Culture

If anyone needs extra motivation for another five years of the Tories, Motihari Brigade will put your marching boots on in Power from Below.

Named after the Indian birthplace of George Orwell, their call to action is standing up to power through their own Orwellian “thoughtcrime” music.

The album begins with the cry that everything will stay the same “until people take the power” and ends with a poignant message in “Waiting for the Revolution” that “We are on our own but we are not alone”.

Greed stars the actor Steve Coogan in a comic take-down of the world of the top one percent. It’s based around a retail boss’s 60th birthday party at his private villa on the Greek island of Mykonos,

The film nominally features the fictional Sir Richard “Greedy” McCreadie. But it’s all about Sir Philip Green. He’s the Topshop supremo who accrued fabulous wealth as he waded through a series of profitable financial manoeuvres and then devastated thousands of lives as the reality led to collapse.

Born to Manifest is the latest dance work by the acclaimed choreographer and performer Joseph Toonga and his company Just Us Dance Theatre. A hip-hop piece for two dancers (Toonga and Dani Harris-Walters), it is a powerful, invigorating, enraging and almost unbearably moving evocation of the experience of young black men in Britain.

As a performing arts critic, I see a lot of stage works. Consequently, I hope, I have developed a strong sense of the difference between cheap sentiment and the real deal.

Here is an album about change – a perceived uncontrollable change and the despair at seeing the world around you crumbling. Singer Sam Treber’s anger at gentrification of his hometown Pittsburgh is put in longing terms; he misses hearing a neighbour sing through the wall who has since been priced out of the area. While others complain he should write songs about lost love and friends, he can’t see past the cracks in the ceiling growing larger, nor how capitalism swallows up communities into desirable postcodes.