“The crocus of hope is, er, poking through the frost.” When he uttered that dodgy metaphor back in February, Boris Johnson probably didn’t predict that it would become the opening number of the third edition of Living Newspaper, the Royal Court’s anarchic, hyper-current series of new writing.

“Your task is to imagine the future.” That’s what the citizens of Assembly, a new streamed production performed and devised by the Donmar Warehouse’s Local Company, are told. It can be anything they like, so long as they make it together – which is the catch, of course. Since when did a citizens’ assembly ever agree on anything? 

It has been well-documented over the last few months that there has been an upsurge in listener numbers for many radio stations offering classical music – notably BBC Radio 3, Classic FM and Scala Radio – and, during these unprecedented times it comes as no surprise to discover that so many people (of all ages) are finding solace in music which, in some cases, they are turning to for the first time.

“How it went with the women,” Martin Amis’s phrase for what most straight men are likely to contemplate in the evenings of their lives, would have made an ideal alternative subtitle for the 50-minute documentary T S Eliot: The Search for Happiness.

Returning to the Wigmore Hall for another socially distanced concert, Edinburgh-born guitarist Sean Shibe brought a programme of moving, often melancholy music, apt for these still locked-down times. He opened with a trio of works by John Dowland written originally for lute.

The four monologues that make up Barnes’ People were filmed in the grand surroundings of the Theatre Royal, Windsor, and that venue's atmospheric spaces (now deserted, of course) seem to tell a sad tale of their own, one that chimes rather appropriately with the mood of some of them.

Contact without touch: among the many readjustments that the pandemic has brought to theatre, its demands that restrict direct contact almost to nothing must be among the most testing. We have learnt much about how rigorously any new production – for now, only live-streamed – must be prepared: the regular testing in rehearsals, the two-metre distancing, the repeated cleaning of props.

Immersively arranged and intricately lyrical, Ghetts’ third full album further boosts grime’s takeover of British music’s front rank. Aged 36, he’s a contemporary of Kano, and similarly still evolving.

Mathieu Boogaerts has been recording since the mid 1990s, emerging from the nouvelle chanson scene in Paris, a chansonnier who’s performed at the likes of Cafe Oto over here, while establishing himself as a star turn on the Tôt ou Tard label in France, mixing Afro-pop and reggae as well as indie elec

Can one use the term autofiction about a film? If so, Mogul Mowgli would be a perfect example. Riz Ahmed, the actor who came to fame with Four Lions, has in recent years appeared in a Star Wars spin-off and a Marvel film; he also raps as Riz MC with the transatlantic duo Swet Shop Boys.