American artist Barbara Kruger started out as a graphic designer working in advertising, and it shows. Her sharp design skills and acute visual intelligence now produce funny, clever and thought provoking installations in which words and pictures illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie.

Never underestimate the enduring power of a great story over an unwieldy operatic setting. Few of us who saw the first ENO production of The Handmaid’s Tale back in 2003 thought the work stood much chance of revival. Yet Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel has justifiably gained even greater hold since then, so here we are on a third run of Poul Ruders’ baggy monster.

How many re-tellings can Alice Walker's The Color Purple take? A helluva lot, as the candid Sofia, one of the work's seminal characters, might put it.

Critically acclaimed in the US, singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz has won four Grammies during the course of her career. Born in Texas, spending most of her adult life in New York, her seventh album was created in her new hometown of Nashville, with an all-star cast of country-flavoured session musicians and producer Daniel Tashian.

At its best theatre is a seducer. It weaves a magic spell that can persuade you, perhaps against your better judgement, to love a show. To adore a show; to enjoy yourself. This, at least, is my experience of Charlie Josephine’s Cowbois, a queer Western extravaganza which opened at the RSC last year and now arrives, in all its shiny silk-costumed glory, at the Royal Court in London.

Twenty years ago Alexander Payne put Paul Giamatti on the map in Sideways; here he is again, as another punctilious expert, this time not in the field of viniculture but plain old culture, of the old-fashioned classical kind. And his adversary is not a roguish friend but a spiky pupil at the boys’ school in New England where he teaches classics.

It is no surprise that the phrase “Witch Hunt” is Donald Trump’s favoured term to describe his legal travails. Leaving aside its connotations of a malevolent state going after an innocent victim whilst in the throes of a self-serving moral panic, it plays into a founding psychodrama of the USA - the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

When it was published in 1976, “The Hite Report” caused such a sensation that it was translated into 19 languages and flew off the shelves in 36 countries to become the 30th best selling book of all time. Yet it’s author, Shere Hite was treated as Public Enemy Number One.

Seabiscuit, Creed, Rocky, The Full Monty, Chariots of Fire… George Clooney’s latest directorial project is in the same vein as these earlier films, but swap Seabiscuit et al for a rowing eight. 

The water is wild in Night Swim, the weirdly wet horror debut from director Bryce McGuire, in which a backyard bathing pool becomes the locus of all things supernatural.