Theatre & Music: book now for our top picks at the Manchester International Festival

The Manchester International Festival is always one of the highlights of our cultural year. We’ve seen performances there that we’d never see anywhere else, from a lesson in how to watch performance art by Marina Abromovich to being chased through ‘woods’ in It Felt Like A Kiss by Punch Drunk and Adam Curtis. This year we’ve already written about Curtis and Punch Drunk’s Felix Barrett’s new collaboration, this time with Massive Attack (read about that here), but now that the rest of the programme has been unveiled we couldn’t resist flagging up the other events we are dying to see.

First on our list is The Old Woman, adapted from a 1930s novella by Russian writer Daniil Kharms, directed and designed by the legendary Robert Wilson and performed by Mikhail Baryshinkov and Willem Dafoe. Then there’s Kenneth Branagh’s Macbeth, directed by Rob Ashford and Branagh, who also plays the Scottish King. The ever brilliant Maxine Peake stars in The Masque of Anarchy, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s epic poem written in response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. We try and see anything Peake does – she’s that good. Artist Tino Sehgal has done a massive installation which demands sensible footwear, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra will be playing new music by John Tavener, and The Rite of Spring has been reworked by Romeo Castellucci so that instead of dancers or actors on stage, the choreography will be performed by falling bone powder. No, you just don’t see this sort of stuff anywhere else. But there’s lighter fare too: Neneh Cherry is performing and so is Goldfrapp, among others. The two Goldfrapp concerts sold out quickly, but extra tickets have just been released, so nab them now while you still can.