It’s an extraordinary thing to see Tilda Swinton on stage after decades away, especially when she’s the only person on it. It was 1987 when she first played Ella, a working-class woman in Nazi Germany who adopts her late husband’s identity, in Manfred Karge’s unsettling journey through six decades of German history. Revived by its original director, Stephen Unwin, this remains a pungent, visceral play. Surrounded by designer Bunny Christie’s East German clutter, Swinton takes her signature androgyny to extremes, resembling a hybrid of Albert Steptoe and Aladdin Sane. She is fearlessly intense as the tenacious survivor of a savage century – a woman/man whom history has scrawled on like she/he’s a toilet wall. Karge has written a new scene for this revival: his evocation of Nazism’s return, with Swinton barking through a megaphone, is all the scarier since the AfD’s recent regional election victory. Returns only, but it’s worth trying your luck to experience this perfect combination of actor and text.

Dorian Lynskey, Nerve theatre critic

This five-piece from south London have pulled off what no British jazz act has managed before: a Brit award for best band, a Mercury prize win, sell-out Wembley Arena and Royal Albert Hall shows and even a track with the ubiquitous Fred Again. The next stepping stone along the path to world domination is this, their fourth album, Here Because of Hope. Ezra might be known as a party band but this shows the softer side to their sound: jazz is more a spirit than a genre, as they apply their beefy drums, vibrant brass and cosmic keys to styles like reggae, salsa, calypso and UK funky. Helping them to unite the African-Caribbean diaspora are British-Gambian rapper Pa Salieu, Cameroonian singer Libianca and Jamaica's Lila Iké, while Leona Lewis adds a sweet vocal to the lovers' rock of All I Need. 

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

All sorts of shows get described as “event TV” but this one truly is: the curtain is falling on the epic documentary project that first aired in 1964. Granada Television originally brought together a group of seven-year-olds from different socioeconomic backgrounds for a programme exploring class. It was intended as a one-off until director Michael Apted had the idea to follow the children throughout their lives, returning at seven-year intervals to chronicle life across six decades. Now one of the most ambitious and influential experiments in broadcasting history bows out with a two-part special. Following Apted’s death in 2021, Asif Kapadia takes over directorial duties and does him proud. As we meet the surviving subjects, who just turned 70, it’s an emotive and elegiac sign-off, themed around what it means to have lived well. We defy you to have dry eyes when the credits roll. 

Michael Hogan, writer

Prolong that summer feeling with this sultry, gossipy novel set in 1970s Crete. The author of Weird Fucks and Haunted Houses excels at unpicking social minutiae and the less salubrious sides of desire, and she is on thrillingly scabrous form here. Ageing crime writer Horace Vaughn’s peaceful existence on the island is thrown into disarray by the arrival of a mysterious young woman named Helen, who brings with her a whirlwind of dramatic displays and strange rumours. When she goes missing, Horace sets aside his magnum opus and puts his detective skills to the test, leading him to a succession of increasingly esoteric detours.

Kathryn Bromwich, writer

With 1536, her savagely feminist take on Tudor history, rising star playwright Ava Pickett took the West End by storm earlier this year and now her spin on Greek mythology explodes on to the stage at Stratford East, full of the same fury and biting wit, directed by Lisa Spirling. Transporting the tale of Helen of Troy to contemporary Essex, Pickett imagines what happens when Helen (an excellent Michelle Dockery) is brought home, bloodied and bruised, by her husband Marcus and his thug of a brother Mario following a war they kickstarted in Britain when she ran off with “a foreigner”. Premiering against a backdrop of actual masked vigilantes bringing anti-migrant disorder to Britain’s streets, Pickett’s brilliantly performed exploration of toxic masculinity, racism and revenge would be almost unbearably chilling were it not laced with the darkest of humour and hilarious contemporary observations about picky bits and pink gin that will have you howling. Unmissable.

Imogen Carter, Nerve co-founder

Bringing together, for the first time, four of documentary photographer Tish Murtha’s most significant bodies of work (Elswick Kids, Youth Unemployment, Save Scotswood Works and Elswick Revisited), this compelling exhibition travels back to a time of major social and economic upheaval in 1970s and 80s Newcastle. It’s an insider’s highly empathetic view of working-class life, with each series displayed salon-style in the bright airy space. It’s emotional to see such desperate times reflected in these personal, honest images filled with warmth, love, humour and deep connection to the community she belonged to and fought for. I spent most time with her Elswick Kids series, marvelling at the playfulness of the young among such deprivation – so to then see some of those same faces years later in her Youth Unemployment series was heartbreaking. Tish’s photographs are paired with a newly commissioned body of work depicting contemporary Newcastle by Polish-born Kuba Ryniewicz, who moved to the area in 2004. It’s a challenge to go from Tish’s work to the vivid colour, flesh and texture of Kuba’s work taken decades later, but worth giving yourself time to contemplate the connections between the two.

Jade Amias, Nerve assistant

Ben Mackenzie’s excellent new documentary is a simultaneously horrifying, edifying and hilarious investigation into the crypto industry. Mackenzie, an actor and author who also has an economics degree, here turns investigator, and manages to find many victims of crypto scams, get crypto leaders to lie on television, and even bags one of the strangest and most illuminating interviews I’ve ever seen with Sam Bankman-Fried before he was indicted and jailed for fraud over his FTX crypto trading platform. Mackenzie sets out in the documentary, which is based on his book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism and the Golden Age of Fraud, to get the audience to understand the sheer obscurity and opacity of crypto – and the fact that everyone is lying to you for money. And he does it brilliantly. 

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Nerve writer

EXHIBITION
Roman Scotland: Life on the Edge of Empire
(National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, 14 November-Sunday 18 April 2027)

Through significant loans, new research and previously unseen archaeological discoveries (including a rare, intricate brooch unearthed by a metal detectorist in a Midlothian field in 2022), this show promises to “reshape our understanding of Scotland’s relationship with the Roman world”.  

MUSIC
Oasis 2027 tour
(Summer 2027)

Oasis have confirmed a second leg of their smash-hit reunion tour for summer 2027 and have promised to avoid a repeat of the dynamic pricing fiasco of the first leg (we’re told standard ticket prices will be fixed and range between £71.50 and £266.60, including fees). To have a chance to buy tickets, you will need to complete the ticket registration process, which closes at 4pm on Thursday 17 September.

DANCE
Rhythm Riot
(Sadler's Wells, London EC1, 24 September-3 October)

A bold triple-bill spanning neoclassical ballet, contemporary choreography, hip-hop and jazz, Rhythm Riot will celebrate the possibilities of ballet, with world premieres from LA’s Micaela Taylor and US-based, Korean-born Jae Man Joo, alongside George Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements, rarely seen in the UK.