Sadler’s Wells East; Sadler’s Wells, London
The elegant new Sadler’s Wells East opened with an inclusive love letter to clubland, while its sister theatre hosted a more abstract spectacle

“You Are Welcome,” reads the sign, in bright red letters, above the door of the newly opened Sadler’s Wells East, on the fringes of the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, east London. Even on a rainy winter’s evening, that lighted sign fulfilled its promise.

Architectural practice O’Donnell + Tuomey have provided the redeveloped Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park with a warm embrace of a red-brick structure; inside, an airy foyer with bright artwork and its own mini stage. Six dance studios upstairs provide equally generous and well-proportioned working spaces for professionals as well as students at Academy Breakin’ Convention and the Rose Choreographic School .

The award-winning British dramatist had a huge hit with her Richard Hawley musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge. Her latest, Otherland, is a much more personal piece – and, she says, frightening

A few years back, Chris Bush, the 38-year-old playwright from Sheffield, was working on two projects pretty much simultaneously. One was called Faustus: That Damned Woman , a radical, gender-switching retelling of the Faust myth (the deal-with-the-devil guy), which she was producing with the groundbreaking Headlong theatre company. It was, she was sure, the best piece she had ever written. “In my mind, because it’s Faustus, it’s proper literature, so I was very excited,” Bush recalls. “I was already being a dickhead, going: ‘Oh yeah, this is the thing that’s going to transfer into the West End. And win me my first Olivier.’”

The other show was a jukebox musical drawing from the back catalogue of singer-songwriter Richard Hawley. The Crucible in Sheffield had already started selling tickets for the show, but the narrative of the play was a disaster and director Rob Hastie called in Bush a few months before opening to do a page-one, conceptual overhaul of the existing script. “Maybe this sounds grand,” she says, “but my energy coming into it was a bit: ‘Oh, I’m doing a favour for a theatre that I love dearly and respect, and a director who I respect and love dearly, to try to get this show on.’”

Sanjeev Bhaskar’s DI Khan remains stoical in the face of perfunctory dialogue; existential struggles hold up a new BBC crime drama; occasional sporting action accompanies Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl victory. Plus, both sides of the Battle of Mogadishu

Unforgotten (ITV1) | itv.com
Virdee (BBC One) | iPlayer
Live NFL Super Bowl LIX ( Sky Sports/Now )
Surviving Black Hawk Down ( Netflix )

As multinationals rush to appease the Orange One by ripping up their DEI policies, it can at least be said that British television is a lot less racially monochrome than it used be. Yet for all the inroads made into previously off-limits areas such as costume dramas, it’s still quite rare to see lead actors of colour. So it’s worth recognising that two primetime series on the most watched terrestrial channels last week featured South Asian-heritage actors in main roles, even if neither of them set the world on fire. The first, Unforgotten (ITV1), is now 10 years old, which is almost long enough to warrant its own cold case review.

The annual competition to discover outstanding new critical writing on the arts is open for submissions until 28 February

Are you a budding culture reviewer? Do you come out of a new show or finish the last page of a book and itch to open your laptop and set down your thoughts about why you so enjoyed – or detested – it?

The deadline – 28 February – is looming for the 2025 Observer /Anthony Burgess prize for arts journalism. Established in 2012 with a prize fund of £4,000, this is the UK’s leading award for emerging critics.

A stirring account of the queer first king of Britain; a vivid tale of life in second world war France; and an innovative family memoir about Jewish emigration to Texas

Gareth Russell
William Collins, pp496 , £25

To order Queen James , The Paris Dancer and Melting Point go to guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

Courtauld Gallery; Hayward Gallery, London
Permitted to leave Switzerland for the first time, 25 masterpieces lovingly acquired by collector Oskar Reinhart surprise at every turn. Plus, pioneering British artist Linder Sterling at full stretch

There are not many portraits you wait all your adult life to see, but so it is with A Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank , painted by Théodore Géricault some time after The Raft of the Medusa in 1819. This shattering image of a man with no name is in Britain for the first time, loaned by a small Swiss museum a dozen miles outside Zurich.

To see it with your own eyes is to have a sense of who this man might really be, whether the title seems right, and why Géricault painted him in the first place: all of them unresolved mysteries.

Language can ‘open eyes’, Salman Rushdie wrote, yet still ideas of profanity are being used to silence dissenting voices

‘Whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses .” So insists Salman Rushdie in Knife , his “Meditations After an Attempted Murder”, written after he almost lost his life in a ferocious assault in Chautauqua, a small town in upstate New York, where he had gone to give a talk in August 2022.

As Rushdie rose to speak, a young man rushed towards him wielding a knife with which he inflicted terrible wounds “to my neck, to my chest, to my eye, everywhere”, excruciatingly severing the optic nerve of Rushdie’s right eye. The talk he never gave was to have been about “the importance of keeping writers safe from harm”.

The 78th British Film Academy awards are heading our way tonight – here’s what you need to know about the big night at the Royal Festival Hall

With each passing year the attention paid to the Bafta film awards turns up a notch, as campaigns jostle and reposition themselves in the quest for the real prize: an Academy Award. The Oscar race is pretty open this year, even more so after the Emilia Pérez debacle , but with its British centre of gravity and slightly differing nominations list, the Baftas have their own dynamic. Hence the Baftas can sometimes seem to be a fairground-mirror reflection of the American contest, or (looked at the other way) an assertion of a similar but separate cultural identity.

The most obvious example of this is the strong showing for Belfast rap comedy Kneecap , which could walk off with a fistful of Baftas, but failed to even get on the Academy nomination sheet. Hard Truths star Marianne Jean-Baptiste is the other big Oscar casualty, but she is in with a major shout for best actress here. And in a wider sense, the current Oscar frontrunners – The Brutalist, Anora, A Complete Unknown – may not resonate quite so strongly with British voters, so expect Conclave, a (largely) domestic effort, to put up a significant fight and follow through on its nominations lead .

Helen Fielding, David Baddiel, Nicola Sturgeon and other cultural figures celebrate the great writer’s 250th birthday

Some will mark the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth quietly, by reading the novels. For them, it will be more than enough simply to turn the pages of Emma or Persuasion ; to read and absorb that unequalled prose for the umpteenth time. But if you’re the kind of person who enjoys more public-facing (let us not say more cheesy) commemorations, then the coming months are nothing if not action-packed. So much is in store, in fact, that the New York Times recently put “Jane Austen’s England” – a realm that embraces the counties of Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Surrey – ahead of the Galápagos Islands as the No 1 place to visit in the world in 2025.

Let us begin in Bath, for as Catherine Morland puts it in Northanger Abbey : “Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?” (Her creator, of course, was less of a fan, and liked to satirise it.) In September, the city will host an anniversary edition of its Jane Austen festival, to include a costumed promenade through its streets and a ball with a seaside theme inspired by the uncompleted Sanditon . Naturally, the chance to wear a sprigged muslin dress or pair of tight breeches will be thrilling for some, but if role-play is not your thing, there’s always tea and a Bath bun to be had in the elegant confines of the Pump Room (Austen once wrote in a letter of “disordering my stomach with Bath bunns”).