Tim Frances News Today

A host of fantastic films, awesome new albums and spectacular stage performances - they are all featured in our critics picks of the best of film, music and theatre.

It's almost 100 years since Sophie Treadwell's expressionist play hit the stage, following the real-life events she witnessed as a journalist (though never wrote them up for a newspaper). Instead, she turned the life and death of Ruth Snyder into an explosive drama, an exploration of the human condition and how one woman was tormented by modern life into insanity and murder. In fact, when we first meet the unnamed Young Woman, she is already clearly fragile, struggling to cope with the...

Sexually repulsed by her spouse, the affair is the Young Woman’s only source of hope

Compelling drama based on the fate of an American housewife sentenced to death for the murder of her husband is imaginatively staged

Compelling drama based on the fate of an American housewife sentenced to death for the murder of her husband is imaginatively staged

Richard Jones’s supercharged staging of Sophie Treadwell’s 1920s masterpiece hits like a fist; Emma Rice subverts a dark fairytale with circus gaiety; and a young couple unravel beautifully in Bijan Sheibani’s latest

A host of fantastic films, awesome new albums and spectacular stage performances - they are all featured in our critics picks of the best of film, music and theatre.

Given the emotional investment required on stage and in the stalls, one feels somewhat shortchanged by a production that invites sympathy for a character with few redeeming features

London Theatre Week is the West End’s biggest promotion, giving you the chance to see over 50 amazing award-winning musicals and stunning plays with tickets from £15, £25 or £35

PATRICK MARIMON: Jonathan Maitlands scathing and excoriating new play cleverly is as cleverly plotted as Bashirs interview was devious.