There’s a deal to be made when taking your seat for The Winter’s Tale. It’s one the title alone would have signalled to the groundlings as much as those invited to rattle their jewellery upstairs back in the 17th century – it’s a fairytale, a fantasy, a funny-peculiar play. Perhaps the only play outside pantomime in which a bear gets involved. 

Comedian Tony Hancock’s vertiginous rise and fall is neatly traced in the two films he completed in the early 1960s. The warning signs were already present when 1961’s The Rebel (★★★★) was released. Hancock’s BBC career had been enormously successful, his eponymous radio series featuring him sparring with a talented supporting cast. The brilliant scripts were supplied by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.

Brian Clarke died on 1 July 2025, after a long illness. He was one of the most original British artists of our time – wide-ranging, ground-breaking and influential. His painting was first-class, but it was in the field of architectural stained glass, which he approached as a fine artist, and in a radically innovative manner, that he truly made a name for himself. 

From the animatronic cat on the bar of the Garter Inn to the rowers’ crew who haul their craft across the stage and the military ranks of “Dig for Victory” cabbages arrayed in Ford’s garden, all the period flourishes that helped make Richard Jones’s Falstaff such an audience hit twice before at Glyndebourne look as spruce and smart as ever in this revival.

The 2024 play at the National Theatre that put writer Beth Steel squarely centre-stage has now received a West End transfer. Its title taken from an Auden poem urging people to dance till they drop, it’s probably the most passionate show in that locale, and definitely the lewdest.

A thirtysomething American woman with wavering self-confidence, a tendency to talk too much and a longing for married bliss with Mr Darcy at his gorgeous country pile tries to reset her life post-breakup with a grown-up new job in London. Welcome to Bridget Jones country as seen through the lens of New Yorker Lena Dunham. 

When in the 1990s, Jenny Saville’s peers shunned painting in favour of alternative media such as photography, video and installations, the artist stuck to her guns and, unapologetically, worked on canvases as large as seven feet tall. While still a student at Glasgow School of Art, she painted Propped, 1992, one of the most challenging and memorable female nudes in the history of art (pictured below right). 

The red, white and blue bull’s-eye on the front curtain at Sadler’s Wells tells us we are in the familiar territory of Pete Townshend’s rock musical about teenage angst in 1960s Britain. What follows isn’t so easy to recognise.

Fans of the character comedian Graham Fellows will possibly turn up for this British film starring the man who created the punk parody single “Jilted John” and Sheffield’s finest, the car-coated singer-songwriter John Shuttleworth. But they may leave disappointed.

If somebody submitted a treatment for a new costume drama series set in the 1930s in which not just one but two fictitious sisters from a fading aristocratic family pair off with leading fascists, while the cousin warning them off these liaisons is a future British PM, the pitch meeting probably wouldn’t last that long.