Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London
The Revel Puck Circus big top rolls into town, featuring fantastic acrobatics, whimsical clowning and admirable ethics

There’s a festival feel at a Revel Puck Circus show: the big top, the caravans and candyfloss, the sense of community. It’s like a gen Z version of a trad touring circus, with the young performers dressed in matching jazzy gender-neutral jumpsuits rather than leotards and spangles.

Inside the tent are some fantastic acts. There is supremely graceful hair hanging from Poppy Plowman (yes, that’s hanging from a rope tied to your topknot). Plowman glides in circles, cross-legged, serenity itself. There is an inspired take on the cyr wheel, providing a great example of how a simple twist – in this case suspending a stage in the air so that we get a double decker performance, with one person spinning on top, one beneath – can bring instant theatre.

And because this is a group that does not lack ambition, there is the country’s only female ”wheel of death” duo, performing in a contraption that looks like a 360-degree pendulum with two giant hamster wheels attached. When momentum builds, it’s as if the person reaching the summit has a moment of zero gravity, which is hypnotic to watch against the sounds of Laurie Anderson’s O Superman .

TikTok meets south-east Asian folklore in Amanda Nell Eu’s fierce directorial debut, an allegory about the onset of puberty

Amanda Nell Eu ’s snarling debut is not the first film to harness body horror tropes as an allegory for the adolescent angst and the shame of female puberty. But this Malaysian production, which shares central ideas with Pixar’s Turning Red , as well as genre films such as Carrie and Ginger Snaps , folds in a distinctive element of south-east Asian folklore and superstition, in addition to universal themes of preteen girl bullying.

Bursting on to the screen with an energetic dance routine – Tiger Stripes is as TikTok literate as it is fluent in the language of horror. Twelve-year-old Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) is the wildest of her circle of friends, but when she gets her period that feral energy takes on a disconcerting new dimension. The message is not always clear, but it’s an entertaining ride.

In UK and Irish cinemas now

Half a billion thrillers were bought in the UK in the past 10 years. Can a visit to the Bristol CrimeFest – this year featuring GT Karber, creator of the world-conquering whodunnit series Murdle – help pin down why the genre is booming?

Sitting at the bar during a convention of crime writers at the Grand hotel in Bristol, nursing a pint, an exciting and inspired thought comes to mind: hey, wouldn’t this be a perfect setting for a murder mystery!

One thing that you learn quite quickly at a convention of crime writers, however, is this: there are no new murder mystery plotlines under the sun.

The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon
The RSC’s European premiere of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer prize-winning play tailors its intriguing characters a little too neatly

Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey’s opening season as co-directors of the RSC continues with a second first. After “a carnival adaptation” of Hanif Kureshi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia , co-written by the author along with director Emma Rice (and reviewed by my colleague Susannah Clapp ), is this European premiere of Sanaz Toossi’s 2023 Pulitzer prize-winning play, English .

Anisha Fields’s set is, unmistakably, a classroom: a frosted-glass wall, neon strip lighting, metal-legged tables, plastic bucket chairs and a whiteboard next to a door. Into the space strides Marjan. Beneath the heading “TOEFL – Test of English as a Foreign Language”, she writes: “English Only”, then underlines the words, once, twice, three times. Lightly played by Nadia Albina, this is deliciously funny. As the action progresses, however, the imperative instruction becomes a motor for identity crises and personality clashes among the characters (who speak English throughout: fluently when communicating in their native Farsi; haltingly in the target language).

English is at the Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 1 June, then transfers to the Kiln , London, 5-29 June

Who will take over the family drug business? Cue violence, treachery and too much shouting

The future of a south London crime family hangs in the balance. Mick Roman (Gary Webster), the cool head controlling a viper’s nest of warring egos, is gravely ill. But the question of succession in the family business (mostly drugs, some violence, lots of shouting) is hotly contested. Mick’s son Jimmy (Charlie Clapham) assumes he’s a cert, but his adopted brother Henry (Michael Head, who also directs) disagrees. And that’s before you factor in the treacherous women of the Roman family. This crime comedy has plenty of energy, as expected from a film that seems to be largely powered by cocaine, but it’s erratic and rather grating.

In UK and Irish cinemas now

Great scenery and a joyous Kristin Scott Thomas are outweighed by one infuriating lead character in Marc Fitoussi’s friends reunited French comedy

The closest of schoolfriends in 1989, despite their wildly contrasting personalities, risk-averse introvert Blandine (Olivia Côte) and gobby showoff Magalie ( Laure Calamy ) fell out spectacularly (full details are hazy, but it involved a boy) and lost touch. Now, thanks to the adult son of Blandine, who worries that his divorced mother is in danger of closing herself off from the world, the pair are reunited and find themselves embarking on the trip they dreamed of as teenagers: to the Greek island of Amorgos, location of the film The Big Blue . Except that, owing to erratic nightmare Magalie, they are kicked off the ferry for fare-dodging on to another island.

Two Tickets to Greece has some appeal: stunning scenery, Instagrammable taverna chic and the unexpected pleasure of seeing a cast-against-type Kristin Scott Thomas letting her hair down as a boho jewellery designer. But the character of Magalie is so enraging that you would chuck yourself into the Aegean Sea rather than spend two weeks in her company.

In UK and Irish cinemas now

In this extract from her memoir, A Woman’s Place Is in the Kitchen, Sally Abé recalls the job she had to leave
• Read the interview with Sally Abé

‘You’ll never amount to anything, young lady.” These are words that no one, no matter what industry they are in, ever wants to hear. If you’re a chef, it’s likely someone will have screamed them in your face at least once. For me, it happened at a restaurant I don’t include on my CV. I have never admitted that I worked for this chef in interviews and rarely speak about my experience, even to friends and family. Because I don’t want to trash someone’s reputation for the sake of my own, I’m not going to use the real name of the restaurant or of anyone who worked there. However, people need to understand that places like this exist, and that the experience was formative, if awful. So, let’s call the restaurant “Jeff’s” after the chef patron, then let me tell you about the worst time of my career.

I wanted to work at the Ledbury, a restaurant in Notting Hill that everyone was talking about but after trying to arrange a trial a couple of times and not being able to make the dates work, I looked elsewhere as my notice period at Claridge’s was coming to an end and I needed to have money coming in. I settled on Jeff’s.

A thoughtful meditation on love and loneliness via an AI-based sex doll; an outstanding debut memoir of infidelity’s aftermath; and a passionate and insightful botanical study

Sarah Crossan
Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp320

To order Hey, Zoey , You Could Make This Place Beautiful or The Light Eaters go to guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

A new exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London includes ‘tragic’ tales of species wiped out from their natural habitats

Douglas Russell, a senior curator at London’s Natural History Museum , was examining a collection of nests gathered on the island of Guam when he made an unsettling discovery.

“The nests had been picked up more than 100 years ago, and I was curating them with the aim of adding them to the museum’s main collection. They turned out to be one of the most tragic, saddest accumulations of objects I’ve ever had to deal with,” Russell told the Observer last week.