The world knows that Andy Burnham, the ‘King from the North’, was a very successful mayor of Manchester. There have been TV images of Manchester – one of the finest was Cracker, starring Robbie Coltrane, but was that topped by Shameless? In any case, we now have Tip Toe, which happens to provide an extraordinary image of that city. We begin with Alan Cumming asking his neighbour, David Morrisey, for help, and we are gradually introduced to a vibrant gay and trans world that includes a superb performance from Paul Rhys (in full makeup) as someone who has always had a thing for Cumming. It’s brilliant and may repel or fascinate or both: a teenage boy facing the enigma of his sexuality – whether or not he’s gay – while his older brother makes extra cash by stimulating himself on OnlyFans. But attractive women of 25 confidently pursue their destinies, and an erotically engrossed Manchester is vibrantly and vividly depicted with wild zest and poignancy. We believe in this Mancunian Lost Illusions, which has that indefinable rustle of everyday life that we associate with Balzac’s great Human Comedy.

And for most of its length Tip Toe lives up to the comparison. Then there is a climax that is unambiguously horrific. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether it’s also hysterical. It doesn’t seem as inevitable or as heartbreaking as Larry Clark’s Bully, which starred the late, wonderful actor Brad Renfro.

We have witnessed an epic amount of previewing and discussion of Christopher Nolan’s film, The Odyssey. It seems amazing that Michael Caine (who plays Batman’s butler in the Nolan versions with Christian Bale) should have made an audio recording of The Odyssey. Anyone who has ever accidentally said Michael Caine when they meant Michael York (Isherwood’s hero) is liable to have an Englishman immediately say, in broad Cockney, ‘I am a camera.’

And, yes, Michael Caine popularised the Cockney accent. But don’t underestimate the range of English accents he can assume. Back in 1964, the year of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the BBC did a production of Hamlet at Elsinore with the great Canadian actor Christopher Plummer in the title role, Robert Shaw as the King, and with Hamlet’s loyal friend Horatio played in standard English by Michael Caine.

Then there’s his breakthrough film Zulu. Michael Caine went to audition for the film of the battle of Rorke’s Drift, and it was the American director Cy Endfield who asked him if he could do an upper-class accent to play an officer. Caine replied that he was a British repertory actor; of course, he could do any accent. So, he got the role that an Englishman would not have considered him for. After that, he played Harry Palmer in Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File, and the London accent (in Alfie, too) stuck. Michael Caine popularised the London accent in the same way Sean Connery popularised the Edinburgh accent.

June 27 saw that wizard of a violinist, Richard Tognetti, adapt Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 for his performance at the St Kilda Town Hall on behalf of the Australian National Academy of Music. It’s appropriate that a musician of Tognetti’s eminence should appear with the students of Australia’s world-class music school, an institution comparable to New York’s Juilliard, which is widely acknowledged internationally, and which has recently appointed Anna Goldsworthy as its head.

Mahler is very much in the air at the moment. On Thursday, 13 August, and Saturday, 15 August, Jaime Martín will conduct Mahler’s Symphony No.6. This should provide splendid opportunities for the head of the MSO to articulate with maximum panache and dramatic extroversion the bravura technique Melburnians have come to love, and which reminds some of the verve and histrionic grandeur of Solti. In a world that rediscovered Mahler after the second world war, Mahler is always a dominant presence. Ever since Visconti made Aschenbach into a composer, not a writer, in his film of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice – and used ‘Adagietto’ from Mahler’s Symphony No 5 – the association has been powerful. It helps, of course, that Dirk Bogarde, in the death scene, gives one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema. And just at the moment, there is a new novella about Mahler, The Last Movement by Robert Seethaler – the German reviews rave.

That’s certainly true of the Australian Ballet’s Copland show. A friend said it had a power beyond narrative, akin to the image of the bull at Knossos as imagined in retellings of Alexander the Great’s life.

And courtesy of Bloomsbury, we now have another life of Alexander, a rather gorgeously written account by Edmund Richardson – in a manner that recalls Robert Hughes – and which comes with blurbs by William Dalrymple and Ken Follett.

Your columnist wrote at length for the then Fairfax Press at the time of the Oliver Stone/Colin Farrell film about Alexander, and found himself in correspondence with the director. At the time, the classicist Peter Green remarked that Farrell lacked a public voice.

Well, Hughes had one that made the world seem like a footnote to his capacity to dramatise. As he feared that he lay dying after the famous accident, he prayed, ‘Please God let me live to write a masterpiece.’ In fact, he had already written one, The Fatal Shore, and – at a different level – heard the music of history in his American Visions.

It does seem in Losing Face that Marieke Hardy has taken a bit of a bath in Gen X gropings for self-knowledge without making the satire stick. It’s a difficult area, and it makes you wonder, but it repays lightning-fast direction. Hardy has known about the complexities of comedy since she was one of the early readers of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and you would think no production could neglect the glory of Christie Whelan Browne’s comic timing, which bears comparison to Maggie Smith’s.

Timing is a weird glass, maybe a dark one, to see J.D. Vance’s book Communion, in which the Vice President of the United States takes time off – how, we ask? – to explain why he became a Catholic. Then again, could anything be stranger than Andy Burnham achieving the prime ministership of Great Britain? He read English at Cambridge, and we’ve learned that he adores Larkin, admires Middlemarch and has an abiding passion for The Canterbury Tales.

Is that a qualification for a democratic crown?