Kidnap and Ransom, ITV1

Trevor Eve is gritty and grizzled as hostage negotiator Dominic King

Notwithstanding his regrettable central role in the recent remake of Bouquet of Barbed Wire, Trevor Eve is an actor who has improved vastly with age. Once cursed with a kind of shiny smugness, the 21st-century Eve is rougher round the edges and indelibly lined with decades of thespian rough'n'tumble.

The Train Driver, Hampstead Theatre

Grave concerns: Owen Sejake in Athol Fugard’s 'The Train Driver'

Athol Fugard’s new play is a two-hander which broods about death

Few playwrights have been so successful at moulding our view of a nation as Athol Fugard. It’s impossible to think of South Africa, especially during the apartheid years, without thinking of his Sizwe Bansi is Dead, The Island or Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act. Since the end of the old regime in 1994, the moral fuel that powered his plays may have evaporated, but this new work, one of nine premiered by the 78-year-old author in the past 15 years, shows that his feeling for stagecraft and his concern for human dignity remain undiminished.

Tony Allen, Barbican

Fela Kuti’s drummer provides three hours of high-protein Afrobeat

Happy Birthday, Tony! Last night the great Nigerian musician celebrated the fact that he has spent 70 years on the planet, with 52 of those years exploring – as no other drummer has explored – the humble kit drum (or drum kit if you prefer). This standard arrangement of bass drum, snare drum, toms, cymbals and percussion has been the engine behind most popular music for only a couple of decades longer than Tony himself has been bashing away at the things for.

Or You Could Kiss Me, National Theatre

Puppetry of love, loss, and infirmity co-starring Handspring's Basil Jones in the flesh

Puppet play looks forward, and back, in latest from the War Horse team

Theatrical conceits, much like London buses, seem these days to come in threes. Or so it is suggested by the Neil Bartlett/Handspring collaboration Or You Could Kiss Me, the third Cottesloe production this year to peer into the future, albeit only as far as 2036, whereas Mike Bartlett's Earthquakes in London leapt forward to 2525. (Completing the trifecta: Tamsin Oglesby's Really Old, Like Forty Five, set a comparatively imminent 40 years ahead.) And while Oglesby's play featured a robotic nurse, this latest opening puts some very singular puppets centre-stage, alongside a vision of infirmity that could not be either more human - or humane.

Truth and Lies: Jillian Edelstein on Show

Pictures from the photographer's most celebrated collection

Regulars of theartsdesk will be familiar with the work of Jillian Edelstein. Her portraits of cultural figures have adorned several of our series, theartsdesk Q&A. There is now a chance to see pictures from her most celebrated collection at a new gallery and bookshop in south London.

New Music CDs Round-Up 12

Top listening includes Manic Street Preachers, Seu Jorge and Underworld

This month's top releases are headed up by a brilliant covers album by Brazilian singer Seu Jorge, and the Manic Street Preachers and Richard Thompson on peak form. Elsewhere there is South African pianist Kyle Shepherd, Argentinian "eccentric mystic" Axel Krygier and dance music from Underworld and Superpitcher and "like a Humberside Randy Newman" Paul Heaton. Reviewers are Sue Steward, Joe Muggs, Russ Coffey, Peter Culshaw, Kieron Tyler, Marcus O'Dair, Bruce Dessau and Howard Male.

Now Newsnight is at it...

The BBC's cultural conscience has been pricked, it would seem, by the World Cup now reaching its endgame in South Africa. Either that or departments don't talk to one another. Singing for Life, Sunday night's documentary on BBC Four about the young singers who aspire to trade the township choir for the opera stage, also focused on Fikile Mvinjelwa, a Cape Town baritone who made it to the Met. Now Newsnight is reporting on another singer who has been on a comparable journey to stardom.

Singing for Life, BBC Four/ Gazza's Tears, ITV1

Township chorister goes it alone: Thami, 18, at an operatic audition

Gifted young South Africans try to sing their way out of the township

I once sat in a rehearsal room in a brick-box theatre on the outskirts of Cape Town. The cast was warming up for Carmen. First, the choreographer put 40 mostly black South African singers through a gruelling physical warm-up. Opera singers are rarely slender, and they were all in a muck sweat by the time the vocal coach stepped forward to lead them through a vocal warm-up. But when they opened their mouths it was as if someone has strapped you to a chair in a wind tunnel. The noise was transforming, majestic, all-powerful. So I knew roughly what sound to expect in Singing for Life, a documentary about the miscegenation of the black township choral tradition and the white man’s most exclusive art form, opera.

Triomf

White trash fear and social intolerance in mid-1990s South Africa

Brutal South African parable about the shock of the new

"Change" has been the watchword of the past few months, the standard flown hopefully aloft by every political party. A week spent anxiously waiting for a political conclusion, worrying about its impact, and heatedly debating its validity has made for a more than usually vulnerable sense of British nationhood: an apt time indeed for the UK release of Triomf, a brutal South African parable about political prejudice, social intolerance, and above all the fear of the new.

Interview: Diane Birch Rises Up

Diane Birch, a singer-songwriter with a classical and gospel bent

Diane Birch's album 'Bible Belt' is an instant classic

It's probably a bit early to start picking the best albums of 2010, but I would seriously consider a legal challenge if Diane Birch's Bible Belt isn't there or thereabouts when the votes are counted. Like a long-lost singer-songwriter classic, it accomplishes the trick of sounding instantly familiar, yet Birch herself doesn't sound quite like any other artist you've heard before. Her voice can be soft and supple, but it also has a raw, rasping quality that can saw through a song like "Choo Choo", with its vamping organ and garage-band guitars. By contrast, in the hymn-like "Forgiveness" she sails up to a top note that could bring Airedales and Labradors running from miles around.
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