Little Gem, Bush Theatre

A gobby play that has real heart: Sarah Greene, Anita Reeves and Amelia Crowley deliver bright and enjoyable monologues

Gobby show about three generations of Dublin women has real heart

Monologue is a boring word, but in the hands of an Irish pensmith it can create some pretty exciting theatre. From a writer such as Conor McPherson or Mark O’Rowe the monologue can set the night alight with its storytelling brio. Word-drunk on these great draughts of bubbling verbal nectar, you soon feel you know the speakers as well as your own family. Yes, a good monologue is that beguiling. Which is exactly the case with Elaine Murphy’s first play, now visiting west London, a lovely and loving set of monologues which create an emotionally rich picture of three generations of Dublin women.

I Am Love

Tilda Swinton glistens in a baroque saga of love and death amid the Milanese upper crust

Somehow the title sounds more sonorous in Italian. Io Sono l'Amore is a big, fat, full-blown melodrama, a film with the button marked "passione" forced up to 11. It looks exquisite, is a glittering showcase for Tilda Swinton as the restless Russian trophy wife of a wealthy Milanese industrialist and is elegant in spades: the cuisine, the couture, the shoes, the decor, the diamonds, the lipstick, they're all to die for. So what if it's also just a bit kitschy around the edges?

Concerto/The Judas Tree/Elite Syncopations, Royal Ballet

Shock power switch in new cast of MacMillan's brilliant last ballet

Another night, another cast, another Judas Tree (see first-night review below this) - and yet more proof of what a tough, durable, shape-shifting piece Kenneth MacMillan created in his last year of life. Recently theartsdesk interviewee Thiago Soares talked of his preparations to play the central male in this gladiatorial ballet, and last night he made the role of the Foreman his own, taking to the stage like a razor-edged switchblade as the head of the gang of labourers who prowl at night through Canary Wharf and carry girls’ bodies to and fro.

Alcoholic Faith Mission, Camden Bar Fly

Will the Apostolic Faith Mission see the joke?

Saturday night's alright for meditations on love and loss

Standing in the black-walled gloom of the Bar Fly in Camden, I suddenly realise that I’m one of only a couple of dozen people completely transfixed by the band on the stage. Perhaps this is because, to most of the audience, they are just the third act in a kind of three-for-the-price-of-one night, and they simply don’t have the necessary party vibe that’s required to bring Saturday night to a satisfactory end. But as I find this Copenhagen outfit’s sublime, intense and obliquely romantic brand of indie rock one of the most compelling sounds I’ve heard in the past few months, I can’t help but feel disappointed on their behalf. They really deserve better than this.

Seven Ages of Britain, BBC One

Gilbert and George and Dimbers go through the motions in Seven Ages of Britain

A load of old posh: David Dimbleby concludes his tour of British art

Seven Ages of Britain began in the same week as A History of the World in 100 Objects on Radio 4. You wait a prodigiously long time for a massive cultural overview and then two come along at once. Do they think in a joined-up way about these things at the BBC? Or has this double helping been a sign of a wider moral and structural chaos that characterises the new world disorder? Last night David Dimbleby concluded his tour of two millennia of British art. It has, inevitably, been a bit of a sprint. In this final episode, the horror of the trenches was wrapped up in less screen time than it took to show Tracey Emin’s new line animation of a woman, legs splayed and frenetically wanking. Chaos? I think so.

Gang-Rape In Ballet: Thiago Soares and The Judas Tree

Royal Ballet star talks about how he deals with the horror of his role in MacMillan's final ballet

In a constantly challenging output of ballets, the remarkable choreographer Kenneth MacMillan produced nothing more upsetting than his last, The Judas Tree. Baldly, it portrays gang-rape, double murder and suicide among a nasty bunch of men on a building site.

The Scouting Book for Boys

Like brother and sister: Holliday Grainger and Thomas Turgoose in The Scouting Book for Boys

Teenage lust turns nasty with a shocking twist in a promising feature debut

Teenagers David and Emily are inseparable friends, who live year-round on a crummy seaside caravan park on the East Anglian coast. They play games of chase among the caravans, scare sheep in surrounding fields and steal from the sweet shop on site. The friends, although the same age, are at different stages of their development; he still looks boyish, she is already flirting with Steve, the much older security guard on site. But the pair are equally emotionally inarticulate and struggling to understand their nascent lust; as the increasingly dark story unfolds, we understand that The Scouting Book for Boys is a snapshot of that moment in our lives when our minds and bodies are caught in a battle between child and adult.

Eigengrau, Bush Theatre

A ‘me and my mates’ flatshare drama that mixes comedy and horror

One of the most common genres of contemporary Brit drama is the "me and my mates" play – usually stories about flatsharing twentysomethings. Although, over the past decade, this type of drama has been somewhat overtaken by the return of the family play, you can still spot the genre in new writing venues all over the country. So Penelope Skinner’s new 90-minute piece, which opened last night at the Bush Theatre, is – despite its evocative name (which means the colour seen by the eye in perfect darkness) – at first sight as familiar as an old sofa.

The Kreutzer Sonata

Tolstoy back in Tinseltown is not as good as Ivansxtc

For scalpel-sharp dissection of the most vapid parts of Hollywood/LA life, told with low-budget digital flexibility that itself critiques studio indulgences, British director Bernard Rose is your man. He hit the note most viscerally in Ivansxtc a decade ago with a story of the drug-induced implosion of one of the city’s top agenting talents. As parallels with a real-life career melt-down were all too obvious to the in-crowd, sourcing to the Tolstoy story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” may have crept in as a cover-up.

Sweet Nothings, Young Vic

Luc Bondy directs a sleek, stylish if not wholly sexy Schnitzler update

Arthur Schnitzler belonged to a culture of inquiry and experiment, in which dreams and desire were crying out to be articulated and delineated; sexual needs were the unexplored stuff of life - how well Vienna painters like Klimt and Schiele knew this - and, as Freud worked it all out for us, not necessarily dangerous. Where better to bring this to flesh-and-blood life than on stage?

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