Adults, Traverse Theatre ★★★

In 2012 Dexys returned with their fourth album, and first in 27 years, One Day I’m Going to Soar. It was a concept piece, original and funny, chewing over the volatility of love, containing wonderful set-pieces, most especially a trio of songs at its centre (“I’m Thinking of You”, “I’m Always Going to Love You” and “Incapable of Love”) which humorously excoriated the fickleness of romance.

It’s been more than 20 years since the premiere of The Shape of Things, Neil LaBute’s prickly drama about couples and friends and the ways we change each other. And boy, does it show. Director Nicky Allpress and a talented young cast try their best with a script that, though updated for this version at the Park Theatre, still feels behind the times.

There’s been a good deal of discussion on “the socials” about how much Janelle Monáe’s sexy image is a new thing or a big deal.

Casual viewers, still stuck on the suit-wearing image with which she crashed into public consciousness in 2010, have acted shocked at her going almost or completely unclad in recent videos and shoots. In turn fans have pointed out the obvious – that her outré sense of fashion and costumery has manifested in many ways over the years, including in plenty of flesh-baring. 

Sophia Giovannitti begins selling sex because it promises to make her the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time. She also has a “near categorical hatred of work.”

“This audience is very diverse, isn’t it?” joked one of the audience members at Fucking Men at Waterloo East Theatre, a reworking of Tony-winning writer Joe DiPietro’s seminal 2008 play (itself a reworking of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, written in 1897).

Sometimes I go outside and look at our kitchen drain. Where there should be a vortex there’s a largely static pool. Tree roots have recently grown through the old pipes, their clumps colonised with fat, dog hair and coleslaw bits, and though a bit of handpumping will shift some of the stale water for a while, it really needs systemic attention from Dyno-rod. A good Dyno-rodding is what Chichester’s new production of Noel Coward’s The Vortex needs too.

Director Brandon Cronenberg has inherited his father David’s eye for the twisted and the sinister. After the creepy mind-meld dystopia of 2020’s Possessor, Infinity Pool finds Cronenberg turning his attention to horror-tourism. It’s like The White Lotus on bad acid.

Compared to her peers, Lana del Rey is mightily prolific. This is her eighth album since her breakthough 11 years ago (her ninth in total). Her last album appeared 15 months ago. There’s still much she wants us to hear. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is an hour-and-a-quarter long. It sprawls. It could do with an edit, but as so often when talented musicians sprawl, there are also gems.

As films and television series based in New York City tend to do, Fleishman Is in Trouble opens with an aerial shot of Manhattan – except, significantly, this sequence is presented upside down. To the celestial sound of tinkling arpeggios, the slim skyscrapers of the Upper East Side hang down from the sky into a blue cloudless ocean like futuristic stalactites, the camera moving gently through them before dipping, Psycho-style, through a window.