Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York

The record-breaking take on the Shakespearean tragedy might already be a smash, but it’s disappointingly muddled

With the smell of doom and regression in the air, perhaps it’s not surprising that the hottest ticket on Broadway this season is for a 400-year-old tragedy. There’s been much ado about the box office for Othello, a new rendition of Shakespeare’s classic given movie-star wattage. The show at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, grossed $2.8m during one week of previews – the most of any non-musical during a single week on Broadway ever, in part because some orchestra tickets are going for a whopping $921.

The sticker shock is not just an Othello problem – tickets for two other celeb-driven plays on Broadway – Glengarry Glen Ross, and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, aren’t averaging much less , and it’s already been a lucrative season for celeb-studded Shakespeare as Romeo + Juliet , starring screen-famous Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, recouped its $7m capitalization before closing last month. But before it even officially opened, Othello became emblematic of Broadway’s trend toward luxury experience and status symbol over popular entertainment, billing Hollywood names in a hyper-competitive, exclusionary market. (Full disclosure: the Guardian, denied tickets for review, paid $400 for a middle orchestra seat.)

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The fantastic performances don’t do enough to lift this scouse Sopranos. There’s an essential emptiness at the core of this generic show

“I sort of hope they all die,” is never the reaction a television drama wishes to evoke. But in relation to the drug-running family the Phelans and their colleagues and connections that make up This City Is Ours, that just might be your response.

Sean Bean plays cocaine-smuggling patriarch Ronnie Phelan, who has enjoyed a long career dominating Liverpool’s drug trade. He is now considering retirement and, it seems, is planning to hand over the reins to his right-hand man of 20 years, Michael (James Nelson-Joyce, recently brilliant as Treacle Goodson in A Thousand Blows). Michael is pretty pleased. It almost makes up for his discovery that he has a low sperm count and that he and Diana (Hannah Onslow), the love of his life, will need to use IVF to start a family. If that all seems a jarring juxtaposition, it is. Scenes of violence are spliced with Michael’s sentimental moonings over pictures of his embryonic children, demanding that we see the irony and feel the humanity of a thirtysomething who is only now beginning to see what life may be really all about and to start groping towards some kind of escape and betterment for the next generation.

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Children’s magazine TV show, which first aired in 1958, will now be pre-recorded due to changing viewer habits

Blue Peter has recorded its final live episode as the show moves to a pre-recorded format, the BBC said.

Airing weekly on Fridays, the longest-running children’s show in the world began on 16 October 1958 with its intrepid presenters and characterful pets.

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Actor, 76, denies claims made by assistant director and set designer who worked with him on Les Volets Verts

Gérard Depardieu will become the most high-profile French person to stand trial on #MeToo abuse allegations when he appears in a Paris court on Monday.

The actor, a titan of French cinema with more than 200 films and television series to his name, is accused of sexually assaulting two women during a film shoot in 2021.

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Turner prize nominee Delaine Le Bas says entrenched racist attitudes to community persist in UK and Europe

Roma, Gypsies and Travellers have not made as much progress as other minority groups in the UK because of deeply entrenched racist attitudes towards them, the Turner prize-nominated artist Delaine Le Bas has said.

Le Bas, who has spent her career exploring themes connected to her Romani Traveller heritage , said that Traveller communities have been “stuck in place” by stereotypes and hostile newspaper coverage.

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On straight line missions, YouTubers jump fences, wade through rivers, and almost die in peat bogs. It’s completely pointless – and weirdly beautiful

Spending too much time on YouTube can be a dangerous game for men my age. Algorithmic gyres can pull you rightwards – towards misogynistic extremes and away from the parts of the internet that build connections and foster consensus.

Thankfully the rabbit hole I fell down led me – in a perfectly straight line – towards a renewed sense of childlike adventure.

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Orange Tree theatre, London
Camaraderie, comedy and a love of the trade shine through in April De Angelis’s group portrait of Nell Gwyn and the other female actors who were the first to be permitted on the English stage

April De Angelis’s 1993 play is more a snapshot than a coloured-in portrait of the first cohort of women to be permitted on to the stage. Still, it is an entertaining and enlightening ensemble work that captures the delicate moment in 17th-century stage history when these pioneering women straddled empowerment and economic independence with sexual objectification and hostile moral judgement.

Nell Gwyn, played spiritedly by Zoe Brough, is famously known to be among these early female actors, but De Angelis draws out several others stories and plaits five lives together, on and off stage. There is Mrs Betterton (Anna Chancellor, giving a glinting performance), something of an elder who brims with stage wisdom and technique; Mrs Marshall (Katherine Kingsley), a steely type whose former affair with an earl has left her vulnerable to heckling and attack; Mrs Farley (Nicole Sawyerr), who starts off as a soapbox Christian before taking to the stage; and finally Doll (Doña Croll), who assists them.

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It has hosted a huge spider and a pickled shark – and despite financial pressures, there can be little doubt about the gallery’s seismic impact

Opening night at Tate Modern, 25 years ago this May, was the kind of party that defines an era. Stars of the arts world and politics, including prime minister Tony Blair, attended. All of them were dwarfed by a giant ­spider – Louise Bourgeois’s visiting sculpture – perched on the gangway over the vast, packed Turbine Hall.

For Alex Beard, particular joyous moments still stand out, but not just from the evening: “It was a remarkable night, but I most clearly remember the first morning, 12 May, when I walked around outside, really early doors, and saw people lining up right around the building. I talked to the first person in the queue, who told me this was something they’d been waiting for all their life,” recalls Beard, who was deputy director of Tate.

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The ‘class clown’ from the racy BBC sitcom discusses his return to the stage, the draw of the dark side and preparing his parents to see him in ‘full bum’ nudity on screen

For the past five weeks, Joshua McGuire has been in a whitewashed room in north London pretending to be a rhinoceros. The 37-year-old actor isn’t in a performance art piece or strange social experiment, but rather starring in director Omar Elerian’s new production of Eugene Ionèsco’s 1959 absurdist play, Rhinoceros ; it is his first stage role in seven years. “It sounds mental but it’s the theatre of the absurd, so it’s meant to be baffling at points,” he says with a smile, back in human form in a white T-shirt and cap while on a break from rehearsals, where he is clearly enjoying taking on the story of a small French town whose inhabitants gradually turn into rhinos.

If you have watched a British comedy over the past decade, it’s likely you’ve seen McGuire in it. The endlessly energetic performer is usually found next to the leading man, sporting a frizz of curly hair and delivering anxious one-liners or slapstick pratfalls. He has featured in everything from Netflix series Lovesick to Richard Curtis’s About Time and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn . On stage, meanwhile, he had his breakthrough in Laura Wade’s 2010 satire on the British upper classes, Posh , playing a member of a fictionalised version of the Bullingdon Club, and has since starred opposite Daniel Radcliffe in David Leveaux’s 50th anniversary production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead .

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