It’s hard to say who is going to enjoy E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea. Admirers of the modernist designer-architect will be frustrated by how little of her other work is actually visible on screen while fans of feminist biopics might well be underwhelmed by the film’s languid pace and arty flourishes. 

In Emmanuel Courcol’s drama The Marching Band (En Fanfare in French, and also released as My Brother's Band), a struggling community band in a mining town in northern French has fallen on hard times. Elements of déjà vu, perhaps?

Certainly, if you're from Northern England. But rather than the romance of Mark Herman’s Brassed Off (1996), The Marching Band focuses on the relationship between two brothers (main picture).

Lucy Farrell, one quarter of the brilliant, award-winning Anglo-Scots band Furrow Collective, and a solo artist whose stunning debut album, We Are Only Sound, was released in 2023, divides her time between the UK – she’s a native of Kent – and Prince Edward Island, a musically rich parcel of land off Canada’s eastern seaboard. The island is home to the other half of this sublime folk-acoustic double bill, Juno Award-winning songwriter Catherine MacLellan.

From the creative team that brought you The Play That Goes Wrong in 2012 (and assorted sequels) comes this spy caper. As ever with Mischief productions, their latest work is a lot of fun and pays its dues to the great age of British farce (and pantomime too) with clever wordplay and physical comedy as things go increasingly awry.

There is so much that is right about Jonathan Kent’s new production of House of Games – the casting, the staging, the direction. But the flaw it can’t overcome is that the 1987 David Mamet screenplay on which Richard Bean based this stage version in 2010 has been transformed from a vicious psychologically tough caper-movie into an almost jaunty puzzle-play, its sharp teeth removed.

William Byrd, Arnold Schoenberg and their respective acolytes go cheek by jowl, crash into one another, soothe, infuriate and shine in their very different ways This is all in a typical programme of pianist, conductor, composer and all-round pioneer Karim Said, and last night in the studio of Leighton House, it nearly all worked (when it didn’t, that was the nature of the beast, not the pianist).

There was a wonderful festal spirit at the Wigmore Hall last night, as the vocal ensemble Stile Antico ran through a Greatest Hits selection in celebration of their 20^th anniversary, in front of a packed and enthusiastic audience. The 12-strong group still boasts four founder members, but this was swelled to 10 for the final item, as a swarm of alumni joined in a beautiful rendition of Gibbons’ The Silver Swan.

According to PUP lead singer Stefan Babcock, the Toronto foursome practiced together a grand total of twice before embarking on their current UK and European tour.

Given the band’s well-known habit for disagreements and teetering on the edge of imploding, that might have been a wise decision. It didn’t affect the show itself, for while the group’s history is littered with chaos, this was a lively but controlled display. 

Zoe Lyons knows her audience; as a few shoutouts confirmed, many of them are long-time fans, and have had lives with similar highs and lows along the way, and she delivers stories about her life that reflect theirs too. And so it proves with her latest touring show, Werewolf – which I saw in the cavernous surrounds of Earth Hackney – as she talks about finding contentment in middle age.

“It is so disgraceful, what happened there,” says Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, in a comment that is the understatement of the century. She is referring to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was held prisoner.