Lynn Nottage’s second London opening this year, the Donmar premiere of Clyde’s, is a comedy about a sandwich, the perfect sandwich. With just a little more punch to the plotting it would be another masterwork from this award-winning American playwright whose book for the musical MJ arrives on the West End next spring.

Seldom can a title have given so much away about the play to follow, not just in terms of the subject matter but also in terms of the sledgehammer approach to driving home its points. Kimber Lee, who won the inaugural Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting 2019, International Award, certainly does not say anything once if she can say it twice or thrice nor leaves any ambiguity about every element of her stance regarding Orientalism.

Lasting just over an hour, The Nettle Dress is like a fairy story. It builds very slowly, each beautifully framed shot contributing toward a perfect little gem that tells a moral tale.

A man spends seven years coming to terms with the loss of both his father and his wife from cancer by spinning nettle fibres into threads, then weaving them into a length of cloth. He recalls sitting beside a hospital bed, spinning while listening to his father’s breathing dwindle to a last gentle sigh, then during his wife’s final illness, spinning his way through sorrow.

The work of the double Pulitzer-winning Black American dramatist Lynn Nottage has thankfully become a fixture in the UK. After its award-winning production of Sweat, the Donmar will stage the UK premiere of her Clyde’s next month, and MJ the Musical, for which she wrote the book, arrives in the West End in March 2024.

An impressive performance by Samuel West as one of two warring hams stuck on-set in a trailer over a not-so-dormant volcano in Iceland, endlessly waiting to shoot their scene and go home, tended by a young runner whose woke values soon clash with their antediluvian ones...

A cameo by Jeremy Allen White wouldn’t usually excite interest, but the star of Disney+’s The Bear is big box-office now, so his presence in Fremont, however brief, will probably guarantee it an audience. There the curious will also find a gem from the Iranian-born director Babak Jalali and a serenely powerful debut performance by Anaita Wali Zada, who gives this simple-seeming project an inner glow.

The English title of Olivier Peyon’s new movie is a rather hackneyed pun that not only doesn’t work in the original language but also manages to convey exactly the wrong meaning. Arrête avec tes Mensonges is a faintly Almodóvarian love story about the importance (and sometimes difficulty) of facing up to the truth about yourself. However, instead of Stop With Your Lies, we get Lie With Me.

Bellini’s La Sonnambula is the highspot of a four-show lyric theatre bill at the Buxton International Festival this year, and demonstrates again how beautifully suited the small Matcham opera house in the High Peak is to mid-19^th century bel canto repertoire.

The revolution in the title of AJ Yi’s new play at the Bush is the one activists hoped to set in motion in Hong Kong in 2019, when China’s stewardship was increasingly restricting their civil liberties. The music on the playlist serves as an evocative backing track for the former colony’s 21st century makeover by China, a Western-influenced alternative. 

Carrie Mae Weems is the first live black artist to have a solo show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, yet she is hardly known here at all. So the Barbican’s retrospective is timely, especially since, at 70, Weems is making her best work yet.