If you’re in the market for some searingly honest reflections on life, London rapper Dave’s new album and Nerve art critic Emily LaBarge’s shapeshifting debut book get our seal of approval this week. On stage, we recommend a superb production from choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité co-founder Simon McBurney and a vibrant new take on Enda Walsh’s Arlington. Plus, there’s an unmissable TV documentary series, a podcast and more.

Dave may be a rapper by name, but he’s a spoken word poet in spirit. His third album The Boy Who Played the Harp is a conversational whirlwind of existential woes, where the Streatham artist explores his relationship to Christianity, wealth, women and politics. It’s interrogative, a little melancholy, with glittering James Black production running throughout.

Kadish Morris, writer

I stumbled across the first episode of this classily filmed doc series by filmmaker James Bluemel (Once Upon a Time in Iraq etc) and am hooked. It’s about the US Space shuttle programme in the 1970s and 80s, which diversified the people who were able to go to space. Episode 2 - about the unprecedented cooperation between post-Soviet Russia and America on a mission to repair the Mir space station - is mesmerising. Picture being asked to go and live in a rusty, falling-apart submarine in space and that’s not even close to how terrifying the task was. The bromance that develops between Russian engineer Sasha Lazutkin and British astronaut Michael Foale is unexpectedly moving.

Sarah Donaldson, co-founder, the Nerve

Nigerian-born, Hamburg-based artist Karimah Ashadu shows a new film that picks up where the themes of her Venice Biennale Silver-Lion winning work, Machine Boys, left off. MUSCLE focuses on men, masculinity, performance, labour - the body as it works, strains, is pushed to its limits. Bodybuilders in the slums of Lagos are shown, as per the exhibition title, with tenderness, reverence, and deep sensuality. A mesmerising show that is as much about its subject as it is about filmmaking and what the camera can do. 

Emily LaBarge, art critic

Two of the most original and exciting artists working today - Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and influential British theatre maker Simon McBurney, one of the founders of Complicité - have collaborated with Nederlands Dance Theater on this urgent response to the climate emergency and our futures. Worth queuing for a ticket - contact the box office for returns. It had five star reviews across the board after the UK premiere last February in Manchester

Jane Ferguson, co-founder

The pod bar has been raised once again with this new deep dive on the Nigerian musician, activist and afrobeat pioneer, Fela Kuti. The idea of music as resistance looms large and, though the Kuti story has been told many times, host/creator Jad Abumrad (Dolly Parton's America) lands you in the story in typically immersive and richly layered fashion, with rare archive interviews, well-researched context, a star turn from Kuti's hilarious friend Sandra Izsadore and input from David Byrne, Questlove, Paul McCartney and Barack Obama (whose production company with Michelle, Higher Ground, has brought the series to life).

Kate Hutchinson, music critic

Sitting at the weirder end of his spectrum of work, Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s genre-defying 2016 three-hander Arlington is an oblique love story set in a dystopian surveillance state, in which "keepers" watch over the "kept" in a featureless forest of tower blocks. This stylish revival from Glasgow-based company Shotput – aka Lucy Ireland and Jim Manganello – is superbly sharp, featuring gorgeous projections, vivid lighting, and an extraordinary central dance sequence. 

Fergus Morgan, writer

"When the six men with their masks and their guns and their knives and machetes and screaming and terror arrive, we are about ten minutes into watching Mrs Doubtfire...". So begins the horrifying hostage ordeal that Emily LaBarge and her family went through during a Christmas holiday in 2009, a trauma so unspeakable that it shattered Emily’s sense of reality and self for more than a decade. In Dog Days, her exceptional debut book, Emily, the Nerve's art critic, a Canadian writer and academic based in London, explores how to capture this sense of breakdown using a narrative structure that itself continually shifts, splinters and fragments. Combining memoir, cultural criticism and literary experiment, Emily delves into the work of writers and artists from Joan Didion to Sylvia Plath, David Lynch to Paul Klee to examine how we tell stories. Cerebral and profound but also raw and at times funny, it knocked me sideways. I immediately wanted to put life on pause and reread it, go deeper into its layers.

Imogen Carter, co-founder

Marcos Kueh is a Netherlands-based Chinese Malaysian textile artist from Borneo whose work explores those cross-cultural histories. Smooth Sailing, his stunning new show at esea contemporary, takes its title from a Chinese parting blessing meaning 'may the wind be smooth along your entire journey' and draws on research at the Whitworth gallery’s renowned textile collection and the People’s History Museum’s labour archives. Entry is through a trade union poster, reimagined as a woven curtain, into a darkened space where a perfectly lit broken mast and sail are soundtracked by the industrial rhythms of an embroidery machine steadily working away centre stage. It beautifully delves into stories of identity, migration and work. 

Susan Ferguson, writer

THEATRE
Man to Man, Royal Court, London SW1
(5 September - 24 October 2026)

As part of the Royal Court’s 70th birthday celebrations, Tilda Swinton returns to the stage after more than three decades, reprising her 1988 performance in Manfred Karge’s Man to Man, directed by Stephen Unwin.

THEATRE
Inter Alia, Wyndhams Theatre, London
(19 March - 20 June)

The National Theatre's sold out legal drama written by Suzie Miller and starring Rosamund Pike transfers.

THEATRE
Something Rotten, Manchester Opera House
(16 June-19 July)

Comedy musical starring Jason Manford from the team behind Mrs Doubtfire. Tickets on sale from 5 Nov.

THEATRE
Stereophonic, Duke of York’s Theatre, London WC2

The acclaimed Broadway musical - said to be loosely based on Fleetwood Mac's recording of Rumours - will end on 22 November. Some cheap tickets available if you search online.