King’s Head theatre, London
A dysfunctional brood gather at a wedding-cum-funeral in actor-writer Rosie Day’s dark comedy

A wedding is repurposed into a funeral in writer-actor Rosie Day’s dark comedy. It might be a twisted spin on Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral except the focus is not on a happy family of friends but on the dysfunctional Henderson brood.

Eric Henderson, a less than perfect father, dies just before he can tie the knot with his third wife, leaving his children, his ex and the arriving guests in a room filled with bows and balloons.

At King’s Head theatre, London , until 27 April

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Officers attended theatre in Southend after reports of altercation at end of Paul Chowdhry’s show

Police were called to a comedy show in Essex after a fight broke out in the audience, which reportedly led to a man being assaulted.

Inquiries are ongoing after the altercation at the end of standup comic Paul Chowdhry’s performance of his Englandia tour at the Cliffs Pavilion in Westcliff-on-Sea, Southend.

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Government plan over copyright-protected work would put industries in ‘dangerous position’, Alex Mahon tells MPs

The chief executive of Channel 4 said that artificial intelligence companies are “scraping the value” out of the UK’s £125bn creative industries, and urged the government to take action.

Alex Mahon told MPs that if the government pursues its proposed plan to give AI companies access to creative works unless the copyright holder opts out, it would put the UK creative industries in a “dangerous position”.

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So Sam Mendes has cast his Beatles tetralogy, but none are from Merseyside. Don’t worry, I’ve just invented the Beatles Cinematic Universe

Sam Mendes has announced the cast for his colossal four-film Beatles extravaganza: Harris Dickinson as John, Paul Mescal as Paul, Barry Keoghan as Ringo and Joseph Quinn as George – and to tumultuous acclaim he brought his Fab Four on stage at the CinemaCon event in Las Vegas, a now well-established affair in the film world, incidentally, satirised in a forthcoming episode of Seth Rogen’s TV comedy The Studio .

I’m sorry to say, however, that Sam has almost entirely ignored the casting suggestions that I made in February last year. For what this is worth, I went with Leo Woodall as Paul, Finn Wolfhard as George, Harry Melling as Ringo and Barry Keoghan as John (though Barry got Ringo in the end). But I like to think that Sam Mendes and his producer Pippa Harris were thinking on more or less the same lines as me. Interestingly, there are no American actors doing Brit accents – just the kind of well-trained British or Irish actors who can fabricate perfect American accents for American roles elsewhere.

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It was a time of high-octane thrills as cavorting couples put themselves through brutal competitions in the hope of winning the equivalent of a year’s salary. Now sculptor Nicole Wermers has brought the dancefloor craze back to life

Marathon Dance Relief, the latest intriguing work by Nicole Wermers, focuses on the Depression-era craze for endurance dancing competitions, mainly in the US in the 1920s and 30s, where cavorting couples put themselves through brutal, sometimes week-long contests in the hope of winning prizes equivalent to a year’s salary, if they could be the last ones standing. On show at St Carthage Hall in Lismore, Waterford, Ireland, the work is a departure from Wermers’ usual interest in the art of “lounging around”. In contrast to her normal languid figures, the subject here is the body when exhausted or taking strenuous exertion.

Cruder class dynamics – the contestants were almost by definition down-at-heel and watched by more affluent audiences – hovered in the background of such spectacles. Although they gathered swift momentum as a low-cost form of high-octane, mass entertainment, their exploitations took a toll on their participants and could, in rare cases, lead to injury and death. Dovetailing with the era’s boom in photography and the rise of the American picture magazine, many black and white snapshots attesting to these merciless dancefloors remain in circulation as a sombre archive, showing woozy couples slumped and clutching at each other, holding one another up in the effort to stay in the game and not collapse.

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A chubby, rhubarb and custard-coloured tower bedecked with anteaters and moles make a fun neighbour to the city’s dreaming spires. It’s left some locals lost for words

A carved stone pangolin clings to the top of the tower, its scaly tail curled into the crevice of a cornice, as if holding on for dear life. It crowns an arresting arrival to Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, the anteater taking its place on this skyline of slender steeples and gurning gargoyles, up there at the summit of the newest – and strangest – spire of them all.

“I was thinking, ‘How do you mark Covid in a building?’” says David Kohn, architect of this curious addition to the campus of New College. “We were developing the designs in the middle of the pandemic, when pangolins had been in the limelight for all the wrong reasons.”

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Set in the bucolically bland world of the toy franchise, the adventures of Freya the rabbit stay well away from any kind of jeopardy

In the very first scene of this film, a woman (well, a female bunny rabbit), broom in hand, sings happily as she sweeps the kitchen floor. Welcome to the wholesome 1950s nostalgia of the Sylvanian Families brand. And while other adaptations of toy franchises whack the audience over the head with irony, skateboards and smart alec gags, this film based on the fuzzy woodland creatures stays firmly on-message. It’s very sweet, slightly dull, and such a throwback that if you stumbled across it on a streaming platform you’d be forgiven for thinking it was made in the 1970s.

It’s set in the bucolically blissful land of Sylvania (though one character pronounces it “Syl-van-ia” so perhaps we’ve all been saying it wrong for years), where bunny Freya is on a mission. It’s her mum’s birthday and Freya wants to give her the perfect present. Each of the film’s chapters takes Freya on a little adventure: first she gets carried off in an autumnal gust while picking flowers to decorate a hat, then she attempts to make her mum a trumpet. The basic animation struggles to get across the highs and low of Freya’s odyssey – it’s such a faithful adaptation the characters look identical to the figures with black bead eyes, and blank faces.

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Wardrobe theatre, Bristol
Daisy Kennedy and Mia Macleod tussle with capitalism, class cliches and the cost of living in this smart two-hander

Meet Daisy and Mia. One is working class, the other middle class. One is proud of that, the other embarrassed. Between them they like pints, artisan coffee, ballet and meal deals. A folk song about labour will be performed by one while the other will do a French-inspired mime. Which of them feels skint and which is considered carefree?

If you’ve begun making assumptions then that’s what Scraps is here to question. Daisy Kennedy and Mia Macleod’s two-hander is a merry-go-round of sketches tussling with class cliches and the cost of living crisis. It’s also about the cost of making a play about these complex issues. The title sums up the ragtag nature of its clowning, dance breaks and DIY multimedia. But it also reflects the fights that break out between the pair and suggests the measly leftovers their generation have been handed by the capitalist machine. Home ownership, job security and what you can buy with an hour’s work at minimum wage are all on the agenda here.

At Wardrobe theatre, Bristol , until 2 April

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The British-Guyanese singer topped the reggae chart with 1978’s Walk Away, but despite work with Robert Plant and others, she’s rarely returned to the studio. This interview might change that…

In December 1978, Marie Pierre was at No 1 in the UK reggae chart with the lovers rock classic Walk Away, a beautiful tearstained lament on a troubled relationship. Her 1979 debut album Love Affair, powered by another enduring scene song in Choose Me, remained one of Trojan’s best-selling albums well into the 1980s; Pierre, with her crystalline multi-octave voice, seemed destined to follow her contemporary, Silly Games singer Janet Kay, into mainstream pop-reggae success.

But in the 46 years since, Pierre has never released another album. A career that promised so much has – despite TV work and successful backing singing gigs with Robert Plant, Donna Summer and Chaka Khan – been one of frustration and thwarted ambition. Misfortune, mistrust and mistreatment, personal and professional, have sidelined her. “I feel as though I’ve been in chains,” she says on a video call. “I’ve been anchored for no good reason.”

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