Barbican, London
Omar Rajeh performs out of frustration, resistance and a need to connect in this stream-of-consciousness solo at Dance Umbrella festival

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.

Rajeh 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.

Linbury theatre, London
Six fearless singers and the Chroma Ensemble, conducted with arresting immediacy by Naomi Woo, rise to the challenge of the brutal musical onslaughts and anarchic orchestrations of Philip Venables’ raw, imaginative score

Sarah Kane revolutionised British theatre with five provocative plays written between 1995 and 1999. Her final work, 4.48 Psychosis, was her most personal, confronting the clinical depression she struggled with for years. The play was first performed posthumously in 2000, after she died by suicide in 1999.

The Royal Opera and Guildhall School of Music and Drama commissioned Philip Venables to adapt the play as an opera, which debuted in 2016. The composer, also known for a certain “in-yer-face” approach, set Kane’s original text almost entirely, realising its 24 disjointed sections in a raw, imaginative score teeming with minimalist licks, prickly synth-pop and consoling nods to the baroque. The libretto shifts between poetic abstraction and scathing exchanges between a patient and a psychologist. An ensemble of six female singers navigates themes of depression, isolation and the agonising choices surrounding medication.

Amid financial pressures on household and school budgets, the theatre company is expanding access with free plays

Six young actors step into the spotlight as a reverent silence descends on the hall at City Academy in Bristol. A boy steps forward to pose a central question: “What does it mean to be young in Britain in 2026?”

Union jack flags flash across the backdrop as three girls excitedly debate a Spice Girls reunion concert, before the focus swings back to the young boy wrestling with modern British identity. He rattles off a list of familiar cultural touchstones – fish and chips, cups of tea, Butlin’s, David Attenborough, Gogglebox and the England football team, naming heroes such as Jordan Pickford and Jude Bellingham.

Crucible, Sheffield
The yellow stockings are as funny as ever – yet a haunting, folky live score casts a dream-like uncertainty over Shakespeare’s tangled romance

You can picture Mathew Horne’s Malvolio as a guest on an early 1970s BBC Two arts show. With his buttoned-up collar, tight black suit and supercilious delivery, he oozes self-satisfaction. Trusting in his superior taste, he has the pose to prove it: stiff, studied and haughty.

His fall from grace, tricked into dressing up as a yellow-stockinged morris dancer, is as funny as it ever is in Shakespeare’s comedy. It is the comeuppance of the arriviste. Brought down to size, he is no less indignant for it. In a smart, unyielding performance, he goes from pompous to bruised – and ever unrepentant.

A new Washington DC exhibition examines how Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and more used the Bard’s work to help tell their own stories

“William Shakespeare was a black woman.” In 1985, Maya Angelou spoke these words as part of a keynote speech at a convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

There, she spoke of the role poetry played in her transition from muteness as a child and how she fantasized herself triumphantly delivering Portia’s speech from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in front of her entire community at church. Though she never got the chance to perform that rendition, Angelou acknowledged her desire to deliver that rendition as part of a lifelong kinship with Shakespeare, a connection she continued to seek out throughout her life whenever she needed heartening or solace. In her eyes, Shakespeare wrote his emotionally desolate Sonnet 29 “for” her; how else could he have so aptly described the harsh realities of the Black feminine condition?

A new play revisits the story of Ireland’s 18th-century German refugees, whose experience of prejudice and exclusion resonates with today’s debates over immigration

In the early 18th century, a few thousand Germans fled religious persecution and near starvation in their homeland and ended up in remote rural Irish villages. The Irish Palatines, as they were known, were poor, conservative homesteaders who couldn’t speak the language and were the object of suspicion and violence – precursors to the displaced Syrians or Afghans of the past decade.

Their story is told in Refuge, a co-production between Staatstheater Mainz and the Irish company Fishamble. Part love story, part social commentary, it is performed by a mixed cast, mainly in English but with some German interludes.