The Opera Theatre of Saint Louis has been sometimes dubbed the "Glyndebourne of America" due to the charming garden picnics enjoyed by patrons during the sizzling Missouri summer season. But that title also suggests the company's daring international programming. Since 1976 Opera Theatre has hosted 22 world premieres and 23 American premieres, almost certainly the highest percentage of new work of any American company. The bold strategy reaches its apotheosis with the global debut of Champion, a specially commissioned new work from jazz maestro Terence Blanchard.

We know that David Mamet doesn’t beat about the bush. He tackles sensitive issues and the least attractive aspects of human nature head on, while his characters use language as weapons against each other with such ferocity and guile that the audience is left with a sort of battered admiration.

There’s something profoundly infantile about Quentin Tarantino’s quest to right the wrongs of history. Last time round he was retroactively bitchslapping the Nazis for the Holocaust. Here he’s punishing Americans who accrued obscene wealth out of slavery. In both films baddies galore get royally ketchupped. What’s next? Backdated justice for the Injuns? Oh shoot, Disney already pulled off that judicial backflip in Pocahontas.

Ellen Gallagher is obsessed by the issue of black cultural identity; but if that sounds tedious or tendentious, think again. She explores her theme in work that is so varied, so beautiful and so humorous that the furrow she ploughs seems more like an endless opportunity than a narrow limitation.

It was over four years ago that I was commissioned by Michael Boyd,  then artistic director of the RSC, to write a play which I had vaguely pitched to him as “a costume drama set in the nineteenth century with Asians running around in it”. And here we are, finally, about to open an epic and ambitious play set over the last 14 years of Queen Victoria’s reign. My initial inspiration came from an old black and white photograph taken in an ayah’s home in Aldgate in the 19th century.

We're at a moment of change in games – new consoles, new ideas, new ways of playing. And what better game to usher out one era and in a new one than BioShock Infinite?

This first-person shooter is still wedded to the core mechanics of traditional big-budget console gaming, but layered on top of a core of classic run-and-gun is a series of innovations in terms of character, script, gameplay and scope of theme that point to exciting potential future directions for the next generation of games.

"Half-caste" and "mixed race" are terms that excite strong emotions. Are you black, are you white? Where do you belong? To whom do you owe your loyalties when the chips are down?

Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football. Show Racism the Red Card. Say No to Racism. Such are today’s campaign messages.  And then there’s the headline: “Colour Prejudice Problem” in a London newspaper.  However, the latter is dated September 1909, perhaps the first time that racism in football (and other sports) was headline news. So, the issue has been around for more than a century in this country and the player who brought it to light was Walter Tull. This is his story.

There is a sequence – quite a long sequence – in the first episode of Dancing on the Edge in which the main characters are all guests on a train. The passengers are curious to know their destination, only it turns out there isn’t one. This is a pleasure trip with no particular place to go. An hour and a half into Stephen Poliakoff’s latest portrait of English manners and mores, boy do you know how they feel.

With its exuberant blood-spray, rambunctious dialogue and generous running time, Django Unchained is writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s first full foray into Westerns. Although it’s not a remake, it pays tribute to Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Spaghetti Western Django, not only in name but in its use of the title song - which opens this movie as it opened that one - and in the fleeting appearance of the original's game star, Franco Nero (pictured below right).