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The Boss and his E Street Band pluck hope from the depths of despair with a fiery show that hits out at the US administration but ends with love

Before Bruce Springsteen sings a word on the opening night of his European tour, he has something to get off his chest. “The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock’n’roll in dangerous times,” he says. “The America I love is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.” The band then launch into a roaring, rousing version of Land of Hope and Dreams, as strings swoop, brass soars and Springsteen gives an impassioned take of the song he sang for Clarence Clemons on his deathbed. Followed by Death to My Hometown – with the titular lyrics delivered with venomous sting – it sets the tone for an evening that is bruised and angry yet also hopeful and filled with love.

The band – who Springsteen calls a “booty-shaking, lovemaking, Viagra-taking, history-making” outfit – are a hurricane force; so tight and in lockstep that they actually feel loose and relaxed. Darkness on the Edge of Town purrs along, almost grooving; The Promised Land is as potent as it is poignant.

Pam Gems’ revolutionary 1976 play Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi put ordinary, flawed, interesting women at its centre – a reversal of all the plays by men where women are ‘the problem’

I saw the play on my own, at the Mayfair theatre in London in 1977. There were four women on stage, in very ordinary clothes, in an ordinary flat. That was really unusual. And they weren’t elegant. I don’t remember thinking, oh, these are nice, stylish women in terrific clothes, which I was used to seeing.

At that time there were no other plays like that. I was in my 20s and hadn’t seen anything where the women were at the centre, but not idealised or sidelined. They were the play. And I found that just revolutionary.

From intimate panels to breathtakingly cinematic canvases, Caroline Walker explains how she set out to capture the many sides of motherhood, right down to the first nappy change

Ten years ago, when the Scottish painter Caroline Walker was in her early30s, she noticed something happening to her artist friends who were having babies. “They were suddenly taken less seriously,” she says. At the time, she didn’t have children of her own, and she was sure that if she ever did, her life as a parent would remain separate from her art. “It still felt hard enough to be taken seriously as a woman artist,” she says, “without adding in this other thing, let alone making it the subject of your work.” She smiles wryly and raises her eyebrows.

We’re speaking ahead of her largest museum show to date – an exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield titled Mothering. Now 43, Walker has built a dazzlingly successful career as a figurative painter, and is the mother of two small children. Ever since she was a student, first at Glasgow School of Art, then at the Royal College of Art in London, from where she graduated in 2009, she’s been closely observing women. Rendered on intimate panels and breathtakingly big cinematic canvases, her subjects have ranged from bakers and beauticians to tailors and housekeepers – and, lately, the constellation of mostly female workers providing support during childbirth and early-years care.

Wagner’s final opera comes to Glyndebourne this week. Why will the composer and his wife be turning in their graves? Michael Downes looks at the family’s attempts to keep Parsifal in Bayreuth

When Glyndebourne opened its doors for the first time in 1934, the work on the programme was Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. Mozart was the only music performed throughout Glyndebourne’s first four seasons, and he is still the composer with whom Britain’s first and best-known “country house” opera festival is most associated.

It was on a very different composer, however, that the gaze of the festival’s founder, John Christie, was initially trained. Christie was a Germanophile and obsessed with the work of Richard Wagner. “He was always hankering to do Parsifal at Glyndebourne as an Easter festival,” recalled his son , Sir George, who ran the Sussex festival after John’s death, until his own son, Gus , took over in turn at the start of the millennium. “He was only shut up by my mother.”

In the year in which the groundbreaking activist would have turned 100, a new book looks at the enduring impact of his words and how they resonate today

The Afterlife of Malcolm X is a new book about the great Black leader who was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, 100 years ago; who in the 1950s converted to Islam and dropped his “slave name”; who rose to fame as the militant voice of the civil rights era; and who was assassinated in New York in 1965, aged just 39.

The book is not a biography. As the author, Mark Whitaker, puts it, his book tells “the story of the story of Malcolm, the story that really made him the figure he is today, even more so than what he accomplished while he was living.

Set to become a major cultural destination, Fenix Rotterdam shows the harsh realities of the migrant experience alongside esoteric art – giving a necessary and nuanced view of the subject’s fraught politics

What does a boat seized from the Italian island of Lampedusa, a piece of the Berlin Wall, two giant bright blue slippers and a New York City bus made of fabric have in common with paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger and Willem de Kooning? They all vie for space in a new museum, opening this week in Rotterdam, which focuses entirely on migration, the movement of peoples that defines each century of humanity and which in recent years has acquired a new political toxicity.

Situated over two floors in what was one of the largest warehouses in the world, it is the centrepiece of a regeneration project in Katendrecht, the city’s southern docks and former red-light district that is redolent with history. Across the water, now a hotel, stood the headquarters of the Holland America Line, which transported thousands of Dutchmen and women to America and Canada to start afresh in the New World. In recent decades, most of the traffic to Europe’s largest port has been in the opposite direction. Rotterdam is now home to 170 nationalities.

I was all set to hate Buxton’s brand of self-deprecating chumminess, but his memoir somehow wins you over

One day Adam Buxton ordered two teas with oat milk from the trolley on the train. Unfortunately his came with cow’s milk and, because his need for vegan alternatives is apparently greater than his wife Sarah’s, he asked her to swap. Before Sarah had the chance to reply, the woman serving their drinks intervened, observing sensibly: “She might not want that one.” Buxton retorted with exaggerated gruffness: “She’s my wife, so she’ll have what she’s given!”

The comedian, radio and TV presenter recalls what happened next. Passengers shook their heads and looked at Sarah with pity and concern. Sarah sank mortified into her seat. The incident, Buxton writes, made him look “even more like the kind of controlling monster I had just parodied. But maybe,” he reflects, “a husband who makes a joke that lands so badly and embarrasses his wife as I just had is a kind of monster. On the other hand, perhaps I’m right and everyone else is wrong.”

A rare retrospective of the late British artist reveals her lifelong dedication to disrupting the boundaries of gender, sex and death via bawdy, provocative sculptures and collages

Helen Chadwick, who died unexpectedly in 1996 at the age of 42, has long been an artist more name-checked than exhibited. Her devotees include the lauded feminist mythographer Marina Warner, for whom she’s “one of contemporary art’s most provocative and profound figures”. Yet she is habitually relegated to a footnote within British art: one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner prize in 1987 and an outstanding teacher of YBAs such as Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.

She remains best known for Piss Flowers, her white bronze sculptures whose stalagmite protuberances are phallic inversions of vaginal recesses, cast from the holes she and her husband made by peeing in thick snow. (The artist’s hotter urine went deeper, creating larger cavities. She described the work as “a penis-envy farce”.) It’s easy to see how her transgressive interests might have quickened British art’s pulse. Yet her meditations on the sacred and profane, sex and death, were expansive, propelling diverse experiments across installation, photography and performance.

From adventures in adolescence to Venezuelan dancers, these images from new artists have been nominated for the Photo London Nikon emerging photographer award