Buster Keaton made his name in a series of two-reel shorts made from 1917 onwards; The Saphead, from 1920, was his first starring role in a feature film.

Will Erich Korngold, the great cinema composer, ever be recognised as a great composer for the live theatre? Probably not, at least until the prejudices that did for him in his lifetime – the prejudice against film and popular music and the prejudice against Jews – are fully corrected in practice as well as in people’s minds. Korngold, happily, is on the way back, though it has taken a long time. Die tote Stadt should, if justice be done, clinch his return.

When Bliss, a new play adapted from an Andrei Platonov short story by Fraser Grace, made its debut in Russia in early 2020, Cambridge-based company Menagerie were told that their production was “very Russian”.

The Mancunian tribute to Ralph Vaughan Williams – a symphonic cycle shared by the BBC Philharmonic and Hallé – reached its conclusion with the Eighth Symphony last night. But, unlike most concerts in the RVW150 sequence, in this one (the final performance in the Hallé Thursday concerts series of 2021-22), Sir Mark Elder added an eclectic mix of other composers’ work to the evening.

Who was Walter Sickert and what made him tick? The best way to address the question is to make a beeline for the final room of his Tate Britain retrospective. It’s hung with an impressive array of his last and most colourful paintings.

Bent Sørensen has christened his new harpsichord concerto Sei Anime: “six souls”. The six concise movements, written for Mahan Esfahani and a chamber-sized orchestra, are modelled, apparently, on the dance movements of a Bach keyboard suite. But as Sørensen explained from the stage – standing next to Esfahani’s gleaming black harpsichord – two further anecdotes explain the name. It’s borrowed from a range of French womenswear, seen in a Copenhagen shop: the audience laughed.

The hidden history of women artists continues to generate some ground-breaking exhibitions that contribute to a radical re-assessment of art and cultural history. This is a welcome trend, though not entirely without risk, as a new show in Paris demonstrates, and as other exhibitions have managed less convincingly.

The night after visiting Tate Modern’s Surrealism Beyond Borders I dreamt that a swarm of wasps had taken refuge inside my skull and I feared it would hurt when they nibbled their way out again.

There was no overt reference to the world outside in this concert, and yet the poignancy of its content could hardly have been clearer if it had been planned: two symphonies and a song cycle each touched by the tragedy of war.

There's a lot of True Crime stuff about, so it's hardly a surprise to see Stephen Dolginoff's 2003 off-Broadway musical back on the London stage, a West End venue for the Hope Theatre's award-winning 2019 production. Whether one needs to see a pair of charismatic child killers given a platform to explain their crimes while the victim, Bobby Franks, is merely a name, his face as absent as it was after the acid was poured all over it – well, you can make your own judgement about that.