Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London
Chekhov’s claustrophobic drama is perfectly suited to this intimate venue, with moments of humour leavening the heartbreak

The flowers spelling out Irina’s name make this party feel like a funeral. It’s an appropriate choice for Caroline Steinbeis’s bluntly sullen, occasionally sharp-tongued production of Chekhov’s unhappy family drama.

Focus is scattered in this first Chekhov play to be staged in the Wanamaker, in which the inhabitants of the Prozorov household talk at each other without taking in anyone else’s words. These are our three sisters: Michelle Terry’s snippy, wrung-out Olga, Shannon Tarbet’s disenchanted Masha, and Ruby Thompson’s wide-eyed dreamer, Irina. Around them stir men who pine or fight for their affections, all downtrodden individuals in various stages of despair.

The British art historian’s essays demonstrate a wide erudition but suffer from his relentless scrutinising

Politics runs through the history of art like a protester in a museum with a tin of soup. From emperors’ heads on coins to Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, Guernica , and Banksy’s street art, power and visual culture have been closely and sometimes combustibly associated. This relationship is explored in essays by the distinguished art historian TJ Clark, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Many of them first appeared in the London Review of Books , where the academic is given room to dilate in its rather airless pages. He brings a wide scholarship and unflagging scrutiny to his task. That said, his introduction includes the discouraging spoiler: “art-and-politics [is] hell to do”. From time to time, the reader finds themselves recalling this damning admission.

Clark writes from a “political position on the left”. He reflects on epoch-making events such as the Russian revolution, which spawned socialist realist art. He says the Dresden-born artist Gerhard Richter, 93, maker of abstract and photorealist works, is “haunted by his past” in the former East Germany. But there are also dustier subjects, including the Situationist International, a group of avant-garde artists and theorists who were active from the 1950s to the 1970s.

As the semi-autobiographical show reaches its third and final series, its award-winning creator opens up about the people who inspired him – and his unlikely celebrity crush

Jack Rooke’s got a problem with something written about him on the internet. Folded into a slightly-too-small chair in the regal-looking cafe of north London’s St Pancras Renaissance hotel, he shakes his head in dismay, causing his mass of tight curls to jiggle. “Rooke. Is. Gay,” he slowly repeats when reminded of the three words that make up the entirety of his Wikipedia page ’s “personal life” section. “There’s a guy I’m currently dating who has mentioned it no less than four times. I’m like, ‘Can somebody just delete that?’”

But while Wikipedia’s summation of Rooke’s personal life may be reductive, its section headed “works” is expansive. It culminates in Big Boys , the 31-year-old comedian and writer’s Bafta-nominated, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy, which has just returned to Channel 4 for its third and final season. Based on Rooke’s 2015 Edinburgh fringe show, Good Grief , about the death of his father from cancer, and his 2020 memoir-slash-advice guide, Cheer the F**k Up , it follows grieving, gay student Jack (Dylan Llewellyn) as he navigates life at Brent University and tries to lose his anal virginity.

Sadler’s Wells, London
With its off-kilter comedy and flirtatious touches, this show is Bausch at her most accessible – and beautiful

There is some absolute beauty in Vollmond, one of the last pieces made by pioneering German choreographer Pina Bausch before her death in 2009. A curtain of water dramatically falls from the sky, shimmering in the light, plumes of the stuff arcing into the air and crashing against the giant, monolithic rock that dominates the stage (designer Peter Pabst is almost as much an author of this work as Bausch). Water is a recurring theme in Bausch’s work and here it rains down, spurts from mouths, is thrown from buckets and poured into overflowing glasses, impossible to catch or control.

Bausch’s other great recurring theme is the endless cycle of flawed human habits (Vollmond means “full moon”, more cycles) and the power play and pettiness between men and women. Her men are always smartly dressed in shirts, her women ever glamorous in spaghetti-strap gowns and long, swishing hair – yearning nostalgically for a more glamorous era while deriding its mores.

Riverside Studios, London
Adapted from a French bestseller, this fictional story of Martin, who missed out on the role of a lifetime, becomes a meditation on how lives are changed

Martin has a meltdown during his pregnant partner’s 12-week scan. For reasons he can’t divine, the prospect of fatherhood is dredging up his childhood demons, specifically the lingering humiliation of being passed over for the film role of Harry Potter when he was 10. These flashbacks trigger a reappraisal of a life lived in the shadow of the Potter franchise that has dogged Martin like an inescapable flock of Dementors.

If this sounds like a slender premise, don’t be fooled. Adapted by Barney Norris from David Foenkinos’s bestselling 2022 French novel, directed by Michael Longhurst, Second Best is a deceptively unassuming play. What starts out like a comical but mundane monologue soon becomes an elegant meditation on the misshapen nature of trauma.

The president’s full-court press to dominate media and control cultural institutions is straight out of the authoritarian playbook

Bigger than the Super Bowl, claimed Donald Trump, sitting in a big leather chair beside a big map. Then came an announcement over the public address system. “Air Force One is currently in international waters,” declared the flight crew of the US presidential jet, “for the first time in history flying over the recently renamed Gulf of America.”

As his aides clapped and whooped, Trump gloated: “Isn’t that nice? We’re about ‘Make America Great Again’, right? That’s what we care about.” He proceeded to sign a proclamation declaring 9 February “Gulf of America Day” as Air Force One flew over the body of water previously known as the Gulf of Mexico.

From Home Alone to Succession and A Real Pain, the actor has added a unique twist to his roles and is tipped for a best supporting role award this weekend

On Sunday evening, Kieran Culkin is up for the best supporting actor award at the Baftas . If he wins, he will probably give one of his startled, free-wheeling and characteristically funny speeches, though by now he may struggle to express surprise, given his extended run of triumphs at these events.

In 2024, he picked up a Golden Globe for best actor in a television drama series for his performance as Roman Roy in Jesse Armstrong’s Succession . Last month, he nabbed the Golden Globe for best supporting actor for his role as Benji Kaplan in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain (he seems to respond well to direction from men called Jesse), which also landed him the four major American film critics awards, made him an odds-on favourite for an Oscar next month, and accounts for his Bafta nomination.

Bridgerton, then Wicked, gave Jonathan Bailey a huge fanbase, but the pressure on the actor to use his platform to speak out is intense

The actor Jonathan Bailey sits at a large table in an otherwise empty room: charcoal cable knit sweater, loose pinstripe trousers, hair neatly coiffed. He is chewing gum, sipping coffee, talking through his recent career, and a certain serendipity that has rendered him reflective. At 36, he’s fresh from his turn as likely-lad love interest Fiyero in Hollywood’s blockbuster adaptation of Wicked ; as a child, seeing the stage show was a milestone for him. “I remember thinking Fiyero was such a good part.” Later this year he will star in Jurassic World Rebirth alongside Mahershala Ali and Scarlett Johansson. “I saw the original Jurassic Park with my family, aged six, at the cinema,” he says. “It was the first time we all went together to something like that. It was seminal, but so rare for us.”

And this month, Bailey will star in Richard II at the Bridge Theatre, directed by Nicholas Hytner . Bailey is its protagonist. It is another example of full-circle career moment. In 2013, he appeared on stage in Hytner’s Othello . Same playwright, same director, same city – Bailey can’t help but consider all that’s changed in the intervening years. “Back then I was too young,” he says. “I came into the rehearsal process not mature or confident enough.”

Landing the role of Cassio, one of Othello’s lieutenants, had been so important to him then. “I didn’t go to drama school,” he says, “and there was a common belief that if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be able to do classical texts, or perform in the big theatres. There are all these stories we are born into that we have to unpick. For me, one of those was how limited I felt.”

Bailey remembers the day that changed. “It was late December,” he says, “and I was walking along London’s South Bank.” He was on his way to the National Theatre to meet Hytner for a callback. “I’d worked so hard and for so many reasons it felt…” He cuts himself off, then goes on, “Working at the National was beyond my wildest dreams.”

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
The links between Le Corbusier and co and the inspirational architect of Dulwich Picture Gallery and the old Bank of England are explored in a fascinating exhibition in his own house of treasures

If John Soane had only created the combined house and museum that bears his name in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London – a domestic-scaled pharaoh’s tomb with Alice in Wonderland tricks of scale and perception – his place in history would be assured. But he did far more. There, and in his building for Dulwich Picture Gallery, he helped to form the modern idea of a museum. His (mostly destroyed) headquarters for the Bank of England brought the serene grandeur and spatial complexity of imperial Roman baths to the workplace of financial civil servants. The son of a bricklayer who became one of Britain’s most original architects, his restless imagination generated a trove of ideas that others still mine, two centuries after he lived and worked.

After a period of relative neglect after his death in 1837 aged 83, his work began to be rediscovered in the 1920s. The best-known homage is the classic red telephone box, its shallow dome and reeded decoration frankly borrowed by its architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, from the tomb that Soane created for his wife and himself in Old St Pancras churchyard in London. Versions of the top-lit vaults he designed in Dulwich can be seen in art galleries all over the world. But most of all, according to a new exhibition at his house and museum , he was a prophet of the modernist architecture of the 20th century.