Movistar Arena, Madrid

Powered by a pounding rhythm section, the crowd dance to even the tricksiest drum patterns at Radiohead’s first gig in seven years – one that demonstrates the pure joy this band can bring

Almost 10 years have passed since Radiohead released a new record, and more than seven since they were last seen on stage. Living through that period has felt like moving further and faster into the future that their songs often sounded so worried about. Animal-borne diseases and invading armies, bomb shelters and endless rainstorms, falling skies and collapsing infrastructure – ’twas all foretold in the lyric sheets of the ever-fretful Thom Yorke.

His reputation as a soothsayer has probably been overstated as the band’s myth has grown in their absence, but if the frontman is a genius (the jury is still out and may never come back in, their verdict deferred more by politics than musicianship) then he’s hardly the only monumental talent in the lineup. For all the brilliant records Yorke has made lately, including several with bandmate Jonny Greenwood in their looser-limbed trio the Smile, the faithful have been holding out a geological age to see the full five back together.

The director wants London’s long-awaited institution to ignite creative passion in the Gen Z visitors it’s aimed at. As he unveils the building and its ‘unapologetically diverse’ contents, can he pull it off?

When Gus Casely-Hayford was a child, his sister Margaret took him to the British Museum. He hadn’t always enjoyed museums: “As much as I was attracted to them, they weren’t places I felt wholly welcome in,” he says – especially since they rarely told the stories of Black British people like him. But Margaret was determined. “She told me that these spaces belong to all of us. They may not tell our stories, but she would say to me ‘That’s something that you can change.’”

Now, as the director of V&A East, he’s building a space in which “young people can come in and have those transformative moments that change the trajectory of their lives”. These are grand ambitions for the project which lives on two sites in London’s Olympic Park: V&A Storehouse, which opened in May this year and has already exceeded its visitor target in a third of the projected time, and V&A East Museum, an exhibition and gallery space housed within a five-storey building designed by Irish architects O’Donnell & Tuomey on Stratford Waterfront. The aim, says V&A director Tristram Hunt, is “to open the V&A’s collection up in new ways to audiences which have historically been underserved by major cultural institutions”.

Tracing the author’s life from bohemian Melbourne in the 70s to the breakdown of her marriage in the 90s, How to End a Story was praised by judges for ‘taking the diary form to new heights’

Australian author Helen Garner has been named the winner of the 2025 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction for How to End a Story, becoming the first writer to win the prestigious award with a collection of diaries.

The announcement of the £50,000 award was made on Tuesday evening at a ceremony in London. Robbie Millen, chair of judges and the literary editor of the Times, described Garner’s collection as “a remarkable, addictive book,” and said the decision had been unanimous among the six judges. “Garner takes the diary form – mixing the intimate, the intellectual, and the everyday – to new heights.”

At the Superhumans centre in Ukraine, the EnterDJ music therapy programme teaches war-wounded soldiers how to mix, rehabilitating them with dance music and providing purpose and opportunities to perform

In Ukraine, sound carries a different weight: the cautionary blurt of sirens, Shahed drones humming overhead, the concussive thwack of air defence interception and the subsequent explosion. But as well as the sounds of war, which continue three and a half years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, music still plays, clubs remain open during the day (closing well before the midnight curfew), and electronic dance music remains an intrinsic part of many Ukrainian lives.

Kyiv’s iconic clubs, such as K41, became bomb shelters before transforming into frontline fundraisers. Parties doubling up as cleanup operations are held at strike sites. New venues such as Abo Records – the first of many creative spaces to set up shop in an abandoned liquor factory – have emerged as gathering points where you might share a cigarette with a sniper or combat medic as easily as with a DJ. But the rehabilitative power of dance music is most evident at the Superhumans centre, near Lviv in the west of Ukraine. Here, the most critically war-wounded are treated with prosthetics and reconstructive surgery, and psychological support is given to children and adults affected by the war. And within the range of treatment is music therapy.

New Art Exchange believes it is first cultural institution in world to hand permanent leadership to the community

“I used to see this place on the street but I didn’t know what was here, I didn’t even know it was an art gallery,” says Felix, a 20-year-old nursing student. “And now I’m here shaping its future.”

Felix is one of 40 residents of Hyson Green in Nottingham who run the show at New Art Exchange (NAE), which believes it is the first cultural institution in the world to hand permanent leadership to a citizens’ assembly.

Not even Glenn Close can save this Ryan Murphy disaster from its dismal plots, clueless characters – and the worst kissing scenes ever filmed

I did not know it was still possible to make television this bad. I assumed that there was some sort of baseline, some inescapable bedrock knowledge of how to do it that now prevents any entry into the art form from falling below a certain standard. But I was wrong. The new series from Ryan Murphy, All’s Fair – starring Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts and Niecy Nash as the founders of an all-female law firm delivering divorce-y justice to incredibly rich but slightly unlucky women under the azure skies of California – is terrible. Fascinatingly, incomprehensibly, existentially terrible. While I try to get my thoughts in order after bearing witness to the first episode, I’m going to give you a few direct quotes, so you can see why I’m struggling.

“Let’s put the ‘team’ in ‘teamwork’.”

National Gallery, London
Joseph Wright of Derby’s vivid paintings depicted Enlightenment thinking and illumination amid the dark. So why are they so terrifying?

He looks like he’s up to no good. In the depths of the night, under trees and clouds turned silver and black by the full moon, a man is at work with a shovel. Is he burying a body or digging bits up for a Frankensteinian experiment? After all, this painting was done by Joseph Wright of Derby, a friend of pioneering scientists and industrialists in the Lunar Society of Birmingham, leaders of the new science that would inspire Mary Shelley.

But the man beside the foaming river Derwent is not collecting body parts. He’s doing something just as nefarious by 21st-century moral standards: blocking a fox den so the foxes can’t get back in and will be easy game for the hunt tomorrow. Maybe Wright shares my compassion for foxes, because An Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent genuinely is a bit sinister. Yet it has a hypnotic beauty. Two light sources – a lantern and the moon – make this night anything but dead as we almost hear leaves rustle, white water rush and the earthstopper’s spade clunk. It’s one thing to paint a landscape by day. Wright makes one come fantastically alive by night.

In a hugely successful TV and film career, her waitresses, neighbours, moms and daughters ranged from comedy to drama to David Lynch films, always with compelling authenticity

• Diane Ladd, Oscar-nominated star of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, dies aged 89

Diane Ladd was part of a Hollywood aristocracy of character actors who from the golden period of the American New Wave onwards lent star quality to supporting roles. She brought an authentic, undiluted American screen-acting flavour to everything she was in, and ran hugely successful movie and TV careers in parallel for decades, playing waitresses, neighbours, moms, sirens and daughters, and ranging from comedy to drama.

She was famously the mother of screen actor Laura Dern and wife of Bruce Dern, and repeatedly acted with Laura in a remarkable mother-daughter partnership in which the two women’s closeness always shone through. You might compare it to Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, or Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher — although Diane Ladd and Laura Dern were far more trouble-free and without that kind of angst. They were Oscar-nominated together for their joint appearance in Martha Coolidge’s Depression drama Rambling Rose from 1991. And they also both appeared in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and Inland Empire, Alexander Payne’s Citizen Ruth, and in Mike White’s HBO drama Enlightened – and in three of these they played, naturally, a mother and daughter. In Joel Hershman’s 1992 comedy Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Ladd acted alongside her own mother, the stage actor Mary Lanier.

The triple Oscar-winning actor, who immerses himself in his characters, took issue with Cox’s questioning of Jeremy Strong’s behaviour on the set of Succession

Daniel Day-Lewis has spoken out over being drawn into what he called a “handbags at dawn conflict” with fellow actor Brian Cox over method acting.

Speaking to the Big Issue, Day-Lewis reflected on his commitment to the technique being pitted against the scepticism of Cox, who had made disparaging remarks about the approach adopted by actors including his Succession co-star Jeremy Strong, suggesting he’d found his on-set behaviour “irritating”.

The musician, who also provided backing vocals on Suspicious Minds and When a Man Loves a Woman, died of cancer in Nashville on Sunday

Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay, a soulful mezzo-soprano who provided backing vocals on such 1960s classics as Suspicious Minds and When a Man Loves a Woman and was a featured singer with the Grateful Dead for much of the 1970s, has died aged 78.

A spokesperson for Godchaux-MacKay confirmed that she died of cancer on Sunday at Alive hospice in Nashville.

Actor who said in 2015 that a Trump presidency would be ‘the end of the world’ says celebrities make no difference to how people vote

Jennifer Lawrence has said she no longer feels it appropriate to speak out against the Trump administration, lest she exacerbate unhelpful debate and further divisions.

“I don’t really know if I should,” said Lawrence in an interview with the New York Times. “During the first Trump administration, I felt like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. But as we’ve learned, election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for.

Halloween weekend failed to make numbers jump, adding up to the weakest monthly performance – other than during the pandemic – for three decades

Box office earnings in October have crashed to levels not seen since the late 1990s, with Halloween weekend becoming the worst of the year so far.

According to a report in Variety, cinema takings for October in North America totalled $425m (£323m), the lowest figure since October 1997, when it was $385m – not counting October 2020, when North American cinemas only took $63m as moviegoing was severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Romanian worker was taken to hospital in ‘serious condition’ after being saved from Torre dei Conti rubble, but died soon after

A Romanian worker who was trapped for hours under rubble in Rome after the partial collapse of a medieval tower has died in hospital, just a short time after he was pulled free by emergency services.

“I express deep sorrow and condolences, on behalf of myself and the government, for the tragic loss of Octay Stroici, the worker who was killed in the collapse of the Torre dei Conti in Rome,” Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni said in a statement after midnight. “​We are close to his family and colleagues at this time of unspeakable suffering.”

Akinola Davies Jr’s Nigeria-set drama has 12 nominations, including best film and besr director

Nigeria-set drama My Father’s Shadow is the leading contender at this year’s British independent film awards (Bifas), after it scooped 12 nominations, including best British independent film, best director for Akinola Davies Jr, and best screenplay for Davies’s brother Wale. The film came out ahead of Pillion, adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’s coming-of-age relationship story, which got 10 nominations, and biopic I Swear, which got nine.

My Father’s Shadow, which stars Sope Dirisu and is Davies’s debut feature as a director, premiered at the Cannes film festival to admiring reviews. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described it as “a transparently personal project and a coming-of-age film in its (traumatised) way, a moving account of how, just for one day, two young boys glimpse the real life and real history of their father who has been mostly absent for much of their lives”. The film is yet to be released in the UK, but has already come out in Nigeria.

Photographer Didier Bizet has spent time documenting life in the self-proclaimed autonomous republic, which is not recognised by the international community. Its status raises complex questions about the identity of its inhabitants – Ukrainians, Russians, Moldovans and Bulgarians – in a land searching for direction and lacking a clearly defined national identity

Amid the ongoing war in Ukraine and between the fragile borders that crisscross the former Soviet Union, the self-proclaimed Republic of Transnistria, which broke away from Moldova more than 30 years ago after a brief but bloody conflict, remains locked in deep political and diplomatic isolation.

Home to about 450,000 people, Transnistria is a narrow strip of land wedged between Moldova and Ukraine, along the eastern bank of the Dniester River. Its de facto capital, Tiraspol, lies less than 60 miles from the Ukrainian port city of Odesa. Though small in size – about 125 miles long – the region holds outsized strategic importance, sitting on a key corridor between the Black Sea and central Europe.

Carl Court documents the life of Socotra inhabitants as they deal with the impacts of climate change in relative peace from Yemen’s hostilities

A child going into an actual shop and buying a vinyl record? It will make you feel old and decrepit, and it’ll utterly bamboozle young people … but shut up – it’s Christmas!

The weird thing about tradition is that it has a tendency to long outlive its usefulness. Bonfire Night, once a way for the government to remind the public of its capacity to murder revolutionaries, has simply become an excuse to eat a jacket potato in a field. Church bells still ring on Sunday mornings, when it would be quicker and way more considerate to ping the congregation on WhatsApp. And the John Lewis Christmas advert is somehow still a thing.

True, it wasn’t so long ago that the John Lewis Christmas advert was a cultural institution; a teargas grenade lobbed into the television schedules to make viewers cry in the middle of The Cube. But now it is the year 2025, and things have changed. The John Lewis advert is a linear television commercial about a department store, even though the only way to describe either of those two things to a child is as a YouTube with no search function and an Amazon you actually have to walk to.

Cash-strapped people forced to do shameful things because they’re desperate for money? How can this rot be real? If I recreated the idea in my local park, I’d surely end up in prison

There’s missing the point, and then there’s Netflix making its capitalism-skewing Korean hit about a ruthless contest into an actual gameshow. The producers of Squid Game: The Challenge have previously denied that’s what happened here, stating that, in fact, the series is also about camaraderie and how people work under pressure, and is, I quote, “a critique of how we are ingrained from childhood to be ultra-competitive”. Come on – it’s a reality show about people doing humiliating things because they’re desperate for money, based on a drama about people doing humiliating things because they’re desperate for money. If I rounded up a load of debt-ridden people and recreated Squid Game: The Challenge in my local park, I’m pretty sure I’d be put in prison.

The thing about Squid Game: The Challenge that makes it all OK (although really, none of it is OK) is that everyone here is completely mesmerised by the amount of money on offer. Its prize is among the largest in gameshow history, with the winner of series one, Mai Whelan, cashing a cheque for an extremely cool $4.56m (£3.47m). It’s the sort of money that makes people go gaga from the off, and the treachery is off the charts.

After a colleague had the bright idea of a workplace version of the hit BBC show, I lied and cheated with impunity. Then the strain began to show

There aren’t many people who understand the stress that the celebrity Traitors Cat Burns and Alan Carr have been feeling as their stint wearing that famous green cloak draws to an end – but I do. I spent four weeks lying, cheating and murdering friends and colleagues in our office version of The Traitors.

I almost lost my mind.

Ed Campbell is a journalist who reports on British culture, politics and the internet. He also co-hosts the PoliticsJOE podcast

Jasmine, Aaron and Tom compete for the ultimate prize. Plus: huge news for the church lavatory in Murder Before Evensong. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, Channel 4
Jasmine, Aaron and Tom have made it to the final week. And while Bake Off might not have the same pull on the nation it once had, there’s still plenty of joy (and many nail-biting moments) to be had as they tackle British iced buns, French delights and, intriguingly, the challenge of pulling off the largest cake in the show’s history. Then it’s time for the tea party before the winner is announced. Hollie Richardson

The 22-year-old history student spent almost two years on a popular French quiz show – becoming a multimillionaire in the process. He discusses the importance of curiosity, frugality and 10-11 hours sleep a night

Being a TV general-knowledge quiz champion is a funny kind of fame, because random strangers want to test you on all sorts of trivia. “Sometimes I’ll be walking down the street, a car slows, the window goes down and someone screams: ‘Capital of Brunei?’ I answer and they drive off – it’s amusing really,” says Émilien, a 22-year-old history student who this summer became not only the most successful French gameshow contestant of all time, but the biggest gameshow winner in European history and the world record-holder for the most solo consecutive appearances on a TV quizshow.

And everyone, of course, wants to know how he did it.

Bombs on trains, coke-fuelled gambling sprees and canine barbecues … from Bodyguard to Industry, here are your most horrific, heart-in-mouth TV moments

The episode starts with the Spooks team locked down while undergoing a drill relating to a hypothetical terrorist attack, overseen by two Home Office officials, but as things progress it appears that there really has been an attack and a chemical weapon has been unleashed. The tension ratchets up as incoming communications show a catastrophe taking place outside, and gets worse as the boss appears to be infected, and the two Home Office officials attempt to leave, forcing Matthew Macfadyen’s character to decide between shooting them, or letting them go and risking contaminating the sealed MI5 offices. This being Spooks, it is unsurprising which one he chooses. Paul, Sheffield

The Homeland star is back in explosive thriller The Beast in Me. She opens up about politics, monsters – and whether her teen romance scenes would be acceptable today

In the new thriller The Beast in Me, a memoirist takes on a sinister property developer who may or may not have killed his first wife, and it’s not entirely clear which of the two is more dangerous. It has been billed by Netflix as “cat and mouse”, but Claire Danes prefers to think of it as the more evenly matched snake and mongoose.

“I liked the idea of a writer being truly dangerous, and predatorial,” she says of her character, Aggie Wiggs – grieving the loss of her young son and living divorced and alone in a big house she can’t afford – who develops a fascination with her new neighbour. Nile Jarvis (I can get on board with everything in the gripping eight-part series except, perhaps, just about every character’s name) is certainly monstrous, may also be a murderer, but might just have found his equal, because “she’s a real fighter, and she doesn’t have that much to lose”.

A quarter century after that landmark cult novel, this new epic has aspects of brilliance but seems designed for academic study rather than readerly enjoyment

In this moment of cultural panic about the decline of reading, it takes an enviable confidence to deliver a volume such as Tom’s Crossing. Weighing in at more than 1,200 pages of closely printed text, the novel contains, I would hazard, about half a million words – roughly two Ulysses. It’s also, for that matter, about twice the length of Danielewski’s debut, House of Leaves, which secured cult status for its author on publication 25 years ago. Tom’s Crossing is so big that when I got it out on the tube, I felt like that character on Trigger Happy TV with his enormous mobile phone. “Look,” I seemed to be telling the passengers scrolling Instagram on their devices, “I’m reading a book!”

The novel is not merely long, it’s also a challenging, deliberately arcane work that insists on its own epic status, yet has at its heart a straightforward and compelling story. Kalin March, a 16-year-old nerdy outsider in the town of Orvop in Utah, is a preternaturally talented horse rider. Through a shared love of horses, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with handsome and popular Tom Gatestone.

“Earlier that afternoon, when for some reason Allison’s thoughts had angrily returned to the curse she’d laid upon Kalin before he’d left, warnin him from guns, makin it clear by insubstantial decree that even handlin a gun might cost him the horses he loved, and for the rest of his life, she and Sondra had returned to the Isatch Canyon parkin lot, where they’d promptly learned about the great rockfall.”

A sharp, funny and engaging autobiography from one of the towering literary figures of our age

• Read an exclusive extract here

Margaret Atwood didn’t want to write a literary memoir. She worried it would be boring – “I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book …” Alcoholic excess, debauched parties and sexual transgressions would have perked things up, but she hasn’t lived that way.

In the end what she has written is less a memoir than an autobiography, not a slice of life but the whole works, 85 years. Where most such backward looks are cosily triumphalist or anxiously self-justifying, hers is sharp, funny and engaging, a book you can warm to even if you’re not fully au fait (and few people are) with her astonishing output, which in the “also by” contents list here fills two pages.

The once-great author revisits St Cloud’s orphanage all too briefly, in a novel that begins with an adopted girl but wanders all over the place

If some writers have an imperial phase, where they hit the heights time after time, then American novelist John Irving’s ran through a series of four fat, satisfying novels, from his 1978 breakthrough The World According to Garp to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were generous, funny, big-hearted books, tying characters he calls “outliers” to social issues from feminism to abortion.

Since Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing returns, except in page length. His last novel, 2022’s The Last Chairlift, was 900 pages of subjects Irving had explored better in earlier books (mutism, dwarfism, transgenderism), with a 200-page screenplay in the middle to pad it out – as if padding were needed.

At 86, she’s a literary seer and saint – and queen of the Canadian resistance. So what does the writer make of our dystopian world?

• ‘From (finally) being given the Booker prize to the day her partner died’: an exclusive extract from Margaret Atwood’s memoir

Margaret Atwood is doing her grocery shopping in her local supermarket in Toronto, and it is taking longer than usual. This is not because The Handmaid’s Tale author turns 86 this month, but because she is checking the provenance of every item before it goes in her trolley: California satsumas out; Canada spuds in. Atwood is a passionate environmentalist, but at the moment she is more worried about boycotting anything that comes from over the border in the US than air miles. “Elbows up!” she declares, taking a furious stance in the fruit and veg aisle.

Back in her kitchen she shows me a YouTube skit of Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and comedian Mike Myers in the national hockey kit to explain the significance of “Elbows up”, a growing gesture of Canadian resistance. “Oh, they’re angry. They’re furious,” she says of the reaction to President Trump’s proposed plans to make Canada the 51st state of America. “We’ve not got a very big army. If they wanted to invade they could do so. But I don’t think they would. Do they have any idea what it would be like to try to occupy a hostile Canada? It would not be a joke.” Trump would have to deal with Atwood, for starters.

With mystery still surrounding Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death, the poet and film-maker’s warnings of corruption and rising totalitarianism offer a chilling message for our times

Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered at around midnight on 2 November 1975. His blood-soaked body was found the next morning on waste ground in Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome, battered so badly the famous face was almost unrecognisable. Italy’s premier intellectual, artist, provocateur, national conscience, homosexual, dead at the age of 53, his scandalous final film still in the editing suite. “Assassinato Pasolini,” the next morning’s papers announced, alongside photographs of the 17-year-old accused of his murder. Everyone knew his taste for working-class hustlers. A hookup gone wrong was the instant verdict.

Some deaths are so suggestive that they become emblematic of a subject, the deceiving lens through which an entire life is forever after read. In this weirdly totalitarian mode of interpretation, Virginia Woolf is always walking towards the Ouse, the river in which she drowned herself. Likewise, Pasolini’s entire body of work is coloured by the seeming fact that he was murdered by a rent boy, the crowning act of a relentlessly high-risk life.

My book, which draws on my upbringing on a diverse and deprived Luton council estate, has been used as a GCSE text. But one man objected to its profane language and depictions of violence and sexual behaviour

Back in September, in a measure designed to “prevent immorality”, the Taliban closed down the internet in Afghanistan. This was the latest step – after a ban on all girls over the age of 12 receiving an education, and the removal of all books written by women from universities – to restrict citizens’ access to information that the regime might consider dangerous or difficult, or that challenges their ideological monopoly. The effect would have been to ensure that an entire generation of Afghans failed to reach their potential; the connection was partly restored 48 hours later, after widespread condemnation.

It was against this backdrop that I read about the school in Weymouth, Dorset, that had removed American author Angie Thomas’s wildly popular young adult novel The Hate U Give from its Year 10 reading list, apparently in response to the objection of one parent, former Conservative councillor James Farquharson. While copies of the book would continue to be available in the school library, its removal from classrooms sent a worrying message: that one man’s comfort could be considered more important than the rights of an entire student cohort to access literature that might speak directly to them, never mind that it may contain dangerous or difficult ideas.

The story of hot tea and unconsummated love hails from a very different era – and was far from easy to make. Yet it remains a key influence for film-makers from Sofia Coppola to Celine Song, James Ivory to Greta Gerwig

The first time David Lean’s 1945 romantic masterpiece was shown to the public, the audience were in stitches. It not being a comedy, this was far from ideal. The director was so embarrassed, he returned to his hotel planning to break into the film lab and burn the negative at the earliest opportunity.

Eighty years on, the legacy of Brief Encounter has proved anything but. First, its train station setting and ubiquity on British TV led to parodies by everyone from Victoria Wood to Birds Eye ready meals.

In The White House Effect, now available on Netflix, archival footage is used to show how the US right moved from believing to disputing the climate crisis

In 1988, the United States entered into its worst drought since the Dust Bowl. Crops withered in fields nationwide, part of an estimated $60bn in damage ($160bn in 2025). Dust storms swept the midwest and northern Great Plains. Cities instituted water restrictions. That summer, unrelentingly hot temperatures killed between 5,000 and 10,000 people, and Yellowstone national park suffered the worst wildfire in its history.

Amid the disaster, George HW Bush, then Ronald Reagan’s vice-president, met with farmers in Michigan reeling from crop losses. Bush, the Republican candidate for president, consoled them: if elected, he would be the environmental president. He acknowledged the reality of intensifying heatwaves – the “greenhouse effect”, to use the scientific parlance of the day – with blunt clarity: the burning of fossil fuels contributed excess carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, leading to global warming. But though the scale of the problem could seem “impossible”, he assured the farmers that “those who think we’re powerless to do anything about this greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House Effect” – the impact of sound environmental policy for the leading consumer of fossil fuels. Curbing emissions, he said, was “the common agenda of the future”.

Clémence Davigo’s uncompromising film gives voice to three survivors of a French correctional school, and the difficult path towards healing

Great courage, physical and moral, is shown by the three principal interviewees in this heartbreaking French documentary. André, Michel and Daniel are former wards of the church-run Belle Étoile correctional school in the Savoie town of Mercury and, now in their 60s and 70s, they recount a barrage of abuse at the hands of Abbot Garin and his lackeys: beatings that inflicted permanent damage, sleep deprivation, cold-water baths, starvation, nocturnal molestation.

As director Clémence Davigo sits in on their long reminiscence sessions, the damage is clear. Michel weeps at the memory of his humiliations: deprived of a nurturing education, André became a career criminal, spending decades in prison; the alert-eyed Daniel, sexually abused and trapped in “hell”, speaks of later being emotionally crippled, unable to tell anyone he loves them. Michel and Daniel, an indefatigable chef and runner respectively, have found displacement activities, the means by which it is possible to empty their heads of the horror.

‘Steven Spielberg lit up when I told him I couldn’t do the face-tearing scene. Those are his hands you see in the film. I could never have ripped my face off with the same joie de vivre’

When my agent said, “We have a script called Poltergeist”, my response was: “Is it horror? I’m not interested.” Then he said: “Well, Steven Spielberg is producing.” So I read the script, which Spielberg had also written, and loved the family in it, and the fact that there were so many strong female characters: Diane, Dr Lesh, Tangina the psychic. Zelda Rubinstein, who played Tangina, was a dynamo. Spielberg was busy prepping ET, so even though he was often on set, Tobe Hooper, who made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed. I’d never seen that because when it comes to horror, I’m a nervous Nellie.

Emily Mkrtichian’s feature debut was shot in the now defunct republic of Artsakh, a tender, intimate meditation on the impermanence of life

With a title taken from the traditional opening phrase of Armenian fairytales, Emily Mkrtichian’s feature debut hints at the impermanence of life itself. Shot in the now defunct republic of Artsakh, the film follows four extraordinary women who find their hopes and ambitions cruelly derailed by war. The breakaway state was formed in 1991, after decades of political discrimination under the Soviet Union and military conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. For the predominantly Armenian population here, their peace has always been under threat.

The personal journeys of Mkrtichian’s subjects feel even more remarkable in the face of these uncertainties. A judo champion, Sose aspires to represent her country at the Olympics; Siranush campaigns to be on the city council; and Gayane runs a support group for women. For those living in Artsakh, memories of the last war are more than a spectre; working in bomb disposal, Sveta defuses mines that are still lodged in the verdant landscape. Though their professions vary, they are all committed to bettering the community, a testament to the strong cultural bonds that exist here.

Isabel Pagliai’s film introduces her central character Louise with a thrillingly eclectic blend of handheld footage and cascades of still images

Reminiscent of a dark fairytale, Isabel Pagliai’s feature debut conjures a multitude of thresholds, lingering somewhere between documentary and fiction, dream and reality. Louise, the young woman at the centre of this beguiling film, is a mirage of a character; introduced in fragments, we first hear her lilting lamentations against a darkened screen. This is followed by closeups of a yellow notebook, in which her fears and desires overflow on every page, as they are read out by a mysterious, unseen man.

When Louise finally materialises on screen, her everyday existence unfurls over deceptively mundane episodes. Through these sequences, Pagliai builds a fascinating tension between the stillness of the compositions and Louise’s agitated psyche. She is often seen in darkness, her face lit by the glow of various screen devices that flicker with snippets of songs and film scenes. This virtual flood of audiovisual materials takes on a literal form as if by magic, we see Louise out of her room and into the woods. Here, she encounters Thomas, the male narrator whose voice appears at the beginning of the film. At one point, Louise is partially submerged in a moonlit pond, a modern-day Ophelia swept up by unanswered fantasies.

As the actor approaches his 90th year and publishes an autobiography, he reflects on his early years on stage, being inspired by Laurence Olivier, becoming a Hollywood star and conquering his demons

‘What’s the weather like over there?” asks Anthony Hopkins as soon as our video call begins. He may have lived in California for decades but some Welshness remains, in his distinctive, mellifluous voice – perhaps a little hoarser than it once was – and his preoccupation with the climate. It’s a dark evening in London but a bright, sunny morning in Los Angeles, and Hopkins is equally bright in demeanour and attire, sporting a turquoise and green shirt. “I came here 50 years ago. Somebody said: ‘Are you selling out?’ I said: ‘No, I just like the climate and to get a suntan.’ But I like Los Angeles. I’ve had a great life here.”

It hasn’t been all that great recently, actually. In January this year, Hopkins’ house in Pacific Palisades was destroyed by the wildfires. “It was a bit of a calamity,” he says, with almost cheerful understatement. “We’re thankful that no one was hurt, and we got our cats and our little family into the clear.” He wasn’t there at the time; he and his wife, Stella, were in Saudi Arabia, where he was hosting a concert of his own music played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. They’re now in a rented house in the nearby neighbourhood of Brentwood. “We lost everything, but you think: ‘Oh well, at least we are alive.’ I feel sorry for the thousands of people who have been really affected. People who were way past retirement age, and had worked hard over the years and now … nothing.”

Passenger reworks songs from his hit musical while Tanika Gupta gives Ibsen a Hollywood makeover and TikTok becomes a stage for young playwrights

When Rachel Joyce’s bestseller about a retiree’s road trip was turned into a 2023 film, it had a couple of lovely numbers by Sam Lee. Earlier this year, fellow folkie Passenger (AKA Michael David Rosenberg) provided the music and lyrics for Chichester Festival theatre’s production, which transfers to the West End in January. Passenger’s album of renditions of the songs, One for the Road – with a few tracks that didn’t make the musical and an appearance from Jack Wolfe, who played the show’s Balladeer – is available to stream now.

His parable of collective social responsibility is a hardy classic but the Yorkshire playwright’s wider legacy should not be neglected

How on earth does one sum up JB Priestley? He wrote 39 plays, 26 novels and a huge amount of nonfiction and was dismissed by Virginia Woolf, with characteristic snootiness, as “one of the tradesmen of letters”. But, in art as in life, tradespeople are invaluable and with one of Priestley’s most popular plays, When We Are Married, about to be revived at London’s Donmar Warehouse, it is worth asking what the qualities are that make him a durable dramatist.

It makes sense to start with An Inspector Calls, which was famously revived by Stephen Daldry in 1992 in a production that has lasted for more than 30 years. What Daldry and his designer, Ian MacNeil, did was to cut through the play’s schematic outline and treat it as an expressionist fable about a family poised on the edge of self-destruction.

The Pit, Barbican, London
Elisabeth Gunawan’s mythological horror blends puppetry, dance, theatre and film to explore the effects of a family’s relocation from Hong Kong to the US

Like so many mythic creatures, the hungry ghosts of Buddhist and Chinese traditions – ghouls with huge stomachs and small mouths, tormented by their own insatiable appetites – is a fecund figure, giving rise to all sorts of stories and meanings. In Elisabeth Gunawan’s Prayers for a Hungry Ghost, for her theatre company Kiss Witness, it is folded in with another staple figure of storytelling: the double. The play centres on non-identical twin sisters and explores, through a supernatural family drama and a mix of theatre, dance, video and puppetry, the dynamics and dysfunctions of the immigrant experience.

The girls’ father (Daniel York Loh) has left Hong Kong to forge an apparently successful life in the US, a place where he has never seen so much food. Their mother is absent and unidentified, but seems to haunt the stage in the form of a silent background figure (Tang Sook Kuan) who sometimes shadows the action or helps with props.

Theatre director and founder of Talawa, the company that champions writers and actors of African and Caribbean heritage

By the time she founded her influential and still thriving Talawa theatre company in 1986, Yvonne Brewster, who has died aged 87, had made waves in her native Jamaica as an actor and director, worked on British TV, run a small touring company, Carib, for black actors, and served for two years as a drama officer on the Arts Council.

She had good contacts and knew the ropes, and set about a dynamic programme of work – new plays and classics by Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka and Shakespeare – often seen in the Tricycle (now the Kiln, in Kilburn), the Lyric Hammersmith and the Riverside Studios, all in London.

The Japanese version of the pop-rock phenomenon about the six ill-fated wives caused a sensation in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. As that production now hits the UK, we go behind the scenes (and thrones)

A singer and dancer in Japan, Marie Sugaya first heard about a musical featuring King Henry VIII’s wives through a friend on a cultural exchange in London. “She spoke of Six so highly that I thought if it were ever to come to Japan, I’d love to be involved. But it was a faraway idea, just a dream.”

Similarly, Airi Suzuki, an actor and “pop icon” famed across Japan, travelled to Britain to watch the show last year, purely as a punter. Neither Sugaya nor Suzuki imagined they would ever take to the same stage to perform the Tudor-era musical-cum-rock concert themselves. But they are part of an all-Japanese lineup of queens who are taking over Vaudeville theatre for a week-long run which producers think is the first of its kind: a West End show, translated into Japanese and performed in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya as part of a sold-out tour, now brought back to the West End with a cast who sing in Japanese (with English captions).

Soho theatre, London
Gayathiri Kamalakanthan’s warm, funny debut examines history, heritage and gender expectations as Krish and bestie Brenavee navigate a big life moment

In many ways, Period Parrrty is your classic coming-of-age story – full of teenage angst, fumbling romances, and dreams of older, freer years. But Gayathiri Kamalakanthan’s debut play is also a bold study of Tamil history and identity. Set in 2010 and using the celebratory ritual that follows a teenager’s first period as a catalyst, it focuses on the thoughts and feelings of Krish, a 15-year-old who has not yet told their family they are non-binary.

It is a deeply endearing play, with Krish’s inner conflicts about wanting to please their family spilling out across the stage in candid revelations. But the structure of Kamalakanthan’s writing feels haphazard. From naturalistic scenes, the drama clumsily shifts to monologues that address the audience directly – then recorded interviews for a school project about “cultural heritage” are used as transitional snapshots. Despite the creativity, the various techniques prevent the play from coming together as a unified vision.

Wielding fantasy weapons and splashing fake blood, the New Yorkers have even learned how to make chainmail outfits – and they’re already aiming to conquer stadiums

While many a rocker has cribbed from high fantasy, few have truly walked the walk. Sure, they might bedeck their album sleeves with ghouls, goblins, manacled maidens and brawny barbarians, but did a member of Cirith Ungol ever have to retrieve a missing unicorn horn from a snowy field in the depths of winter? Has Yngwie Malmsteen spent time squinting in the back of a tour bus, repairing his own chainmail?

Formed in 2019, Brooklyn’s Castle Rat have had to face both these scenarios and more as they live out their epic fantasies. From heraldic, earworm-heavy anthems to eye-popping live shows, costume design, videos and album art, they’re not so much a metal band as a full immersive experience.

Breaking dancefloors, recording in the dark, crying at I Know It’s Over, winning in court, splitting over chips … the musician relives his tumultuous years in ‘the best British band ever’

‘It was terrifying,” says Mike Joyce, sitting in the palatial suite of the Stock Exchange hotel in Manchester. The drummer is talking about his favourite gig with the Smiths: the night in July 1986 when The Queen Is Dead tour hit Salford Maxwell Hall. “They weren’t taking ticket stubs off people coming in. So they were giving their tickets back out through the bog window.” The show ended up at double capacity. “They had to evacuate the bar downstairs because the sprung dancefloor was collapsing. Delirium! There were people crying their eyes out, strangers hugging each other – and that was before E!”

Joyce, garrulously upbeat company, has just written a warm, engaging memoir, The Drums, celebrating the Smiths. It’s a “right place, right time” story of his memories as the great indie band tore down the boundaries of British guitar music, with Johnny Marr’s beautifully intricate playing merging immaculately with Morrissey’s words, resulting in devastating, romantic and witty vignettes that perfectly captured everyday life.

(Columbia)
The Catalan star’s monumental fourth LP features lyrics in 13 languages, references to female saints, the London Symphony Orchestra – and Björk on ‘divine intervention’

Last week, Rosalía appeared on a US podcast to discuss her fourth album. At one juncture, the interviewer asked if she didn’t think that Lux was demanding a lot from her listeners: a not entirely unreasonable question, given that it features a song cycle in four “movements”, based on the lives of various female saints and involves the 33-year-old Catalan star singing in 13 different languages to the thunderous accompaniment of the London Symphony Orchestra; and that it sounds nothing whatsoever like its predecessor, 2022’s Motomami. “Absolutely,” she responded, framing Lux as a reaction to the quick-fix dopamine hit of idly scrolling social media: something you had to focus on.

Demanding a lot from her listeners didn’t seem like something Rosalía was terribly bothered about, which is, in a sense, surprising. Pop has seldom seemed more prone to user-friendliness, to demanding as little as it can from its audience, as if the convenience of its primary means of transmission has affected its sound: it occasionally feels as though streaming’s algorithms – always coming up with something new that’s similar to stuff you already know – have started to define the way artists prosecute their careers. Then again, Rosalía has form when it comes to challenging her fanbase: variously infused with reggaeton, hip-hop, dubstep, dembow and experimental electronica, Motomami represented a dramatic pivot away from her 2018 breakthrough, El Mal Querer, a pop overhaul of flamenco that – incredibly – began life as the singer’s college project. It seems oddly telling that the biggest guest star on Lux is Björk, whose distinctive tone appears during Berghain, somewhere in between a resounding orchestral arrangement, Rosalía’s own operatic vocals and the sound of Yves Tumor reprising Mike Tyson’s “I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me” tirade over and over again. It’s hard not to suspect that Rosalía sees Björk as a kindred spirit or even a model, someone who has predicated a decades-long solo career on making artistic handbrake turns through a glossy aesthetic.

The former Verve singer talks about his supporting role in the big Oasis reunion shows, his AI fears and what he thinks of fans who Shazam his songs

Richard Ashcroft is the man of the moment. Fresh from supporting Oasis as the self-proclaimed “only man for the job”, the former Verve singer is back with an (almost) sold-out arena tour for 2026, and some more Oasis dates in South America, not to mention a seventh solo album, Lovin’ You. We caught up with Ashcroft to chat about loving Abba, being inspired by Serge Gainsbourg and fighting Liam Gallagher.

Hi, Richard! Always a pleasure to interview another Richard – who else is in the club?
Madeley … Hammond … It’s dying out. I wonder if it’s because of the Dick abbreviation? Back in the day, old actors were very happy being Dickie. I went into an off licence in Chiswick and this lad went: “All right, Dickie?” I said: “Do you know what happens to people who call me Dickie?” He said: “Oh no, sorry mate.” I said: “I’m only joking. I don’t give a shit. Call me what you want.”

Albert Hall, Manchester
The Chicago musician’s fans are delighted by her alt-R&B, but for all the adventurous new songs tonight’s show does not quite live up to its ambition

Chicago-born Ravyn Lenae has been a cult darling of alt-R&B since the mid-2010s, an art-school dreamer whose whimsical, pop-tinged sound first drew notice when indie-slacker wunderkind Steve Lacy produced her Crush EP back in 2018. Tonight in Manchester, her kooky on-stage persona is mirrored by a surprisingly baby-faced group of misfits pressed against the barrier: a sea of trend-conscious twentysomethings in slouchy cargos and Y2K outfits desperate for a chance to brush against the singer’s hand. Supported by a guitarist, drummer and backing track, Lenae twirls on to the stage with the groove-heavy Sticky, and a lone wind machine whooshes her curls into the air.

Some songs from her 2024 album Bird’s Eye land on eager ears. The new material takes a sweet yet sharp turn from her earlier work, bouncing from the fun, rocksteady dubby speaker rattles in Candy to the tender, heart-on-chest ballad Love Is Blind. She airs her ruptured romantic frustrations in plaintive pleas: “How do you love me if you leave me behind?” But feels such as the slower, sad-girl moments on the new record, including Pilot, struggle to maintain the same momentum. Her recent melancholy undoubtedly means a great deal to her: Lenae punctuates the set with warm reflections on her own growth as an artist and offers a healthy, relatable dose of sisterly love and guidance: “Stay the course. Time is a gift.”

The Australian rock band are ‘legit now’ with their second album, Glory. They talk about performing while underage, playing with Dave Grohl and the ‘girl band’ label

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

“If you want to rock, you’ve gotta break the rules. You’ve gotta get mad at The Man,” a wise man (Jack Black) once said (in School of Rock). And in 2015, four 15-year-olds in Canberra watching the Richard Linklater film at a sleepover decided they wanted to do just that, forming a rock band the morning after that has become one of Australia’s most exciting acts: Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers – a joke name suggested by one of their uncles that stuck.

The four teenagers had enough punk brio that they were soon being booked to play venues they weren’t old enough to enter unchaperoned. Adults around them would assume they were in their early 20s, when they were actually 16 or 17.

Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning

The bucket hats were out in force at Marvel Stadium as Liam and Noel Gallagher made a polished – and even affectionate – return to Melbourne

The first time Oasis played in Australia, in 1998, the controversies piled up to the point that some journalists speculated it was a media strategy. Liam was slapped with a lifetime ban from Cathay Pacific due to the band’s alleged bad behaviour on the flight over. (The ban was sealed when Liam told an Australian reporter, “I don’t give a flying fuck … I’d rather walk.”) Noel got in hot water for comments he made about Princess Diana, then Liam was hauled in front of Brisbane magistrates court, charged with assault after allegedly head-butting a fan who wanted a photo. The fan dropped the charges, though Liam later called the alleged head-butt “justice”, adding: “The geezer put a camera in my face and I told him not to.”

But other than the handwringers, Australian fans seemed delighted with it all. The Gallaghers’ particular tetchy, laddish swagger has always played very well here, as has the drama of their on-off relationship. And the music too, of course: both What’s the Story (Morning Glory)? and Wonderwall went to No 1 in 1995, while in 2013 Triple J listeners voted Wonderwall the best song of the past 20 years. The affection remained even after Noel went on Triple J and said: “You fucking need us more than we need you. Your lives and the people that listen to your radio station and listen to Radiohead and fucking Blur and Robbie Williams – your lives would be lessened without me and my brother and it’s as simple as that.”

Silk Street theatre, London
The UK premiere of Respighi’s 1937 work was paired with Ethel Smyth’s dark and dramatic Der Wald, both imaginatively staged by Stephen Barlow

As the near-capacity audience settled and orchestra members warmed up ahead of Guildhall School’s latest double bill of operatic rarities, a familiar tune emerged from the pit: a tuba parping its way through Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. Talk about setting the tone. Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald (premiered in Berlin in 1902) and Ottorino Respighi’s Lucrezia – first performed in 1937 although this, remarkably, was its UK premiere – will have been new to most in the Silk Street theatre. Yet both scores could have “RW woz ’ere” graffitied on them, such is Wagner’s impact on their musical language.

Der Wald veers into total fandom. Here’s a dark, Romantic forest inhabited by innocent lovers. There’s a dramatic soprano wreaking social havoc. “Tod und Liebe” – death and love – sings the female innocent at the end in her own miniature Liebestod. In Stephen Barlow’s production, the lighting is set at “gloomy” and the action is in 1950s North America, the woodlanders clad in denim and plaid while Iolanthe the pseudo-Valkyrie arrives on a motorbike.

Glyndebourne Opera House, Lewes
Mark-Anthony Turnage and Rachael Hewer’s new 80s-set version of E Nesbit’s tale has a Le Carré meets the Famous Five vibe and boasts a strong cast, imaginative staging and a vivid, colour-filled score

E Nesbit’s The Railway Children has enjoyed national treasure status since it was published in 1906. The author, a prominent member and co-founder of the Fabian Society, fashioned an absorbing storyline, equal parts innocence and mystery, while subtly suggesting that the British establishment is not always to be trusted. Now, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Rachael Hewer have turned it into an opera, if not quite for children, then definitely of appeal to a broad family audience. By relocating the action to the 1980s they’ve shaken off the musty clouds of nostalgia that hover around its pages.

Rachael Hewer’s forthright libretto is dramatically effective, though it becomes disjointed towards the end (a chorus celebrating the colour of paint representative of the national railway network feels like it wandered in from another show). For the most part, however, it possesses a fast-paced John le Carré meets the Famous Five vibe, nicely mirrored by Stephen Langridge’s lithe-limbed production. Nicky Shaw’s versatile set, lit with pinpoint precision by Mark Jonathan, employs an open and shut camera effect that shifts the action from government office to station platform in the twinkling of an eye. Costumes range from Cold-War chic to 1980s baggy, and in case you still don’t get it, props include a Rubik’s Cube.

Bamberger Symphoniker/Hrůša
(Accentus Music)
Jakub Hrůša’s absorbing treatment gives life to three late-19th-century works reflecting on the notion of heroism

This absorbing release on the Leipzig-based Accentus label is a reminder that the Royal Opera’s new music director, Jakub Hrůša, has for the last nine years excelled in orchestral music as chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony. The programme juxtaposes three works composed in the final decades of the 19th century, each reflecting in different ways on the notion of a hero, or what is meant by a hero’s journey.

A Hero’s Song was Dvořák’s final tone poem, a 20-minute micro-symphony in which intrepid determination gives way to mourning, martial conflict and finally hope. It’s full of amiable melodies and, in Hrůša’s hands, it packs a dramatic punch. It’s followed by a compelling discovery: Glazunov’s symphonic elegy To the Memory of a Hero, composed when he was 20. Advancing with sombre tread, and boasting a pair of instantly memorable themes, it is handsomely shaped by conductor and orchestra.

Sinfonia of London/Wilson
(Chandos)
Conductor John Wilson’s rumbustious reading and cellist Jonathan Aasgaard’s angst-ridden romantic sweep bring out the brooding tension and snarling climaxes

This is the second Sinfonia of London album dedicated to William Walton and a perfect example of how conductor John Wilson’s vital, yet penetrating, approach combines with the orchestra’s trademark lustre to fit this composer’s music like a glove. It’s evident from the outset in a rumbustious reading of the Scapino overture that positively snaps, crackles and pops.

Principal cellist Jonathan Aasgaard is the soloist in Walton’s final concerto where the music’s angst-ridden romantic sweep is tinged with introspective melancholy. Translucent orchestral textures allow his generous tone to shine, while a prodigious technique is showcased in an immaculately articulated account of the central Allegro appassionato.

On its release in 1993, Midway’s gore-filled fighting game ushered in a new era of hyperviolent gaming that continues to influence the industry to this day

On 9 December 1993, Democratic senator Joe Lieberman sat before a congressional hearing on video game violence and told attendees that the video game industry had crossed a line. The focus of his ire was Mortal Kombat, Midway’s bloody fighting game, recently released on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System after a successful run in the arcades. “Blood splatters from the contestants’ heads,” he told the room. “The game narrator instructs the player to finish his opponent. That player may choose a method of murder ranging from ripping a heart out or pulling off the head of the opponent, with spinal cord attached.”

Lieberman’s aim with the congressional hearing had been to force the US games industry into creating a formal ratings system, preventing minors from buying violent titles. He succeeded in that – the Entertainment Software Rating Board was established as a result of the hearing – but he also boosted a moral panic that had quietly begun with the launch of the Mortal Kombat arcade game in 1992. This then took on more urgency following the high-profile home console release on 13 September 1993 – a global simultaneous launch Midway named Mortal Monday. US news networks were sending reporters to arcades, interrogating teens as they enthusiastically dismembered each other’s fighters. Newspapers were interviewing alarmed child psychologists. The BBC responded by featuring the game on its late-night news magazine programme The Late Show, calling in author Will Self to play live in the studio.

It’s not just what we hear and see that scares us, according to those behind many of video gaming’s modern horror classics

The sound came first. In a San Francisco Bart train tunnel, Don Veca took his recorder and captured a train’s metallic roar – “like demons in agony, beautifully ugly,” he remembers. That recording became one of the most chilling sounds in 2008’s Dead Space.

“We dropped that screeching, industrial noise at full volume right after the vacuum silence – creating one of the game’s most jarring sonic contrasts,” Veca, who made horror history as the audio director for the Dead Space games, recalls. “Our game designer hated it – but the boss loved it. Over time, it’s become iconic.”

Spending eight hours in a theatre with 70 people playing through political donkey epic asses.masses was gruelling – and a tribute to gaming’s shared joy

This weekend, I spent more than eight hours in a theatre playing a video game about donkeys, reincarnation and organised labour with about 70 other people. Political, unpredictable and replete with ass puns, Asses.Masses is, on the one hand, a fairly rudimentary-looking video game made by Canadian artists Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim with a small team of collaborators. But the setting – in a theatre, surrounded by others, everybody shouting advice and opinions and working together on puzzles – transforms it into a piece of collective performance art.

Here’s how it works: on a plinth in front of a giant projected screen is a controller. In the seats: the audience. Whoever wants to get up and take control can do so, and they become the avatar of the crowd. The game opens with a series of questions, mostly about donkeys, some in different languages, and quickly it becomes obvious that you have to work together to get them right. Someone in our crowd spoke Spanish; another knew the answer to an engineering question; I knew, somehow, that a female donkey is called a jennet.

From cultivating a spiral-shaped orchard to finding lost glaciers and dressing up as a landmark bird, on 4 November artists around the UK will participate in Remember Nature, a day of activism to offer hope for the future

Back in 2015, well into the twilight of his life, the artist and activist Gustav Metzger decided to embark on one last big project. Best known as the inventor of auto-destructive art – a response, he said, to the destructive horrors of the Holocaust – Metzger had also, over the course of a long career, been an inspirational teacher to Pete Townshend of the Who and campaigned for numerous causes including nuclear disarmament and vegetarianism. Now, on a video message barely three minutes long, he was making one final plea.

“I, Gustav Metzger, am asking for your participation in this worldwide call for a day of action to remember nature on November 4th, 2015,” he began, appealing to creatives to take a stand against the ongoing erasure of species. “Our task is to remind people of the richness and complexity in nature … and by doing so art will enter territories that are inherently creative.”

A new museum in Mödlareuth tells the story of how a settlement of only 50 people straddled Bavaria in West Germany and Thuringia in the east

A creek so shallow you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades. By an accident of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a group of local people set about memorialising their history. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the (big) Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Various venues, Oxford
From historical cottaging locations to attempts to fool an AI, the fifth edition of this biennial festival is a refreshing celebration of the form’s most DIY and downright uncommercial delights

It is the first day of Photo Oxford’s fifth edition but the first venue I arrive at, Maison Française, is closed. Is this what Roland Barthes meant when he wrote that “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away”?

There is at least an exhibition outside – one of the 30 shows in the city’s community spaces, churches, colleges and pubs that are part of the festival this year. Michael Christopher Brown’s 90 Miles refers to the distance between Havana and Florida, a perilous stretch of ocean crossed by many Cubans fleeing the country on DIY boats – a record number between 2022 and 2023. Brown uses AI the way draftsmen created illustrations for newspapers before photography. He has collected eye witness accounts, news stories and historical reportage of Cuba’s history from Castro to today, and used them as prompts for the software. In one image, the figures positioned on and around a classically Cuban vintage car, strangely stranded in a turbulent ocean, have warped faces and limbs that melt and drip like a Francis Bacon painting. These aren’t real images – but they are truthful.

Large-scale William Scott works feature in exhibition that tells story of artist’s friendship with Mark Rothko

The story of how one of the UK’s great abstract painters was inspired by ordinariness – and the extraordinary meeting he had with an American artistic giant – is being told in a new exhibition in the West Country.

Three large-scale paintings by William Scott (1913 –1989) have been loaned to the Museum of Somerset in Taunton, not far from the artist’s home and studio in the countryside south of Bath.

A unique show at Khanenko Museum, opening three years after a Russian missile hit, is inspiring Ukrainians to think about art and empire in new ways

On a quiet street in central Kyiv, where monuments are wrapped in sandbags and shrapnel shields, the Khanenko Museum has opened an exhibition about Africa. Its title, Africa Direct, is a statement and a method: a call to approach the continent not through inherited filters (Soviet, colonial, or western) but through direct engagement with its histories, philosophies and living cultures.

The museum, which holds one of the most distinguished private collections of the 19th century in eastern Europe, was badly damaged when a Russian missile struck nearby in October 2022. Windows and show cases were shattered and the glass ceiling collapsed. Yet the museum’s collections were unharmed: Byzantine icons, Islamic artwork, and old master paintings had already been secured, some of them safely evacuated to partner institutions in Paris, Vilnius, Warsaw and The Hague.

Vikings, miners, refugees, enslavers and good old Albion himself … Ben Edge reveals how his dynamic new understanding of Britain today was triggered by seeing a procession of druids march past a KFC

A toy poodle called Lunar arrives at the door of Ben Edge’s studio in a furry blur of excitement. There’s also a full-size fibreglass horse, already halfway through the door. It’s being ridden by a mannequin who is wearing a garland of artificial flowers and, under that, a shirt patterned with green men, Uffington White Horse references and oak leaves. It’s identical to the one worn by the living, breathing artist standing next to me.

A highlight of Edge’s upcoming exhibition at London’s Fitzrovia Chapel, the sculpture is titled Where Must We Go in Search of Our Better Selves. It’s a self-portrait like no other, riffing on the magnificent equestrian monuments of the Renaissance, and honouring the Garland King, a figure from the recesses of British folklore, who each May rides through the Derbyshire village of Castleton. “The Garland King has become a symbol for me,” Edge says. “I see it as representing a process of finding your own nature, of going inward.”

Julianne Moore, David Beckham, Dr Dre … the Gavin & Stacey creator’s new pod isn’t short of massive names spilling the beans. Plus, Stacey Dooley and Ben Zand unpick the headlines with chutzpah

James Corden has jumped on the celebrity podcast bandwagon, and what he lacks in speed he makes up for in star power: guests include Julianne Moore, David Beckham and Anna Wintour. His Desert Island Discs-esque format invites them to expand on the people, places and cultural artefacts that have shaped them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the accomplished yapper effortlessly extracts a surfeit of stories from his patrons (see his episode with Dr Dre). Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

When Nicola Thorp was growing up in Blackpool, the ‘kebab girl’ who had gone missing less than a mile away, aged 14, was spoken of as a cautionary tale. But what really happened to her? For the last three years, Thorp has been finding out

It has been more than 20 years since 14-year-old Charlene Downes went missing in Blackpool. Last captured on CCTV on a Saturday night in November 2003, Charlene still hasn’t been found, and the truth of what happened to her remains unsolved. Nicola Thorp, an actor, writer and broadcaster, who grew up in the town, describes Charlene’s disappearance, considered to be murder, as “a wound for Blackpool”. Over the last couple of decades, the case has been clouded by rumour, far-right rhetoric and police failures. In a new podcast, Charlene: Somebody Knows Something, she has set out to clear up some of the speculation, and expose how Charlene was repeatedly failed by those around her.

Many in the town, she says, still believe the two men who were first tried in 2007 – a retrial was ordered, which then collapsed amid “grave doubts” about the evidence – got away with murder. That in itself, she says, is an obstacle to finding out who is really responsible.

After 16 years and almost 1,700 episodes, Maron is ending his show – which changed the face of podcasting. No wonder it’s sparking an outpouring of sadness

When I discovered Marc Maron’s influential podcast WTF, I was working in a pub. It was a weird time for me. I had just left university and had absolutely no idea what I was doing with my life, so I moved back home and took on shifts as a waitress and chamber maid.

Podcasts became an escape from my reality of changing sheets on king-sized beds, folding hospital corners and rearranging tiny bottles of shampoo – and none more so than Marc Maron’s WTF.