For The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal re-teams with Jessie Buckley, the star of her subtle 2021 directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, with electrifyingly different results. In 1930s Chicago, a murdered woman (Buckley) is revived as a mate for the Monster (Christian Bale), and the two then embark on a Bonnie and Clyde-style crime spree, which gleefully stitches together body parts from the sci-fi, horror and gangster genres.

Ellen E Jones, Nerve film critic

Mike Tweddle's superb new production of Edward Albee's play crumbles the colossus of the Burton-Taylor reading in a quietly radical reinterpretation. Innovative staging frames the two couples’ conflicts very much as a form of performance, sets of curtains in the increasingly claustrophobic house echoing our assumptions about theatre, confessional monologues repositioned downstage like old-school front-curtain standup comedy, and fourth-wall-breaking antics spilling the collapsing third act into the main house itself. Big laughs! Sick revelations! And lots of booze! It's the shortest three hours you'll ever experience.

Stewart Lee, Nerve columnist

"A true celebration of living" is how Tracey Emin has described her new Tate Modern show, and while its 100 works in paint, video, textile and more overflow with pain, heartache, anxiety, abuse and near-death experiences, they are so full of Emin’s trademark honesty and defiance that it’s hard not to leave the show feeling joy. I remember the electrical jolt I felt upon first seeing My Bed in the 1999 Turner prize show. As a teenager, I’d been led to believe that displaying your emotions in public was embarrassing, and yet here was a woman not only proudly showing the messy remains, the actual dirty linen, of one of the darkest and most depressing times of her life, but turning it into art. I haven’t always loved every work of Emin’s since but it’s clear that in her 40-year career she has helped open up the conversation for women, helped change what’s acceptable. Here, surrounded by rooms filled with writings, paintings and reflections from other anguished periods of Emin’s life, the bed remains deeply poignant. In a world reeling from Epstein’s crimes and the reversal of so many women’s rights across the world, Emin’s total commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about how it feels to be a woman seems more needed than ever.

Imogen Carter, Nerve co-founder

After the Post Office drama, here’s another “real-life” TV series which is just as sharply observed and horrifying. Dirty Business, written and directed by Joseph Bullman, shows the consequences of Margaret Thatcher’s decision to privatise water management in England and Wales. Cue years of asset-stripping and underinvestment by overseas investors leading to infrastructure so wildly unfit for purpose that the illegal dumping of untreated sewage into rivers and on to beaches became more or less routine. 

Reenactment of the devastation this has meant for customers and the environment is combined with real footage – rivers crusted over with shit, hundreds of dead fish – while the drama follows dogged campaigners Peter Hammond and Ash Smith (an ex-Oxford professor and ex-policeman, played by Jason Watkins and David Thewlis) who team up after noticing that sections of the River Windrush, near where they live, have gone from clear blue to murky brown. Their fight to get those responsible to sit up and take notice is mostly met with obfuscation and evasion. The tragic case of eight-year-old Heather Preen is depicted – a little girl who died two weeks after picking up an E coli infection on a beach in Devon – as is the story of Reuben Santer, who now lives with an incurable illness after surfing at Saunton Sands.

What a gripping and important three hours of TV. In the closing moments, a caption recounts conclusions reached by the Grenfell Tower inquiry as to the cause of that tragedy: “Decades of failure by private companies, regulators, lack of readiness by fire safety bodies and government.” Dirty business indeed.

Ursula Kenny, Nerve writer

In 1995, War Child made the groundbreaking charity compilation HELP, a snapshot of Cool Britannia and the only time Blur and Oasis appeared on the same record. It raised over £1.25m for the charity’s efforts in conflict zones. Fast forward two decades and you don’t need me to tell you why a follow-up is necessary, although the stats are shocking: nearly one in five children globally, War Child says, are affected by current crises. And so to Abbey Road, where an impressive roster of A-listers from across the genres jostled for studio space over an intensive week of sessions and collaborations – including Damon Albarn, Kae Tempest, Pulp, Ezra Collective, Young Fathers, Sampha, Depeche Mode, Fontaines DC and American pop star Olivia Rodrigo – all overseen masterfully by exec producer James Ford, who worked on it in part while he was receiving treatment for leukaemia in hospital. Highlights include the punkiest Pulp have ever sounded on Begging For Change, a heady new track from Arctic Monkeys and a divine cover of Jeff Buckley’s Lilac Wine by Arooj Aftab and Beck. 

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

It's not often you "meet" a writer first in the flesh rather than on the page. But last week, at the Southbank's first Indie Night (a smart idea for a new quarterly panel event in which four independently published authors discuss their latest books), I heard Vigdis Hjorth - a Norwegian novelist I'd not read and only vaguely heard of - talk and immediately became a fan. On stage, Vigdis was funny, brutally honest, eccentric - telling livewire anecdotes about her ex's lame literary response to one of her books, and at one point leaping round the stage. The lazy shorthand is that Vigdis is Norway's answer to Annie Ernaux. Her latest autofictional novel - Repetition - explores the experience of being a teenage girl and is dark in tone and full of startlingly perceptive sentences (beautifully translated by Charlotte Barslund). I'm hooked!

Sarah Donaldson, Nerve co-founder

MUSIC
Somerset House Summer Series
(Somerset House, London WC2, 16-26 July)

Somerset House has just announced the names for this year’s edition of its annual outdoor gigs series held in its beautiful courtyard. The line-up features upcoming stars alongside established names, including the Flaming Lips, Benjamin Clementine, Agnes Obel and Grammy-winning saxophonist Venna. Tickets go on general sale from 10am on Friday 6 March (but the venue’s e-newsletter subscribers have access from 10am on Thursday 5 March)

CULTURE
Brighton Festival
(1-25 May, venues across the city)

Highlights of the 60th edition of the annual festival spanning theatre, dance, music, literature and visual art include the world premiere of the play Kohlhaas (adapted from Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas), directed by Omar Elerian and starring Arinzé Kene and one-off performances from Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson. There’s also a collaboration between Sampa the Great and W.I.T.C.H and, in dance, the final touring production from The Akram Khan Company, Thikra: Night of Remembering.

ART
Anish Kapoor
(Hayward Gallery, London SE1, 16 June-18 October)

As part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th birthday celebrations, the sculptor returns with a major show to the Hayward Gallery, where he staged his first major UK survey almost 30 years ago.