He made his name as one of the great British TV baddies in Happy Valley, and bared all in a gruelling production of A Little Life. Despite facing heartbreak and press intrusion, he’s ‘feeling Zen’ as he turns 40 – and about to step it up a gear with two epic new shows

Two days before we meet, James Norton turned 40. To celebrate, he threw a massive party at his home in north-east London – and he’s still feeling the effects. “I didn’t get any sleep,” he admits, “and yesterday was just a huge clear-up, so if I struggle for a word or an anecdote, please forgive me.”

To be fair, I’ve seen Norton in worse shape. The last time I encountered him in person he was naked, crawling around on all fours while being spat at. “Oh, yeah,” he smiles, realising I’m talking about his performance as Jude in the 2023 stage version of A Little Life. In that play, an adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s cult tragic novel, he remained on stage at the Savoy theatre in London for its whopping three-and-a-half-hour length, fully immersed in a character who suffers an immense, seemingly never-ending ordeal of sexual abuse and self-­harm. “That was a proper … ” He trails off and exhales. “That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

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Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh
Alan Bissett embodies both the expansive Big Yin and the detached author of Lanark in a thoughtful, entertaining search for their connection

There is a scene in Alasdair Gray’s landmark novel Lanark in which the author himself makes an appearance. He startles the eponymous hero, one of the book’s twin protagonists, by explaining he is a work of fiction.

It is an authorial intervention too brazen for Alan Bissett to ignore. In this charming and light-footed tribute to two towering cultural figures, the actor-playwright steps out of character to fill us in on what is going on.

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The prequel to unapologetically preposterous period drama Outlander is similarly wild. It’s a melodrama-packed show with an apalling script and questionable premise. But it’s enjoyable nonetheless

Scotland, 1714, and the air is heavy with script. Scowling laird Red Jacob MacKenzie (Peter Mullan) has snuffed it and the task of spelling out the significance of the tragedy has fallen, from no little height, on his eldest daughter.

“Clan MacKenzie is vulnerable,” wails Ellen MacKenzie (Harriet Slater). “No successor has been named. Someone else, not of our blood, could come in and take charge of the clan; of our home, of our money, of our reputation, of everything we have!”

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Take a deep breath and prepare yourself, because the "saga of the green dildos" is going to get really, really dumb.

Now take another one, just to steel yourself—this story involves crypto and memecoins, after all.

Ready? Okay.

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I unequivocally loved the first season of The Sandman , the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman's influential graphic novel series (of which I am longtime fan). I thought it captured the surreal, dream-like feel and tone of its source material, striking a perfect balance between the anthology approach of the graphic novels and grounding the narrative by focusing on the arc of its central figure: Morpheus, lord of the Dreaming.  It's been a long wait for the second and final season, but S2 retains all those elements to bring Dream's story to its inevitably tragic, yet satisfying, end.

(Spoilers below; some major S2 reveals after the second gallery. We'll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

When Netflix announced in January that The Sandman would end with S2, speculation abounded that this was due to sexual misconduct allegations against Gaiman (who has denied them). However, showrunner Allan Heinberg wrote on X that the plan had long been for there to be only two seasons because the show's creators felt they had only enough material to fill two seasons, and frankly, they were right. The first season covered the storylines of Preludes and Nocturnes and A Doll's House , with bonus episodes adapting "Dream of a Thousand Cats" and "Calliope" from Dream Country .

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Traverse, Edinburgh
In Dan Colley’s evocative play, a retired actor with dementia loops through scenes from the classic tragedy

A play remains a classic for as long as it continues to yield new meanings. Shakespeare’s King Lear, for example, remains open to interpretation. Its story of a retiring king bequeathing his lands to his daughters before descending into madness can, in the right hands, engage with many themes in the modern day including dementia.

It was not really necessary for writer-director Dan Colley to construct a whole new play about it, but that is what the Irish theatre-maker has done in Lost Lear. Venetia Bowe plays a retired actor, now resident in a care home, whose memory has faded in every respect apart from a word-perfect recall of Shakespeare’s play. To keep her relaxed, the staff take on the parts of Goneril, Regan, Cordelia and the Fool as she loops repeatedly through her favourite scenes of parental regret.

At the Traverse, Edinburgh , until 24 August

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The surprisingly successful Ryan Reynolds-fronted docuseries now has three other celebrity-meets-football-team pretenders, of varying quality

It was the crossover that no one in the entertainment industry, or the sports world, saw coming: the stars of Deadpool and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia aligning in February 2021 to purchase a beleaguered professional football club in the north of Wales. Four years on from that blockbuster deal, which looked all but doomed to end in disaster, Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac (legally changed from McElhenney, a tongue-twisting trip wire apparently ) have not only proven to be eminently noble stewards of 160-year-old Wrexham FC; in hindsight, they look even cannier for deciding to make a great show of their attempt to reverse the club’s fortunes.

Welcome to Wrexham – their Ted Lasso-like hourlong series documenting the club’s historic ascent from fifth division English football to, now, the Premier League doorstep – has been an unqualified hit with American audiences and critics, many of whom came into this premise as clueless as the new owners themselves. So it figures now that Wrexham has nabbed eight primetime Emmy nominations , Hollywood finds itself scrabbling to turn Reynolds and Mac’s offsides run into a proper reality TV subgenre, with three new Wrexham knockoffs hitting small screens starting from last week.

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Overdue recognition for the designer of Paris’s famous Métro entrances is an encouraging sign of the times

Walter Benjamin, the great German theorist of early 20th-century modernity, was famously unimpressed by art nouveau. Dismissive of the style’s dreamy aesthetic and flowery taste for designs inspired by the natural world, he described it as “the last sortie of an art besieged in its tower by technology”.

An artistic movement embodying a reaction against the mass production of the industrial age deserved a more sympathetic reception. Nevertheless, the 20th century appeared to agree with Benjamin’s analysis. By the end of the first world war, art nouveau’s decorative curlicues and flowing forms had fallen out of fashion as a more machine-inspired modernist aesthetic came into vogue. But that was then. More than a century on, as artificial intelligence offers a fresh tech challenge to humanity, a timely spot of revisionism appears to be taking place. Last month, in Paris, it emerged that a museum is finally to be dedicated to one of art nouveau’s most deserving and neglected exponents.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

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Replacing figurative statues of colonists and enslavers with more figurative statues is timid – let’s embrace new art forms instead, says Dr Wendy Osmond. Plus letters from Jean Calder, Mary Fitzpatrick , and Peter Corkill

Thinking about how we publicly celebrate or memorialise women’s achievements has changed – but not in pace with contemporary art practice. The highly figurative bronze statue is such a relic of a colonial patriarchy, and yet it is still often the go-to kind of representation in the public square. Replacing figurative statues of colonists and enslavers with more figurative statues is timid, and so reductive. We can do so much better than erecting supersized dolls on plinths outside post offices and shopping malls.

New work such as Khaleb Brooks’s shell sculpture The Wake, mentioned in your editorial ( The Guardian view on statues: new monuments reflect changing values and reinvigorate the public realm, 1 August ), don’t just commemorate a past, they declare a now agreed truth that was once obscured by the powerful.

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