Television
Love (and sex) are very much in the air on television this spring as the much-hyped adaptation of Normal People, Sally Rooney’s bestselling novel, arrives on BBC Three. Relative newcomers Daisy Edgar-Jones (best-known as Olivia in Cold Feet) and Paul Mescal (making his TV debut) take the lead roles of Marianne and Connell, two very different teenagers who fall unexpectedly in love. It is directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald and adapted by Rooney herself alongside Alice Birch and Mark O’Rowe. Amid the hype, the biggest question remains just how they’ve turned Rooney’s slender yet satisfying tale into a six-hour, 12-episode series.
Elsewhere, Sky Atlantic has snaffled one of spring’s most glamorous casts as Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland star in The Undoing, a psychological thriller about a marriage which collapses when the husband (Grant), a successful paediatric oncologist, vanishes, leaving his wife (Kidman) to discover that little in his life was as claimed. It will air in late May.
Finally, sex of a less glamorous kind as playwright Lucy Kirkwood, author of Chimerica and The Welkin, returns to Channel 4 with Adult Material, a four-part look at the British porn industry. With original star Sheridan Smith having pulled out with a scheduling clash, the role of Jolene Dollar, a mother-of-three who is the UK’s biggest porn star, is taken by I, Daniel Blake’s Hayley Squires. Kirkwood has said she’s interested in exploring power structures and complicity in the workplace … so expect no easy answers. Sarah Hughes
Books
Two comic American writers, one new and one familiar from hit screenplays such as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, are offering to help you through the spring with plangent tributes to the emotional clarity of a bygone era – represented in both cases by cinema.
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has put a neurotic film critic at the centre of Antkind, his first novel, published by Random House on 12 May. The discovery of an unknown film masterpiece should change everything for this failing pundit until, of course, it is destroyed. At the end of the same month, Fourth Estate is to bring out debut novelist Simon Stephenson’s Set My Heart to Five, in which an android is moved by watching films from the 1980s and 90s.
The run of highly rated literature on both sides of the Irish border continues with Roddy Doyle’s new novel Love, published by Jonathan Cape on 14 May. It starts with Joe and Davy reuniting in a Dublin restaurant to talk about their old but mislaid friendship. And one of them has a secret to share. Vanessa Thorpe
Theatre
You’ll have to hustle to get a ticket for 4000 Miles – expect queues for day seats and returns to be, well, almost as long as the title. For many, the draw of Timothée Chalamet making his British theatre debut will be enough to make it worth a shot. He stars in Amy Herzog’s inter-generational drama, alongside the redoubtable Eileen Atkins, at the Old Vic from 6 April.
Under Milk Wood meets Twin Peaks in a new musical comedy: Milky Peaks is Seiriol Davies’ long-awaited follow-up to his hit 2016 show, How to Win Against History. That brought to life the story of a cross-dressing Marquess of Anglesey; Milky Peaks looks likely to have more eccentrics in its sights, being a “queer Welsh fable” about tensions within a Snowdonian settlement nominated as Britain’s Best Town. It’ll be at Theatr Clwyd in Mold, from 20 March, before touring Wales till 9 May.
Actress Kate Fleetwood – who’s given very good villain in Medea and Macbeth – is surely perfect, terrifying casting as Cruella de Vil in a new musical version of Dodie Smith’s 101 Dalmatians. Zinnie Harris’s production arrives at the Regent’s Park Open Air theatre in London from 16 May; expect heart-stirring puppetry, too, from Toby Olié, who’s worked on War Horse and Running Wild. Holly Williams
Art
The most anticipated show of the year, if not the decade, is devoted to Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654), Italian painter, precocious Caravaggio successor, fearless traveller and all-round heroine of art. Gentileschi painted women as strong as herself: Cleopatra, Lucretia, Judith cutting off the head of the despotic Holofernes. She is also the first woman to show herself, sleeves rolled, sweat on her brow, in the very physical act of painting a self-portrait. The National Gallery’s show, opening on 4 April, will be a surprise from first to last, not least because many of the masterpieces have never been shown before in this country.
From 2 April, meanwhile, the Manchester Art Gallery will be hosting Derek Jarman Protest!. Director, writer, set-designer, political activist and gardener of the shingle at Dungeness, where he lived his last years at Prospect Cottage, Jarman was one of the most influential polymaths of the late 20th century. From the great films – Sebastiane, Caravaggio, Jubilee – to the anguished self-portraits and righteous protest paintings, the designs for opera, ballet and the movies of Ken Russell, all the way to the enthralling diaries and sketchbooks, this show will present every aspect of his mind: Jarman in the round.
Just as summer begins, the British Museum will plunge deep into the mysterious icescapes of the Arctic, where 4 million people still live in a culture shaped by the climate. From 28,000-year-old jewellery, discovered in newly thawing ice, to sculpted figures of men and dogs, walrus ivory needles, fur clothes and contemporary photography, this is a portrait of a society through the lens of time and weather. Expect the show, from 28 May, to be as revelatory as the museum’s magnificent blockbuster Ice Age. Laura Cumming
Pop
Spring’s seasonal pop uptick hits warp speed in April. Fresh as a daisy is Brighton singer Celeste, who – like Adele before her – recently picked up a Brits Rising Star award to add to her BBC Sound of 2020 accolade. This velveteen-voiced soul singer heads out on tour supporting Michael Kiwanuka in March, but she has her own short UK headline tour in April, taking in Glasgow (27 April, Manchester (28 May) and the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London (29 May).
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ latest album, Ghosteen, is both a hugely affecting, once-in-a-lifetime record, and an album you fervently wish had never been recorded. A song cycle based on the death of one of Cave’s teenage sons, this keening document of grief is playing arenas all over Europe. The UK leg starts at Birmingham Arena on 2 May and ends with two nights at the O2 in London on 14 and 15 May. Kitty Empire
Video games
Released in 1997, Final Fantasy VII, the first video game epic, has become the Star Wars: A New Hope for a generation of players now in their 30s. The visuals have dated terribly but the story, about a group of eco-terrorists fighting a corporation that’s turbo-sapping the earth of natural resources, has never been timelier. Prime time for this remake then, cherishingly rebuilt from the ground up using cutting-edge technology.
That the project has been broken into multi-parts (of which this – Final Fantasy VII: Remake- will be first when it is released on 10 April) bespeaks the scale of the work. The chance to resurrect and reconnect with some of the medium’s most beloved characters is exhilarating. Simon Parkin
Film
This season brings a double-whammy of edgy, exciting debuts from new British female film-makers. Rose Glass’s sensational Saint Maud, which earned her a special jury mention at last year’s London Film Festival, is a uniquely unnerving religious horror film, anchored by ferocious performances from Morfydd Clark and Jennifer Ehle, in which a pious home nurse hired to care for a hedonistic, cancer-stricken dancer reveals an ominous higher calling. Imagine Lynne Ramsay directing Carrie and you’re some of the way there, though it’s best experienced cold. Don’t read too much about it before it opens on 1 May.
Meanwhile, Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, which opens on 17 April, made a buzzy, bloody splash at January’s Sundance festival: an audacious blend of revenge thriller and pitch-black comedy for the #MeToo era, it gives Carey Mulligan the meatiest and most surprising lead role of her career as Cassie, a seemingly hapless barfly who turns out to be waging a crafty vendetta against sexual predators. Expect laughs, gasps and much ensuing debate – a combination you’d expect from Fennell, the writer-director who succeeded Phoebe Waller-Bridge as scriptwriter on Season 2 of TV’s Killing Eve.
Waller-Bridge has her own big-screen writing debut out next month: a little film you may have heard of called No Time to Die. It’s hoped that the Fleabag creator’s addition to the team behind the latest James Bond spectacular will bring a sharper, more modern edge to the usual macho 007 derring-do. We’ll find out on 2 April... Guy Lodge
Classical
Beyond Beethoven 9 is Beethoven as you’ve never heard before. A massed choir of 350 singers – including Only Boys Aloud, the Bach Choir, the London Philharmonic Choir, Kaos Signing Choir, Voicelab, Lister Community School Choir and Finchley Children’s Music Group – together with the 164-strong National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, performance group Kinetica Bloc and jazzers Tomorrow’s Warriors, celebrate Beethoven’s 250th Anniversary at the Royal Festival Hall with a new version of his Ninth Symphony.
Three new compositions will be interspersed before and between Beethoven’s original four-movement work for two performances on 16 and 18 April. Poet Anthony Anaxagorou has made a new English text of the Ode to Joy, and Marin Alsop conducts. Fiona Maddocks
Dance
This May a legend of dance will collaborate with a pioneering company to present a unique spin on a classic work of contemporary dance: the Pina Bausch Foundation is working with École des Sable, the international centre for traditional and contemporary African dance in Senegal, to stage Bausch’s ferocious 1975 take on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
Pulling in global influences and using an all-black cast of dancers to express the story of ritual femicide, the evening will feature performers Germaine Acogny, founder of École des Sables, and Malou Airaudo, who was an early member of Pina Bausch. It promises to be unmissable and unforgettable. Launching in Dakar at Théâtre National Daniel Sorano on 25 March, The Rite of Spring/common ground[s] will receive its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells from 17-20 May. Bidisha
This article was updated on 4 March 2020 to correct the name of one of the companies producing Rite of Spring at Sadler’s Wells in May.
