The Guardian

At the world’s biggest barrel of laughs, Hannah Gadsby, John Kearns and Rose Matafeo rub shoulders with homegrown stars-in-the-making. Our writer has the time of his life What’s the biggest comedy festival in the world? Parochial Britons would say Edinburgh . Internationalists may consider Montreal’s Just for Laughs . They would all be wrong. Just for Laughs is out of the running: it filed for ba…

The Latin music legend – back, at 66, with her first salsa album – answers your questions on her star collaborations, screen chemistry, and what she and Stevie Wonder still can’t agree on When did you first know you were a drummer? axolotly I still don’t know if I’m a “drummer”! Sometimes people mean percussion – like congas and timbales – and sometimes they mean drum set, which wasn’t a thing fo…

St John’s Smith Square, London Lee Reynolds’ reduced arrangements of Schoenberg and Mahler were convincing and involving The concerts of the Society for Private Musical Performances that Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils established in Vienna in 1919 regularly included performances of arrangements that reduced contemporary orchestral scores to more convenient ensemble proportions. But even Schoenb…

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London Hofesh Shechter’s young company are an international bunch but their slo-mo curves and sudden shocks deliver some startling home truths about the UK There’s an irony, of course, in a piece about English identity that’s made by an Israeli choreographer, with a cast from Taiwan, Iceland, Belgium and elsewhere, just two Britons among them. Shechter II is the younger bran…

Sketchwriter’s take on memoir of PM who screwed up catastrophically and quickly but thinks there’s still work to do I was impatient to get going. Plans had been made. I picked up my phone. “ChatGPT. Write me a memoir in the style of an excitable five-year-old on acid.” “We’ve only got 10 years to save the west,” I declared solemnly. Continue reading...

With three hit shows – Strictly, The Traitors and the returning The Piano – Claudia Winkleman is TV’s hottest presenter. She talks about being tone deaf, being a style icon … and why she’s allergic to praise Claudia Winkleman is convinced she gave the ick to Mika and Lang Lang, her co-stars on Channel 4 hit The Piano . “They’re so alarmed by my eating habits,” she says. “My mic’s always on and al…

As the show becomes a global hit and is renewed for a second season, experts say game adaptations are the new superhero movies In the first few days of its release, Fallout – the Prime Video adaptation of the post-apocalyptic video game franchise – has become a hit with global audiences, shooting to the top of the UK chart and ranking among Prime’s top three most-watched titles ever. On Friday, j…

New research suggests some 16th-century writers were confident Shakespeare was the pseudonym of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford Scholars often say that no one doubted Shakespeare’s authorship until the 19th century. The response is a rote way of brushing off persistent questions about the attribution of the world’s most famous plays and poems – but it may not be true. New scholarship suggests…

Production examines why Scottish poet’s The Living Mountain lay unpublished in a drawer for 30 years Nan Shepherd, the Scottish poet and nature writer whose vivid reflections on her treks through the Cairngorms have brought posthumous acclaim, is celebrated in a new play that aims to unravel the mystery of why her masterwork remained unpublished in a drawer for 30 years. Shepherd is recognisable …

The comedian is desperate to make out his jokes about rape and domestic abuse will get him cancelled. In reality, this Netflix special is about as edgy as a Jim Davidson set The darting eyes are new. As a young man, Jimmy Carr never had so much trouble keeping his eyeballs under control. In Natural Born Killer, the comedian’s new Netflix show, his pupils bounce from one side to the other so frequ…

Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Emily Burns’ modern-day romcom, set on a Pacific island retreat, ramps up the silliness and makes accessible the text’s cloud-parting power and wordplay This early Shakespearean comedy might be rich in verse but it is a tricky play to pull off for its strained Elizabethan-era wordplay, convoluted subplots and too inevitable downfall of four men who s…

Kooky kid sister, romantic lead, comic turn, cantankerous old dame … we pick out her greatest roles An early Shirley in this epic Technicolor comedy-adventure based on Jules Verne, overstuffed with superstar cameos and produced by the impresario Mike Todd. David Niven sauntered through the role of the globe-circling gent Phileas Fogg and 22-year-old MacLaine was cast in the way Hollywood sometime…

Kiln theatre, London Sophie Thompson and Charles Edwards are delightful as the unlikely pair thrown together by a school production as teenagers and reunited late in life Music, says Hattie, is supposed to be a consolation. But in the opening moments of this play, it feels more like an exorcism, as she sits down at a piano in St Pancras International station and gives a performance that goes inst…

Pioneering German modernists, a stately new setting for Britain’s best-known sculptor and Rauschenberg’s utopian cultural exchange – all in your weekly dispatch Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider The passion and spirituality of a key movement in early 20th century German art jerks back to life like Dr Caligari’s creature. • Tate Modern, London, from 25 April until 20 October Con…

Tom Hardy, Cynthia Erivo and Andrew Scott conjure menace and melodrama in this 75th-anniversary remake of Orwell’s classic Audible has been pushing the boat out lately with its dramatisations of literary classics, and this adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, marking 75 years since it was published, is a dark delight. Andrew Garfield leads a starry cast as Winston Smith, a worker a…