As the star teams up with director Michael Grandage for his first West End part in 17 years, the pair discuss the thrill of putting on a new play, how it updates Ibsen for our times – and a Trainspotting-esque toilet encounter in Russia

In September last year, it was announced that Ewan McGregor, the 54-year-old Scottish actor, had been honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The news item happened to pop up on the feed of Michael Grandage, the theatre director who worked with McGregor in the mid-2000s on two productions, Guys and Dolls and Othello , both under the Donmar Warehouse umbrella. “I thought, ‘Oh God, how brilliant is that!’” exclaims Grandage, who is 62 and since 2012 has been the artistic director of the Michael Grandage Company . “We hadn’t been in touch for a long time and I just thought that I’d send him a text, because it’s a big well done. It’s not something that a lot of people get, actually. I was looking up who hasn’t got one…”

Grandage and McGregor, who are sitting side by side in a rehearsal space in central London, steal a glance at each other and erupt, simultaneously, in loud howls.

I get why wedding DJs are increasingly discerning. Our job is to spread joy on the dancefloor – not upset and division

I have DJed at some impressively esoteric weddings in my time. I started playing clubs in 1999, but in the mid-2000s I started advertising myself as a wedding DJ on the era-defining digital noticeboard Gumtree. One heroic couple only wanted the music of abrasive Manchester geniuses the Fall for the entirety of their nuptials. Another sweet couple wanted to evoke the night they met at 5am at the London gay club Fire – so hired me to bang out punishing hard house from 5pm in a hotel function room.

From experience, people who hire wedding DJs are usually fairly clear about what they like. They may provide a short list of songs they love, usually across a few genres, and trust a DJ to fill in the gaps. It’s rarer that people are clear what they explicitly don’t like.

Almeida, London; Theatre Royal, Bath
A bold revival of Ionesco’s play about the dangers of conformity rings all too true. And Hitchcock’s murderously droll back catalogue is turned into a stylish, suspense-free song and dance

Who would have thought that Rhinoceros , written in the 1950s, would prove to be a stage-shaker today? Sometimes taken as a satire on the rise of the Nazis or the lack of resistance to East European authoritarianism, but surely more accurately described as a general attack on unreflecting conformism, Eugène Ionesco’s play is a hard thing to pull off. At least in Britain, where the expectation of naturalism runs deep. After all, the plot turns on the entire human population of a European village – bar one – turning into rhinoceroses.

There are touches of Kafka, without the black force. There are Beckettian gleams of despair without Beckett’s lyrical intensity – or brevity. Insisting on the one theme without ever quite making an argument, Rhinoceros can easily become both heavy-footed and elusive: a pachyderm peeping flirtatiously from behind a fan.

Arklow’s sleek new wastewater treatment plant is a collaborative triumph between engineers, contractors and architects Clancy Moore. And it’s amazingly unsmelly…

“Who’d want to live next to a sewage treatment plant?” asks the architect Andrew Clancy, who with his business partner Colm Moore runs the Dublin-based practice Clancy Moore . Who indeed, yet they have had to find a way to overcome precisely this difficulty. In the coastal town of Arklow, 40 miles south of the Irish capital, they have designed a wastewater facility that seeks to act as a landmark for the town, an agent of its renewal and growth, and a good neighbour to the homes and shops and places of work that it is hoped will be built alongside. The plant consists of two calm oblongs of mysterious scale, their long horizontals echoing the line where the sea meets the sky, plus a third more domestic structure alongside, all in a marine blue-green colour you could call pale teal.

The project is in illustrious company. The tradition of making dirty functional structures into objects of pride and beauty gave the world such things as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the noble, deco-ish ventilation towers of the Mersey Tunnel in Liverpool and the Wirral. When Joseph Bazalgette installed London’s sewage system in the 1860s and 70s, he created parks and gardens and well-appointed public spaces on the river embankments that contain giant sewers, and ornate structures such as the neo-Byzantine pumping station in Abbey Mills, east London. The Arklow project, argues Clancy, is an opportunity to make visible the billions that are usually spent unseen on the public good of clean water.

Royal Opera House, London
An immensely satisfying tribute to the choreographer is full of invention, emotion and dazzling precision

George Balanchine’s Serenade has the most beautiful opening in ballet. Seventeen women standing like statues, bathed in cool blue light, raise one hand in the air, palms outwards, as the music of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings surges around them. It has the most elegiac closing moment too, as a single standing ballerina is lifted aloft by four men, curved arms flung behind her, arching into the unknown.

The rest of the piece, made in 1934 for students of the Russian-born choreographer’s nascent school in the US, is just about perfect. It incorporates mundane daily events – a student running in late, a stumble, a woman unpinning her hair – and turns them into mysterious art. In its ceaseless, inventive movement it makes space visible, as the dancers seem to mould the air they move through.

Balanchine: Three Signature Works is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 8 April

Royal Opera’s new associate director on her obsession with Peter Grimes, winning over tech-sceptics and the joy of school matinee shows

Born in London, where she still lives, to an artist mother and musician father, Netia Jones is the new associate director of the Royal Opera. Known for using immersive installations, film and VR, her operas include Alice in Wonderland , Least Like the Other with Brian Irvine, which won the Ivor Novello best opera award, and Peter Grimes , which finished its run last week at the Gothenburg Opera House. Next year she will curate the Royal Ballet and Opera’s first opera and technology festival, RBO/Shift.

The first opera you ever saw, when you were 10, was Peter Grimes . How has it been to revisit the tragic fisherman ’s tale?
Relentless! It’s such a brilliant story but so bleak; it gets under your skin. Doing it in Gothenburg, which was cold and very wet, was perfect, although not the best thing for your mental health.

Michelle Williams shines as a woman with terminal cancer hitting Tinder; dirt is dished in a demise-of-Twitter doc; Helen Mirren unleashes her Irish accent on London’s criminal underworld. Plus, the Australian drama that gets autism right

Dying for Sex ( Disney+ )
Twitter: Breaking the Bird (BBC Two) | iPlayer
MobLand ( Paramount+ )
Austin (BBC One) | iPlayer

I can’t quite put my finger on the tone of new Disney+ US dramedy Dying for Sex . There’s sex and death, of course. The series is based on the real-life story of fortysomething Molly Kochan, who, on receiving an incurable breast cancer diagnosis, left her husband and embarked on a kinky sex quest until her death in 2019 (Kochan discussed her experiences with her friend Nikki Boyer, which were turned into a Wondery podcast). Finally it struck me: sweetness. While sex and death are amply represented, from giant vibrators to near-death hallucinations, it’s the sweetness that stays with you, burning through the melancholy and rocket-fuelling the humour.

Tate Britain, London
From digital avatars in limbo or distress to a poignant reliving of his father’s last days, the artist seeks to ‘reimagine life’s chaos’ in this major retrospective of his prolific career to date

A mesmerising film by the British artist Ed Atkins (b.1982) shows a pianist performing – with excruciating difficulty – what seem to be arbitrary chords in some mysterious sequence. Straining and sighing, pausing and deliberating, he appears to be guessing the notes. Yet every strike is right, or so the visible relief running through his face and body appears to confirm. Except that the pianist is not real, and nor are his emotions.

The man is a digital avatar of Atkins himself, his performance translated by motion capture into this hyperreal model. The excessively perfect rendering of every imperfection, from stubble to wen, gives it away. But so do the movements of eyes and head, which have a trace of the super-glide smoothness of CGI – expertly programmed and yet still unable to capture the vagaries of human vitality.

An impelling US road-trip for our times; an enlightening cultural history of female friendships; and a bond forged over butterflies for a son and his dying father

Ariel Courage
Chatto & Windus , £16.99, pp304

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