For a two-hour opera, not an awful lot happens in Werther – boy is denied girl, and sulks his way to suicide – but the status of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther as the foundation stone of Romantic self-absorption means Massenet's opera is more character study than narrative.

Things do not look good for Anne Truelove. "No word from Tom," she sings, while her beloved vanishes to London, led astray by the sinister Nick Shadow. That is just the start of her problems. Stravinsky's neoclassical masterpiece, The Rake's Progress, concludes with a heartbreaking scene in which Anne sings her Tom a lullaby as he dies by inches in the lunatic asylum of Bedlam.

'I wanted to join the circus'

Cirque du Soleil has a highly successful formula that surrounds strong, polished circus acts with bombastic glitter and vaguely uplifting sentiment.

As a silent act, I enjoy the noise of Edinburgh during the Fringe. The tourist shops selling "Scotty" caps complete with ginger hair wouldn't be the same without blasting bagpipes covering "Fly me to the Moon". The shout of street performers, who block off the mile and all read from a universal script, would be a mere whisper if it was reduced to slow hand claps and the smell of jugglers (white spirit and cabbages). It's the constant babble of people summing up their shows in 10 seconds that you manage to tune out. Occasionally, it is nice to tune it back in again and have a listen.

A new collection of works by David Shillinglaw will bring together a selection of art hoping to reflect 'the constant search for and consumption of that which makes us complete'

I don't know whether you care why they didn't ask Evans or not, but if you're hoping for clarification here I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you. I didn't know the answer before I watched Agatha Christie's Marple, never having read that particular novel, and I'm no wiser now that I have. I can tell you who Evans was, because he was played by Mark Williams, who could read out the fine print on a phone contract and make it interesting. Or at least I can tell you who one Evans was, because I was vaguely aware – through the light coma of the final explanation scene – that another Evans was sprung on us at the final moment. But I'm afraid I don't know what they should have asked Evans or why exactly this question was connected to the dying man who'd croaked it out two achingly long hours earlier. I fought sleep valiantly, I promise you, but there were a couple of moments when it had me pinned for a while.

Silence may seem a paradoxical title for a show by the excellent Filter, one of whose fortes is using sound to sound the depths of a theme or dramatic situation.

A man runs naked from the sea, gathering clothes as his journey progresses on land – a Reggie Perrin-esque escapade in reverse. So opens this family-friendly variety show that, for the most part, covers itself in credit.

Are they going to be issued with cats? More middle-aged men are living alone, according to new figures, and it goes without saying that they must be just as miserable as all the middle-aged single women we've heard about for years.

Bruce Springsteen may have lamented flicking on the TV to find "57 Channels and Nothin' on", but these days such small-screen rage is decidedly démodé. For, whether there be 57 channels or 357, why would we waste time seething at the schedules when we have our trusty repositories of high-end drama to watch any time we please?

Ever felt that the demands of your day are sometimes a bit much? True, the more you juggle, the better you can get at it, but for all our modern lifestyles and labour-saving devices, sometimes it can feel as if all we have won is the right to a pressure-cooker life. Where online supermarket shopping at midnight, 6 am alarm calls, or speed yoga classes in your lunch hour are increasingly becoming the norm. What can you do?

This tribute to the late composer Joe Zawinul by Holland's fabulous 48-piece Metropole Orchestra is something of a missed opportunity.