Exhibition at Holburne Museum features 32 experimental land and seascapes that chart artist’s evolution

• Why JMW Turner is still Britain’s best artist, 250 years on

It is, says the curator Ian Warrell, a little like peering over JMW Turner’s shoulder as he puzzles out how to create the sweeping land and seascapes that made him one of the greatest ever.

An exhibition of the artist’s rarely seen watercolours is opening in Bath, which includes scenes of the English West Country that he created as a teenager to a series of sketched seascapes when he was a much older man gazing out at storms off the Kent coast.

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Austrian-Filipino countertenor praised for melding techno with country’s rich operatic tradition in song Wasted Love

Austrians were on Sunday celebrating JJ, an Austrian-Filipino countertenor lauded for “singing Austria into the spotlight” after bringing home the country’s first Eurovision song contest victory in 11 years with a song that gives a nod to both the country’s rich operatic heritage and modern music.

JJ, 24, hit all the right notes with Wasted Love, an operatic ballad about unrequited love that mutates into a techno club anthem. The 69th edition of the contest was hosted in Basel, Switzerland.

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OVO Hydro, Glasgow
Bedazzled and surrounded by inflatable body parts, the US band sound as thrillingly absurd on this reunion tour as when they brightened up the charts the first time around

Maximalism is too timid a word: the Scissor Sisters’ first tour in a decade rolls in like an alien carnival. A gorilla-suited master of ceremonies pulls a curtain to reveal the New York band’s logo standing statuesque: scissors split wide open, blades curving into shapely legs. Amid a deserted jeep, retro payphone and broken highway, the metaphor is clear: the Sisters are a crash-landed UFO shaking up dusty Americana.

More than twenty years after their self-titled debut album rocketed them from New York’s queer cabarets to household-name status in the UK, the band tumble from the shadows – effervescent frontman Jake Shears in bedazzled denim, cool-headed guitarist Del Marquis, and PVC-clad multi-instrumentalist Babydaddy – and the bawdy, stabbing synths of early single Laura pull a sold-out crowd to their feet.

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Pleasance theatre, London
Jamie Sykes’ queasily entertaining play dramatises the contemptible views found in ‘incel’ forums – but also elicits sympathy for its characters, whose loathing is directed inwards as well as out

Three men are gathered in an online forum to speak of women as cunts, bitches and “Beckys”. These are “incels”, who boast a coded vocabulary of hate and valorise male celibacy. That is, until a fourth man among them has sex. The opening scene is the morning after and the woman he spent the night with stands hovering behind his laptop.

Cuckboy (Fiachra Corkery) and fellow incels Ghost (GoblinsGoblinsGoblins) Crusher (Jackson Ryan) and Einstain (Jimmy Kavanagh) are volubly and virulently anti-women. “Feminists have destroyed male and female courtship,” says one. But gradually they are shown to be desperate for intimacy, once the itch has been scratched by Cuckboy’s hookup with Margaret (Justine Stafford).

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Cannes film festival
British-Nigerian film-maker Akinola Davies Jr makes a strong directorial debut with this deft and intriguing tale of an absent father briefly reunited with his two young sons

Once upon a time in Lagos might be an alternative title for this fervent and vividly intense child’s-eye-view movie from first-time film-maker Akinola Davies Jr. It’s 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 – and how they come to love and understand him just at the moment when they come to see his flaws and his weaknesses.

It is 1993 in Nigeria, a tense time with the country on the edge of disorder due to the imminent presidential election, the first since a military takeover 10 years previously. In a remote village far from Lagos, two young boys (played by bright-spark newcomers Godwin Chimerie Egbo and Chibiuke Marvellous Egbo) are awed at the sudden reappearance of their father, Fola, played by Sope Dirisu, who makes no explanation or apology for having been away for so long on business in Lagos, or for appearing now unannounced. He is a handsome, charismatic, commanding man to whom they make the instant obedient responses “Yes, daddy” and “No, daddy”.

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The Big Picture, the story of the venue’s renaissance as a grassroots community space, will premiere this month

It was the cinema screen that – despite being extremely big – a city forgot.

Now the feelgood tale of how Bristol’s Imax screen was revived by a ragtag bunch of cinephiles with a DIY punk ethos is being told in a documentary that will, appropriately, get its premiere on the vast screen this month.

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Finborough theatre, London
A woman with cerebral palsy is interrogated in a hostile future environment in Athena Stevens’ powerful work about society’s unattainable expectations

Activist and playwright Athena Stevens’ latest play, in which she also stars, is an eerie and powerful work. Like much of her writing, Diagnosis explores the double sense of reality experienced by many people living with a disability – the gulf between the life they might lead and the one society expects and imposes on them. This dual sense of reality is taken to extremes during one pulsating night in a police station. After seeing strange messages light up above people’s heads, a woman who uses a wheelchair (Stevens) grows convinced a deadly flood is set to engulf central London. But will anyone listen?

The play is set some time in the future, when a series of supposed protections have been put in place for society’s most vulnerable citizens but have only made things worse. It’s a time when an AI computer program will read you your rights, yet when recited in a robotic voice, these rights only feel all the more unattainable. It’s a time when a witness statement will be filmed for extra security, but the video keeps warping so that the woman in question, rather than being faithfully recorded, is endlessly distorted and obscured.

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Glyndebourne, East Sussex
Jetske Mijnssen’s production of Wagner’s opera – the festival’s first – bypasses much of its mysticism and magic, but it is moving and musically very special

Even before Monty Python clip-clopped two coconuts together , it was never easy to put Wagner’s Parsifal , with its heady combination of Catholic religiosity and Arthurian legend, on stage. Glyndebourne’s first ever production of the opera, staged by Jetske Mijnssen, takes a dour approach, bypassing almost all the religious mysticism, and laces the rest of the story firmly into the stays of a Chekhovian family relationship drama.

Ben Baur’s sombre sets and Gideon Davey’s buttoned-up costumes place us in a Catholic community around the time of the opera’s premiere, 1882. A quote from the Cain and Abel story, projected during the orchestral prelude, sets the tone. Mijnssen makes Amfortas and Klingsor into long-lost brothers, separated during a previously idyllic childhood when a fit of teenage jealousy over Kundry’s affections and his brother’s regard made Klingsor lash out with a whittling knife. We see this being acted out by the characters’ younger selves while Gurnemanz tells us the backstory in his mammoth Act 1 narration – a velvet-toned tour de force from the bass John Relyea .

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