on 28 May. Tickets for Lear will go on sale at a later date.

PHOTOGRAPHY
Bristol Photo Festival
(Multiple venues, opening week 14-18 October, running until 15 November)

The third edition of the festival, the international biennial of contemporary photography, opens in October with the theme “Time Machine”. Sign up to the newsletter for updates.

THEATRE
Starlight Express world tour
(Opening at Curve, Leicester from 9-22 May 2027 travelling to Liverpool, Glasgow, Sunderland, Birmingham, Southampton and more)

The award-winning new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s outlandish mega-musical has just announced a world tour next year, opening in Leicester at Curve on 9 May and then travelling to Liverpool, Glasgow, Sunderland, Birmingham, Southampton and more before, we’re promised, hitting Canada and Australia. Sign up now to be first in line for tickets.