The O2, London
Forty years after her feminist breakout hit, the New York singer bows out of live performance with a show rich in colourful pop and personal anecdotes, while never losing sight of women’s basic rights…

We all know exactly how this gig ends. Or we think we do. There can only be one finale to Cyndi Lauper’s farewell tour set, soundtracking the streamer explosions garlanding a sea of upheld phones – Girls Just Want to Have Fun , a female-forward anthem from 1983 that hasn’t left hits radio playlists since.

Originally written by Robert Hazard , the song was refashioned by Lauper into a paean to women’s pleasure and freedom. It staked a claim to living life in brightly hued contrast to the lives her mother, her aunts, their female neighbours in Queens, New York – and many of their Sicilian foremothers – had put up with. The dancers in the video intentionally featured a range of ethnicities, the conga line dragged in a diverse array of party people and passersby. Everyone wanted fun, the track screamed. Everyone deserved choice and autonomy over how they spent their time.

The riotous all-female London six-piece invite people to ‘laugh and rage’ with their forthcoming EP about UTIs, the patriarchy and more…

UTIs, dating red flags and wardrobe malfunctions aren’t just cautionary tales but the inspiration for new performance art meets punk-rock six-piece Twat Union . Following in the feminist footsteps of riot grrrl forebears such as Bikini Kill , the all-female British band have built up a grassroots fanbase around London thanks to their blistering live shows skewering the letdowns and joys of life as women.

With members from the Isle of Wight, Wales and London, Twat Union first met in a house-share in south London at the tail end of lockdown. They were united by their need to find a living space that could also accommodate their instruments, so the house soon became a natural jam space where they began playing their tongue-in-cheek tunes live.

Don’t Look It in the Eye is out on 4 April. Twat Union play the Exchange, Bristol, on 28 March and tour until 27 April

Reading fiction fosters empathy in a polarized world. I’ve learned how arts organizations can do the same

On 12 August 2022, I was about to begin interviewing Salman Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York when he was attacked. Now, more than two years later, the trial of the attacker has begun.

I was on stage as co-founder of City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, part of an international organization inspired by Rushdie to protect exiled, endangered writers in long-term residencies. Shortly after the attack, I wrote about how the audience – an intentional community of readers – rushed to the stage to subdue the attacker. I called this “the reader effect”, a response based on empathy that comes from reading fiction.

Henry Reese is a retired entrepreneur, who in 2004 co-founded City of Asylum Pittsburgh with his wife, the artist Diane Samuels

The radio and television presenter and her best friend, Clare Hamilton, on behaving badly on shoots, hanging out with the stars after The Girlie Show, and a major wardrobe malfunction

Born in Bolton, Greater Manchester, in 1974, Sara Cox began her career as a model before becoming a presenter on Channel 4’s The Girlie Show in 1996. In 2000, she took over BBC Radio 1’s breakfast show, hosting for three years. She now presents for BBC Radio 2, fronted TV shows including Between the Covers , and has published two novels. Cox lives in London with her husband, Ben Cyzer, and three children. This month, she and her best friend Clare Hamilton launch Teen Commandments, a podcast about parenting adolescents.

The actor is teaming up with old friend Thomas Ostermeier for a bold new take on Chekhov. The pair discuss censorship, risk-taking, the far right, and ask: are celeb-led plays ruining the West End?

The first time Cate Blanchett was cast in The Seagull, she was in Sydney and in her 20s, a young stage actor playing the part of another young stage actor who was desperate for fame and dizzyingly in love. It was 1997, at Belvoir St theatre, and Blanchett was very much in love herself, having recently got together with the writer-director Andrew Upton, who she would marry later that year. Though the part of Nina in Anton Chekhov’s drama involved far more heartbreak – the character is left emotionally wrecked after being dropped by her lover – and Blanchett remembers “I’d just met Andrew and was madly in love and thought: ‘How am I going to go out every night and be broken open when I’m so deeply happy?’”

She clearly pulled it off: among those who saw her in the Australian director Neil Armfield’s production was the director Jane Campion, who reportedly thought Blanchett’s portrayal so “utterly perfect and true” that she wished Chekhov had been there to see it. If the audience fell in love with Blanchett then, she in turn fell in love – with Chekhov’s play: “It’s so fuelled by perplexed, dissatisfied, annoyed people who do really strange things, but in Chekhov those people really are anchored by love,” she says today.

When Nussaibah Younis met IS brides, the peace consultant was struck by how easily she could have become one herself – sparking the idea for her darkly funny first novel

One February evening, in Baghdad’s Green Zone, I found myself ransacking an Iraqi MP’s wardrobe. She had looked me up and down, considering my skirt suit and heels. “You have to dress modestly,” she said, “to meet the Islamic State women.”

It was 2019, and so far my career had revolved around mostly failed efforts to help stabilise Iraq, including attempts to influence US Iraq policy from Washington thinktanks and convening high-profile Iraqi leaders in various absurd peace processes. I had grown up half-Iraqi in the UK during the invasion of Iraq – and I felt duty-bound to help my motherland.

Indian photographer Sayan Bose celebrates the cultural heritage of Bengal in this striking image of a young farmer

Sayan Bose had travelled two hours from his home in Kolkata, India, for a day of documentary photography in Sangrampur, West Bengal. “I was roaming around the village, capturing the local people’s lifestyle, asking about their daily lives and jobs and struggles,” Bose says. “I got talking to a 17-year-old called Ariful Alam. He was a farmer at a large sunflower garden. He was youthful and fun-loving, and agreed to pose in the field for me.”

Alam wears a Chou, or Chhau, mask. “They hold a significant place in Bengal’s rich cultural heritage,” Bose says. “They’re used in a traditional folk dance, the Purulia Chhau , which narrates mythologies and folklores, and also as decorative pieces. I chose to use the mask that depicts a character named Mahisha, from Mahishasura Mardini, a 21-verse stotra from Hindu mythology.”

The actor on making mistakes in the public eye, finding happiness in a lido, and his famous footballer crush

Born in London, Douglas Booth, 32, was cast in the film From Time to Time at 16. In 2010, he played Boy George in the television film Worried About the Boy and the following year he was Pip in a BBC adaptation of Great Expectations. In 2013, he starred as Romeo in Carlo Carlei’s version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; his other films include Noah, The Riot Club, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Mary Shelley, Shoshana and I’ve Never Wanted Anyone More, which is now available on digital platforms. He is married to the actor Bel Powley and lives in London.

When were you happiest?
Whenever I’m swimming in the lido at London Fields.

Tell people they’ll be upset by The Years and they may be. But they may also enjoy it

If your Valentine disappointed you this weekend, spare a thought for the protagonist of The Years , the explosive West End play based on the writings of the French novelist and Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. A teenager is thrilled to discover she has attracted the temporary attention of an older man at summer camp. After he painfully takes her virginity, she gradually realises that he has told half the resort. She finds the word “whore” scribbled across her bathroom mirror. Still she yearns for the validation of his returning desire.

The play takes as its subject the full range of life experiences contingent on embodied womanhood. Like the Ernaux memoir from which it draws its name, its heroine tells her story in the plural “we” and speaks for a generation of war-born French women. To the frustration of its artists, however, one of those experiences has captured all the headlines.