Director Kevin O’Hare announces staging of NYCB choreographer Peck’s 2014 piece, as well as new works by Akram Khan and Cathy Marston

A ballet by one of New York’s hottest choreographers, set to the music of Sufjan Stevens, and Akram Khan’s first work for the Royal Opera House stage are two highlights of the Royal Ballet’s 2025-26 season, announced on Wednesday. They will be seen alongside the first commission for a UK company from choreographic duo Paul Lightfoot and Sol León, premieres from Wayne McGregor and Cathy Marston and a new ballet based on Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, with live music by John Grant.

“It’s about working with new voices, looking for what we haven’t experienced and what’s important to see,” said artistic director Kevin O’Hare about what will be his 14th season in charge of the company.

Known for his roles in Batman Forever, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Tombstone, the prolific actor’s cause of death was pneumonia

Val Kilmer, the actor best known for his roles in Top Gun, Batman Forever and The Doors, has died at the age of 65.

His daughter Mercedes told the New York Times that the cause of death was pneumonia. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and later recovered, after treatment with chemotherapy and trachea surgery that had reduced his vocal capability.

The US-Canadian dual citizen speculates he may be ‘barred or put in jail to sleep on a cement floor’ after his European tour, after years of speaking against Trump

Neil Young has shared his concerns of being barred from the US after his European tour later this year, thanks to his outspoken critiques of Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, on his website Neil Young Archives , the 79-year-old musician – who has dual Canadian-American citizenship – wrote of his fears after the recent spate of people being detained and deported upon entering the US. These incidents have been credited to vague or unspecified visa issues, but have frequently affected individuals who have criticised the Trump administration either publicly or in messages on their phone read by immigration officers.

It’s impossible to dislike Joe Swash. But his utterly chaotic approach to looking after five kids turns this reality show into a nightmarishly stressful watch

Oh man. I really thought this was going to be the one. I thought Stacey & Joe, the new reality show starring Stacey Solomon and Joe Swash and their 800 children (five) would let me escape and forget the troubles of the world. Because I like Joe Swash (for it is impossible to dislike Joe Swash. I mean, disliking Joe Swash is not a thing. You won’t. You can’t.) and I absolutely love Stacey Solomon. Her wit, kindness, radiant energy and endless charisma, plus her ability to bring order out of chaos in Sort Your Life Out heals something deep in my soul.

So I was greatly looking forward to seeing them all live in their gorgeous, fully storage-solutioned house in Essex, a peek into a life running – unlike mine – along well-ordered lines, with a place for everything and everything in its place.

Irish publisher receives award for small presses for Gaëlle Bélem’s There’s a Monster Behind the Door

Irish publisher Bullaun Press has won the Republic of Consciousness prize for small presses with the book There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert.

There’s a Monster Behind the Door is a “rollicking, sardonic picaresque”, said judge Houman Barekat. “The novel has important things to say about colonialism and society, but it’s also tremendous fun – darkly funny, acerbic, energetic.”

After Mark O’Sullivan’s My Sexual Abuse: The Sitcom helped him move past his childhood trauma, he’s launched a tearful, joyful new show – about creativity’s power to rebuild lives

Mark O’Sullivan is still buzzing from winning a Royal Television Society (RTS) award for his documentary, My Sexual Abuse: The Sitcom . “I’m grinning like a mid-party Michael Gove,” he chuckles. “It’s lovely for it to be recognised as an important and powerful piece. I just got a message from someone I knew years ago to say they’d seen the news about the award, watched the show and finally felt able to say they were also abused. That moved me to tears. Again!”

Comedian and writer O’Sullivan – co-star of cult Channel 4 sitcom Lee & Dean and creator of ITV teen drama Tell Me Everything – is now launching the weekly podcast Making Lemonade. It explores the healing power of creating something positive out of negative experiences, after his own life was radically transformed by his deeply personal film, confronting the abuse he suffered as a child. When he was 12, O’Sullivan began to be sexually assaulted by a member of his extended family. He reported it to the police when he was in his 30s. The culprit was convicted, imprisoned and has since died. Last May’s Channel 4 documentary followed O’Sullivan’s attempt to make mirth from what he endured, by creating an 18-minute TV comedy about his experiences, which was available online on Channel 4. It made for audacious TV, by turns heartbreaking and darkly hilarious.

Authors and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

When HHhH by Laurent Binet came out in 2012, I was scared away by the impenetrable title. I still don’t like the title much because it gives no sense that this book is going to be so welcoming, playful and immersive. HHhH tells the true story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich – the high-ranking Nazi officer, “the butcher of Prague” – but it also describes Binet’s research on the subject, an obsession which verges on mania. The book makes a convincing case that Heydrich’s botched assassination was the single most significant event of the 20th century. (It also makes a convincing case that Binet is so deep into the subject matter that his opinion should not be entirely trusted.)

Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst has just won the Nero book of the year prize so it really does not need my recommendation. Nevertheless, I recommend it! It jolts you awake from the very first page, telling a true and uniquely weird love story about a British couple whose boat is sunk by whale-strike while they are sailing around the world. Elmhirst finds moments of transcendence even as Maurice and Maralyn are beginning to starve and decompose, physically and mentally, while adrift in a leaky dinghy in the middle of the Pacific.

The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod is my favourite poetry anthology. The poems are presented in reverse chronological order so that the book starts with recent work from Anne Carson and Patricia Lockwood then steadily dives backwards through time: Eileen Myles to Allen Ginsberg to Gertrude Stein before finally ending in 1842 with Aloysius Bertrand writing beautiful prose poems before the term even existed. Every time I come back to this book I find new gems.

As she reveals her tougher side in a Liverpool gangland drama, and fearfully prepares to tread the boards in New York, the actor talks about body image, big hair and the blind faith that has always driven her

Saoirse-Monica Jackson has done some dramas where everyone was quite sober and all her jokes fell flat. But This City Is Ours was different, not least because of the number of Scousers on set, the Derry Girls star explains. “It wasn’t, like, so serious,” she says. “We had craic off-camera.” However, while it was fun to make the buzzy new BBC crime drama (the female cast members named themselves the Muffia) the end result isn’t fun – although it is gripping. Featuring betrayals, love and a lot of violence, the show stars Sean Bean as a Liverpool drugs boss, while Jackson plays Cheryl Crawford, the wife of one of his underlings.

Cheryl is on the periphery, though her voice-of-experience warnings ring loud. “There’s nothing good about our men,” she tells Diana, the partner of a senior gang member. Jackson has lived in Liverpool for a couple of years now – which helped with the accent – and it was a treat to be back in her own bed at the end of a day’s filming. A lot of hair extensions helped with the look. “It was so heavy, so hot, to be under it every day,” she says with a laugh. “Our amazing hair and makeup designer, Adele Firth, really wanted to get the picture across of some girls in Liverpool – they take such pride in themselves. Every occasion is an occasion to really get dolled up.” Jackson found herself intrigued by Cheryl. “I think if, like her, you grow up around these types of people, or they’re adjacent to your family, that can blur the danger for you.”

Holy Cow is a film about underdogs and a bid to make a prize-winning cheese, set against a rural backdrop of sozzled fetes and demolition derbies. Director Louise Courvoisier talks about shooting where ‘people are kind of wild’

Louise Courvoisier grew up the daughter of farmers in France’s eastern Jura region and, by the time she was 15, was desperate to leave this backwater. So she chose a boarding school 100km away in Besançon that happened to offer a cinema course. “I really needed to get out, for sure,” says the director, now 31. “But after my studies I needed to come back, and I had a new point of view. Leaving let me look at things differently and see what others don’t see. And I think that, without getting that distance on the region, I couldn’t have made this film.”

The film in question is Holy Cow, a rough-edged, sharp-tongued but good-hearted tale about one teenager’s quest to make a prize-winning wheel of comté cheese, a Jura speciality. The story appears to be comparable to the likes of The Full Monty or Brassed Off – British underdog comedies that Courvoisier admires for their social conscience.