John Webster’s sour, bloody tale of brotherly greed and vice has been updated by the playwright Zinnie Harris, who also directs her own text at the Trafalgar. The title has a handy [of Malfi] added. But do we really know where we are? Or which century we’re watching?

Of all the ingenues in all the world of golden TV sitcom, Felicity Kendal was the most innocent, the most wicked, the most deceptive, with an amaretto voice that wheedled like a child and seduced like a witch. Half a century on, there must be a heck of a portrait in her attic because at 78 Kendal displays intact all her qualities – including that elfin prettiness – in a glorious star performance as Filumena, the mother-of-three in want of a husband in Eduardo di Filippo's classic comedy.

This revival of Puccini’s Trittico a mere three and a half months after it was first shown on the Millennium Centre stage seems to bear witness to WNO’s current financial uncertainty. In effect, it reduces their 2024 repertory to half what it was a decade ago – four shows instead of eight, though admittedly all four productions have been new, at least to this company. 

We were of course lucky to get this new WNO Rigoletto at all. If it weren’t for the fact that, in the end, the company’s wonderful chorus and orchestra couldn’t wait to get back to doing what they do best, and accepted a modest glow of light at the end of the tunnel that would barely have registered on the light meters of most union negotiations, the company could well have been dark for many months, perhaps for good.

Out of emergencies may come revelations. Sir András Schiff has broken his leg, and we wish him a super-speedy recovery. At the Proms, his promised Art of Fugue will have to wait. Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, a past winner of the Chopin Prize, stepped in yesterday with a late-night recital programme that at first glance could hardly have looked more alien to the austere grandeur of Bach’s contrapuntal epic.

On opening night, there’s always a little tension in the air. Tech rehearsals and previews can only go so far – this is the moment when an audience, some wielding pens like scalpels, sit in judgement. Having attended thousands on the critics’ side of the fourth wall, I can tell you that there’s plenty of crackling expectation and a touch of fear in the stalls, too. None more so than when the show is billed as a new musical.

Heartbreak Hotel, Summerhall ★★★★ 

It’s been a long time since the Whitechapel Gallery has presented three seriously good exhibitions at the same time. Already reviewed are Gavin Jantjes’ paintings on show in the main gallery. He is now joined, in gallery 2, by Dominique White, winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and in galleries 5, 6 & 7, by Peter Kennard.

Could “Cav and Pag” give way to “Sue and Pag”? As a double-bill partner for Leoncavallo’s backstage shocker Pagliacci, Opera Holland Park have scheduled not the standard Cavalleria Rusticana but an entirely different one-act work. Premiered in Munich in 1909, Wolf-Ferrari’s Il Segreto di Susanna plays droll, even farcical, variations on the same theme of male jealousy as newlywed Count Gil suspects his bride Countess Susanna of having an affair. 

It’s somehow typical of the Welsh National Opera I’ve known now for the best part of sixty years that it should confront its current funding difficulties with brilliant productions of two of the more challenging works in the repertory.