Comedy spacecraft thefts, passive-aggressive in-laws and a planet being fracked to death – the revolution just got playful, comrades!

Comrades! Welcome back to the revolution. Andor is the Star Wars TV show with the sharpest political acumen: yes, like everything in the franchise, it’s about an underdog rebel movement fighting against a totalitarian empire in space, and it has plenty of thrilling battle sequences, but here there are no Jedi mind powers or cute green backwards-talking psychics. Under the hard-nosed stewardship of writer Tony Gilroy, Andor bins the magic and myth and replaces it with the reality of anti-fascist struggle, where the good guys are ready to risk their lives for freedom. It’s the Star Wars spin-off with the strongest claim to being a proper drama – but, in season two’s opening triple bill, it shows it can do sly, wry comedy too.

We’re a year on from where we left off, which is four years before the Death Star blows up at the end of the original movie – the point at which all the work done by our hero, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), pays off. We pick him up in an imperial military facility, where he’s posing as a test pilot for a spacecraft he intends to nick. There’s a classic Andor moment where Cassian meets the rebellion’s woman on the inside, a junior technician who has gathered her courage to make her contribution, and knows the rage of her superiors will be directed at her once Cassian has flown off. “If I die tonight, was it worth it?” she asks him, and gets a rousing speech in response, urgently whispered.

He put Carmen in a gorilla suit and had Das Rheingold’s Erda represented by an 82-year-old naked woman. What are the the director’s plans for his edge-of-the-seat Die Walküre?

From the Muppet Show to Kafka, Yiddish theatre to Vivaldi, pop music to Wagner – Barrie Kosky’s enthusiasms ricochet at a speed that leaves you dizzy as well as, in their rampant variety, a touch envious. This 58-year-old Australian theatre and opera director sees all art, all life, as one. His love of clowns, cabaret and musicals is as intense as his passion for theatre and grand opera. “Whether it touches the soul is all that matters,” he says, his loquacious personality expanding into a small side office at the Royal Opera House in London before a rehearsal. His new staging of Die Walküre, the second opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle, openson 1 May .

Kosky was born in Melbourne but has been based in Berlin for the past 20 years, where he was artistic director of the Komische Oper and still has an association there. He is funny, clever, outrageous but above all serious. His productions may shock, though that is never his intention. Dressing his Carmen up in a gorilla suit for a production that now has cult status in Frankfurt and Copenhagen – but did not catch light with audiences in London – was part of a studied aesthetic: the heroine living her brief life through a set of extreme roles. In his Das Rheingold , the first part of the Ring which opened in 2023, he caused upset in some quarters by having Erda – mother Earth – represented by a naked 82-year-old woman.

Ocean-inspired artworks created using kelp-based pigment will be sold to raise funds for conservation

Last year in early summer, Alex Glasgow could be seen hauling up a long string of orangey-black seaweed on to the barge of his water farm, located off the west coast of Scotland near Skye. Growing on the farm was what Glasgow described as “perhaps the quickest-growing biomass on the planet”: seaweed.

The weed from Glasgow’s farm, KelpCrofters, is used in everything from soil fertiliser to artisanal soaps to glass-making and is part of a burgeoning industry – not just in Scotland, but around the world.

Professor says text shows Hathaway lived with playwright in London, upending the established idea of an unhappy marriage

It has long been assumed that William Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway was less than happy. He moved to London to pursue his theatrical career, leaving her in Stratford-upon-Avon and stipulating in his will that she would receive his “second best bed”, although still a valued item.

Now a leading Shakespeare expert has analysed a fragment of a 17th-century letter that appears to cast dramatic new light on their relationship, overturning the idea that the couple never lived together in London.

Last Friday, in an op-ed piece on the Trump administration's war on American universities , we called for academia to 1) band together and 2) resist coercive control over hiring and teaching, though we noted that the 3) "temperamental caution of university administrators" means that they might "have trouble finding a clear voice to speak with when they come under thundering public attacks from a government they are more used to thinking of as a funding source."

It only took billions of dollars in vindictive cuts to make it happen, but higher education has finally 1) banded together to 2) resist coercive control over its core functions. More than 230 leaders, mostly college and university presidents, have so far signed an American Association of Colleges and Universities statement that makes a thundering call gentle bleat for total resistance "constructive engagement" with the people currently trying to cripple, shutter, and/or dominate them. Clearly, 3) temperamental caution remains the watchword. Still, progress! (Even Columbia University, which has already capitulated to Trump administration pressure, signed on.)

The statement largely consists of painful pablum about how universities "provide human resources to meet the fast-changing demands of our dynamic workforce," etc, etc. As a public service, I will save you some time (and nausea) by excerpting the bits that matter:

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The comic’s love for his home town leads him on this charming and wacky odyssey to find ‘his people’ across the pond. Brummies of the world unite!

Joe Lycett is on a mission to visit every one of the 17 Birminghams in the US and the one in Canada too. Why? Because he is a native of the UK’s own Birmingham, and he wants to see if there is any shared identifiable vibe and to foster a sense of togetherness among the scattered Brummies. Also, as he says, he has a pressing need to make a travelogue for Sky “and if anyone can do it, it’s Frank Sk– … it’s me”. There is also a Birmingham on the moon (a remnant of an impact crater – save your jokes, please, that’s Joe’s department) and one in Belgium. But “we don’t have a lunar budget and I’m not going to Belgium,” says Lycett, so off he sets round the US in a tour bus suitably decked out in Cat Deeley and Alison Hammond scatter cushions. They both hail from Birmingham in the UK. This is not difficult, people. Do try to keep up.

Joe has a sheaf of “friendship agreements” for the Birmingham mayors to sign – including a promise to stand together in Nato’s stead should it fall – a pen once used by the Queen Mother with which to do so, a collection of commemorative plaques and some Birmingham-centred presents to give to the people he meets along the way. There is Cadbury’s chocolate, of course, originally manufactured by one of the Quaker families whose histories are centred round the city; Bird’s custard (“sugar and asbestos”) invented by Brummie chemist Alfred Bird in 1837; HP Sauce (born of Nottingham but made famous under the aegis of the Midland Vinegar Company); and some of the 723 novels by “the David Walliams of her day”, Dame Barbara Cartland, originally of Edgbaston. Not all of these facts are in the programme, by the way. Joe’s enthusiastic spirit and evident love for his home town inspired me to go digging. He has that effect on you. And indeed on his driver, the North Carolinian Randy who, once he has figured out what little there is to figure out – and, indeed, that there is that little to figure out – relaxes and gets into the swing of things and functions as the perfect foil for his passenger.

After two actors died in Owerri, Imo State, AGN head Emeka Rollas drew comparisons to events last year, when popular Nollywood actor Junior Pope drowned

The president of the Actors Guild of Nigeria has called for mass prayers and increased unionisation after the death of two actors in Owerri, the capital city of Imo State.

Posting on Instagram, Emeka Rollas advocated spiritual intervention and better workplace regulation to try to prevent future tragedies after the two men, who have not yet been named, died on Friday.

Billionaires, starring Steve Carell and Ramy Youssef, meet amid an international crisis in HBO’s of-the-moment satire

A summit of influential male billionaires is under way in the first teaser trailer for Mountainhead.

HBO unveiled the extended look at the first feature from the Succession creator Jesse Armstrong on Tuesday, which stars Steve Carell, Cory Michael Smith, Ramy Youssef and Jason Schwartzman as a group of billionaire friends who meet at an alpine retreat during an international crisis.

He slept in cars, found notoriety on social media and could be pop’s next superstar. The singer of Ordinary, the longest-running No 1 of the year, talks about his journey to breakout success

At 18, Alex Warren was homeless, sneaking into the gym of a gated community in his home town of Carlsbad, California, to shower for job interviews and film TikTok videos of himself singing in the bathroom. Six years later he is one of pop’s next potential superstars. His bombastic ballad Ordinary has been No 1 in the UK charts for five weeks, the longest-running chart leader this year, and entered the US Top 10 last week. As soon as he heard the finished version, he was “freaking out – my wife and I listened to it on repeat for our entire drive home, for 45 minutes.”

Ordinary may be Warren’s breakout hit but he’s been famous for a long time. He gained notoriety on social media in his teens by making hugely popular videos with titles such as “BROTHER WAKES UP IN MIDDLE OF LAKE PRANK!” In 2019 he co-founded the Hype House, a shared house of content creators (including the D’Amelio sisters and Addison Rae) known for Covid-era internet videos, as well as at least one controversial facemask-free influencer party and, eventually, a $300,000 (£226,000) lawsuit – which Warren wasn’t named in – which alleged property damage and unpaid rent.