Pick of the Week: by David Nice

Music theatre with an audience is back at last at the Royal Opera on Saturday – though we’re not being admitted, so it’s back to livestream reviewing, which is such a second-best when so much is actually opening up in London (for now). Among the monologuists of 4/4 are Allan Clayton in H K Gruber’s Frankenstein!! directed by Richard Jones and Christine Rice singing Britten’s blisteringly beautiful Phaedra in a staging by Deborah Warner.

I was also lucky to be among a select few in LSO St Luke’s last week for the filming of a concert conducted by Kerem Hasan launching on YouTube on Sunday, free to watch on demand – the pure champagne of Strauss’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme Suite, a third airing for Hannah Kendall’s The Spark Catchers and a big orchestra (brass on the balconies either side, two grand pianos) for Bartok’s Dance Suite.

Other live forms seem on hold over the next week, so the main drama is on television and in the cinema. David Hare’s new political thriller Roadkill launches on BBC One, starring Hugh Laurie as Conservative cabinet minister Peter Laurence and Helen McCrory as Prime Minister Dawn Ellison. On the big screen there’s Phyllida Lloyd's drama about a mother escaping her abusive husband to build a house for her family, Herself, and more from the London Film Festival.