4.48 Psychosis review – a dazzling, harrowing opera worthy of Sarah Kane’s furious writing

TVIf you only watch one, make it … TimeBBC iPlayer; available nowSummed up in a sentence David Tennant gives one of his finest performances in the third series of Jimmy McGovern’s terrifying but essential prison drama. What our reviewer said “This portrait of masculinity and the misery it brings probably won’t garner the attention and momentum that Jack Thorne’s Adolescence did. But it should. Our boys need it.” Lucy ManganRead the full reviewFurther reading ‘Me and the lads would not survive a day in here’: inside TV’s utterly stunning, Bafta-winning prison dramaPick of the restThe DiplomatNetflix; available nowHurtling into the abyss … Keri Russell as Kate Wyler in The Diplomat. Photograph: Erika Kuenka/NetflixSummed up in a sentence Keri Russell returns in Debora Cahn’s transatlantic thriller for a fourth series of exquisitely fraught geopolitical skulduggery.

In January 2015, I was on an overnight flight coming back from New York, having attended Prototype, a festival of new opera. I didn’t sleep a wink, but worked without stopping in a packed, dark, sleepy cabin, reading and annotating a book and furiously making notes on my laptop. As if in a fever dream, my mind whirled with text, music, dramaturgy, theatre. Those six nocturnal hours were some of the most creatively fertile of my life. The book was 4.48 Psychosis; the annotations became the blueprint for an opera. Sarah Kane’s text had unlocked something in me, a fervour, a deluge of ideas. I could barely keep up, noting every impulse, every fantasy, as my mind pinballed around. I landed back home, back to real life, with a thud. That year turned out to be tough: a messy and protracted relationship breakup and a threat of bankruptcy and losing my house, a victim of rogue builders. I broke out in a bleeding stress rash, and, for the first time in my life, suffered insomnia. I was not composing. Time slipped by. Philip Venables: ‘my mind whirled with text, music, dramaturgy, theatre.’ Photograph: Charl MaraisIn late summer, I managed to pull myself together.

In August 2019, Omar Rajeh sat in his bedroom, listening to the sound of pounding percussion with his world in crisis. In the midst of political instability, Citerne Beirut, a theatre and cultural centre Rajeh had founded in his native Lebanon, was forced to close, dismantled by order of the local government, who planned to build an incinerator on the site. Heartfelt … Omar Rajeh in Dance Is Not for Us. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the GuardianRajeh tells us that as a teenager, coming of age at the end of the Lebanese civil war, dance had always seemed like the most revolutionary thing he could do. Now here he is, more than three decades later, still dancing – out of frustration, defiance, resistance and a desire to connect. As the percussive score gains momentum, Rajeh’s busy body builds up a sweat. In this danced stream of consciousness, Rajeh is not always an especially elegant mover, but he dances like it’s a necessary thing to do. Part of this year’s Dance Umbrella festival, Dance Is Not for Us is a solo that appears at times like an explosion of physical instinct, but it is mostly calm, considered musings on the nature of choreography, with all its workings exposed.

moving between fashion, theater, and music, the dutch spatial designer treats architecture as a framework for encounter, where the relationship between performers and audiences matters as much as the space itself. thomai tsimpou October 18, 2026 8 min prefer designboom on googledennis vanderbroeck on designing experiencesA fashion show or a live performance may last only a few minutes, but what happens in the room is harder to capture. For Dennis Vanderbroeck, this temporary collectiveness is at the heart of his work, which moves between fashion, theater, music, and performance. The Dutch spatial designer approaches his work as a way to bring people together and shape how they encounter one another. With a background in theater, Vanderbroeck focuses on the experience a setting creates. His designs set the scene for encounters between performers and audiences, leaving room for the unexpected. ‘I always say that our designs are just a tool to facilitate the experience,’ he tells designboom.

English Touring Opera’s autumn season has a mythological theme – which, in practice, means operas about women getting left behind. Touring alongside Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice is this compact double bill, pairing Dido and Aeneas with Elena Langer’s Ariadne, a 20-minute scene for soprano setting words by Glyn Maxwell, which was premiered by Almeida Opera in 2002. Langer’s mini-opera is essentially a monologue, sung persuasively here by Jessica Cale, her powerful soprano diamond-bright. Anna Morrissey’s production, though, has six people on stage: abandonment feels like something active as well as passive. It begins with Theseus leaving, disentangling himself from both the sleeping Ariadne and the red thread that links them, spooling from a heap on the floor – it’s as if he got back from the labyrinth the night before. When Ariadne wakes he’s still there, pacing in the shadows or turning her bed on its rotating platform. Catwalk Coraline … Lydia Shariff and Isabelle Atkinson with members of the ensemble in Dido and Aeneas. Photograph: Richard Hubert SmithLanger writes, captivatingly, for four instruments: oboe, violin, viola and cello, playing without a conductor.