Now updated for 2024.
Read our picks of upcoming cultural highlights in the UK across drama, pop culture, poetry and classical music.
Drama
By Lily Levinson
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Complicité
National tour, January–April 2023
Complicité’s adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s electrifying novel will almost certainly be a beautiful, violent, challenging and funny piece of theatre.
Linck & Mülhahn, Ruby Thomas
Hampstead Theatre, London, 27 January–4 March 2023
In eighteenth-century Prussia, the truth is placed on trial. Ruby Thomas’s third play is an epic, gleeful, swashbuckling queer love story.
Macbeth (an undoing), Zinnie Harris
Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, 4–25 February 2023
The hags on the heath. The woman who went mad. The man who became a tyrant. You might know Shakespeare’s play, but Zinnie Harris, author of The Scent of Roses, brilliantly reimagines Lady Macbeth in her brutal and compelling new version of the tragedy.
Akedah, Michael John O’Neill
Hampstead Theatre, London, 10 February–18 March 2023
The powerful, haunting winner of the Bruntwood Original New Voice Award will be staged here for the first time. In a mega-church in a coastal town in Northern Ireland, two sisters’ grievances threaten to tear them apart.
Brilliant Jerks, Joseph Charlton
Southwark Playhouse, London, 1–25 March 2023
Catch this sleek, revelatory exploration of tech entrepreneurialism and a certain ride-hailing app before it hits the big-time: Joseph Charlton’s first play, Anna X, transferred from the underground fringe VAULT Festival to the West End.
Sap, Rafaella Marcus
Described by The Guardian as ‘a glorious tapestry of a play’ and fresh from huge success at the Edinburgh Fringe, Rafaella Marcus’s debut is a contemporary thriller inspired by an ancient myth, about passion, power and photosynthesis.
The Good Person of Szechwan, Bertolt Brecht, adapted by Nina Segal
Crucible, Sheffield, 11 March–1 April, then Lyric Hammersmith, London, 15 April–13 May
Shen Te is forced to reckon with the consequences of her goodness, after three gods offer her a double-edged reward. Nina Segal is a delightfully strange, imaginative writer and this adaptation should highlight the continued relevance of Brecht’s eighty-year-old play.
Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel
National Theatre, London, from 6 April 2023
Brian Friel was the greatest Irish playwright of his generation, and Dancing at Lughnasa is one of his best plays. Poetic, political and profound, it is a shining, heartbreaking portrait of five sisters in rural Donegal, 1936.
Patriots, Peter Morgan
Noel Coward Theatre, 26 May–19 August 2023
In Patriots, a prescient and fascinating play that ‘zings with wit’ (Daily Telegraph), the creator of The Crown charts the rise and fall of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.
The Pillowman, Martin McDonagh
Duke of York’s Theatre, 10 June–2 September 2023
Martin McDonagh’s pitch-black, viciously funny comedy, The Pillowman, gets a major West End revival. In a totalitarian state where storytelling is a dangerous art, a writer is interrogated following a series of gruesome murders.
Popular Culture
By Hannah Knowles
Film
Barbie. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, directed by Greta Gerwig. Need I say more?
TV
The second series of Yellowjackets: a gloriously nuts thriller with an incredible cast (Juliette Lewis, Tawny Cypress, Christina Ricci etc.),who are clearly having a blast.
Books
Coming up on the music and popular culture list at Faber in 2023, we have an exciting range of titles to appeal to a variety of tastes. Here are just a few to whet your appetite. . . Publishing 2nd February, Tony King‘s memoir, The Tastemaker, looks back at his extraordinary six decades as a key figure in the music industry. Emma Warren’s Dance Your Way Home, a personal study and celebration of dancefloors in the UK across the decades, publishes 16th March. And August sees the publication of Aniefiok Ekpoudom’s Where We Come From, a lyrical examination of the impact that grime and rap have had on communities across the UK – and on the artists behind the movement.
Music
The Roots’s new album End Game: I’m hoping that the sneak preview of ‘Misunderstood’ with Erykah Badu and Tierra Whack in October means that the album will finally appear in 2023. It’s nearly 10 years since their last studio album, but it will be worth the wait.
Poetry
By Lavinia Singer
For Faber Poetry, the year starts brightly with a live performance of Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s version of The Owl and the Nightingale, including avian-inspired music performed by City of London Sinfonia. In partnership with Faber Members: Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, 14 January, 7.30 p.m.
Two of our poets – Victoria Adukwei Bulley and Zaffar Kunial (pictured) – will take part alongside eight others in the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings. Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, 15 January, 7 p.m.
More widely, poetry festivals will bring together exciting current voices. Some examples to look out for in the first half of the year are:
VERVE Poetry Festival
Taking place at the Birmingham Hippodrome, VERVE 2023 features Zaffar Kunial, Hannah Sullivan and Mary Jean Chan, who co-hosts the 100 Queer Poems event.
StAnza Poetry Festival
Scotland’s international poetry festival, which takes place in St Andrews and online, runs under the banner of WILD! in 2023, celebrating ‘forms of resistance’. Festival artists announced so far include Helen Mort, Hollie McNish and Linton Kwesi Johnson.
European Poetry Festival
The sixth edition of this festival celebrating avant-garde and literary poetry will include fifteen events featuring over 100 poets from twenty-five nations.
Cork International Poetry Festival
17–20 May 2023A host of Irish and international poets gathers in Cork for a week of readings, workshops and prize presentations, run by the Munster Literature Centre.
Poetry International Festival
Poetry International is the Southbank Centre’s long-running poetry festival, founded by Ted Hughes in 1967. Returning for the first time since 2019, this year’s iteration forms part of a season of events focused on the climate. Look out for the programme here.
Ledbury Poetry Festival
The Ledbury Poetry Festival is an ‘inclusive, international and inspirational celebration of poetry and spoken word’ in Herefordshire, in the west of England; a beautiful setting for this summer gathering.
Classical Music
By Belinda Matthews
Rachmaninoff
Royal Festival Hall, London, 4 March 2023
London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Edward Gardner
A wonderfully inviting programme including works by George Benjamin, Grieg and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, written when he was in exile in America, grappling with the hosts of an old world amid the energy of the new. Look out for Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile by Fiona Maddocks, to be published by Faber in June 2023.
Steven Isserlis
Wigmore Hall, London, 27 March 2023
Steven Isserlis, one of the world’s finest cellists, champions the neglected 18th-century master Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) in the company of a star-studded ensemble. Boccherini moved from Lucca to Madrid where he composed a good deal of attractive music for solo cello as well as chamber music for strings. Steven is also the author of The Bach Cello Suites: A Companion, now available for pre-order in paperback.
Stephen Hough
Royal Festival Hall, London, 4 May 2023
Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Ryan Bancroft
Stephen Hough, the author of Enough: Scenes from Childhood (available for pre-order now), plays Beethoven’s moving Third Piano Concerto, ahead of Nielsen’s glorious evocation of ‘the spirit of life’.
Edward Dusinberre
Wigmore Hall, London, 15 and 17 May 2023
Takács Quartet
The legendary quartet are led by violinist Edward Dusinberre in a thought-provoking programme of quartets by Haydn, Fanny Mendelssohn and Schubert. Edward Dusinberre is the author of Beethoven for a Later Age: The Journey of a String Quartet and Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home.
Conducting
Garsington Opera, 18 June–21 July 2023
Mark Wigglesworth conducts Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos Strauss
The dream team of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal strikes at the heart of what music and drama mean with a lightness of touch and lustrously sumptuous music. Mark Wigglesworth is the author of The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters.
Longborough Festival Opera, 20 June–1 July 2023
Alice Farnham conducts Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love)
A travelling quack doctor offers a lovesick young man a cure for all his problems: the elixir of love. A hilarious satirical comedy – one of Donizetti’s most-loved works, and one of the most popular operas of all time. Alice Farnham is the author of In Good Hands: The Making of a Modern Conductor, available for pre-order now.
