Mind-blowing stage sculptures that fuse music and technology

Spanning 150 years in three hours, Stefano Massini's play traces the trajectory of western capitalism by following the fortunes of a single family. It's a kaleidoscopic social and political metaphor — an intimate epic, a religious parable of reckoning. Past, present and future are coterminous in an eternal Manhattan that is equal parts steel and shadow. The word "nothing" echoes throughout. Nothing is what the Lehman brothers say they come from; nothing is finally what's left of all they've achieved. That's what happens when money floats into the ether of latter-day Wall Street, unmoored by connection to substance. As one of the characters says: "If buying is instinct like breathing, then people will use banks like they breath air."

This is one of my favorite poems by Warsan Shire. I discovered Shire's work through Beyonce's film Lemonade. Shire says: "I navigate a lot through memory, my memories and other people's memories, trying to essentially just make sense of stuff." As a first-generation immigrant, she has used her poetry to connect with her home country of Somalia, which she has never visited.

Writing just a few years before the onset of the first World War, in response to the advancing machine age, Forster envisions a marriage of soul and body, country and city, passion and prose, culture and commerce.

Novelist and critic Peter Ackroyd describes this collection as "poems about a nation and about a culture which is very severely under threat, and in a sense, you could describe The Four Quartets as a poem of memory, but not the memory of one individual but the memory of a whole civilization."