On the eve of her UK retrospective Revelations, the veteran US feminist artist known for her large collaborative art installation pieces such as The Dinner Party – and for dividing the critics – is in celebratory mood

On-screen interviews can be a bit low-key, the victim of time lags and muffled human connections. But not the one on which I’ve just embarked, an experience I can only describe as psychedelic from the off. First to appear on my laptop is Donald Woodman, who sits and chats to me while we wait for Judy Chicago, the celebrated artist and his wife of 38 years, to arrive (a position in which I suspect he quite often finds himself).

Woodman, who is a photographer, has bleached blond hair, bright blue glasses, and gold polish on his nails, which he now waves at me. Apparently, he and Chicago have been going to the same manicurist for years, a routine so entrenched, it’s virtually part of their artistic practice. “It’s fun,” he says. “When I got married to her, I was wearing nail polish. You can’t let only the women adorn themselves. But it’s also a break from work, because it means I have to sit down for two hours.” The couple are famous workaholics, and their days – they live and work in an old railroad house in Belen, a small town in New Mexico – begin early and end late. “Last night, Judy came in and went straight to bed without any dinner,” he tells me, and I can’t quite tell from his tone whether he is proud or completely exhausted. (Maybe both: he is, after all, 78, and Chicago is 84.)

Stone Nest, London
Jill Johnson’s intricate new piece puts the audience in the midst of an exploration of interaction and connection

There’s something magical about watching dance at a distance when everything seems effortless. But arguably it’s more interesting to experience dance up close, to see the beads of sweat, feel the endurance and the heat radiating from the dancers’ bodies as they push themselves on.

Jill Johnson’s new creation for Rambert, Analogue , presented in association with the Southbank Centre at Stone Nest , makes the most of that proximity. For those who remember the West End venue as the nightclub Limelight, there’s something of the same sense of movement stripping human motivation to its core, revealing intention in the lines of an encounter.

Exclusive: Chronicles of Narnia author detested HC Wyld so intensely he wrote mocking verse in a copy of his own book

CS Lewis loathed one of his fellow Oxford academics so much that he satirised him in a series of seven previously unpublished poems that have been discovered.

The Chronicles of Narnia author simply could not stand HC Wyld, deriding his lectures as elementary and dismissing his snobbery and his bullying of students, referring to him in his diary as “the cad”.

The actor on playing a pushy mother in new Channel 4 drama The Gathering, keeping her Bafta well away from the loo and why she’s an indie girl now

Actor Vinette Robinson, 42, is best known for playing chef Carly in the Boiling Point film and TV series, and civil rights campaigner Rosa Parks in Doctor Who . After growing up in Bradford and training at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, she began her career in theatre, including roles at the RSC and the National Theatre. Her other TV roles include Sherlock , The Lazarus Project , Six Four , The A Word and Black Mirror . She now stars in Channel 4 drama series The Gathering .

How would you describe your new series ?
It’s ostensibly a thriller but told from a character perspective, rather than from a police viewpoint. A girl called Kelly is attacked at an illegal rave. In each episode, you meet the people in her life who become suspects. Its themes are the trials and tribulations of that teen stage of life. A lot of it is about control – parents exerting it, how they lose it, how children gain it. It brings up lots of issues but it’s also joyful and captures the excitement of youth.

Assisted dying is shockingly unpacked by Liz Carr; Nicola Coughlan moves centre stage in Netflix’s Regency romp; Skins meets Euphoria in a Liverpool psychodrama. Plus, the trouble with a ‘mostly true’ Black Panthers drama

Better Off Dead? (BBC One) | iPlayer
Bridgerton ( Netflix )
The Gathering (Channel 4) | channel4.com
The Big Cigar ( Apple TV+ )

Every so often, a documentary comes along that unnerves you so much you half-wish you hadn’t seen it. Better Off Dead? (BBC One) is one such programme. Presented by Silent Witness actor and disability activist Liz Carr, who’s had arthrogryposis – congenital joint contracture – since childhood, it delivers a passionate and coherent argument against assisted dying. An emotionally bruising slab of television, it’s about life and death itself.

This insightful memoir addresses the author and his parents’ struggles with mental illness, and offers a historical account of treatments

The year 2008 “should have been a good time in my life”, the novelist Tom Lee reveals in this memoir. He was a new father, homeowner, and his first book was imminent. Instead, he was in emotional freefall because of acute anxiety. “I had forgotten how to be, ” he writes.

The bullet of the title is mental illness, one he felt was heading his way, because of its impact on his family. Both of Lee’s parents were institutionalised at the now defunct Severalls hospital in Colchester. Here, he shows how, having dodged their fate into adulthood, his collapse into bedridden stasis made him panic about whether he would ever recover. He’s subtle in detailing his cautious self-medicating with Ativan (“more suburban than subversive”) and dawning realisation that ill-health tracked him long before he was aware. Later, he suffered another illness, acute respiratory distress syndrome (Ards), which proved nearly fatal. He was placed in an induced coma and labelled by a consultant as “the sickest man in London”. He refers to Ards as an “invader”, unlike anxiety, the enemy within.

Tate Britain, London
A Flemish ‘paintrix’ at the court of Elizabeth I, a magnificent mouth artist and a glamorous suffragette are finally given their due in a show tracing female artists’ rocky road to recognition. But the story too often takes precedence over the art

Mary Delany (1700-88) was a witty memoirist of 72 when she in effect invented the paper collage in Britain. Noticing the affinity between a geranium and a scrap of red paper, she took her scissors and cut a petal from it freehand. The exquisite plant that grew from Delany’s work looked so exactly like a watercolour people mistook it for a painting. She had discovered a new way, she wrote to her niece, “ of imitating flowers ”.

Delany’s collages are startlingly beautiful – nearly transparent apparitions materialising on inky black paper. They have the translucence of both watercolour and actual pressed flowers. Two appear in this exhibition: a flowering raspberry glowing crimson against the blackness and a fragile white lily unfurling its petals, as it seems, by night. They might be emblems for the show itself: discoveries, and rediscoveries, brought out of darkness into light.

Cast member of Palme d’Or contender shot in Kent says the high number of chaperones and intimacy coordinators on set was over the top

Is Britain leading the way in protecting young people and children from the potential traumas of working on a film set, or has it all gone far too far? Two of the most prominent European stars attending the Cannes film festival, both with high-profile premieres, have very different views.

Franz Rogowski, the acclaimed German actor who plays a key role in Bird , British director Andrea Arnold’s contender for the top Palme d’Or prize, said this weekend that the proliferation of chaperones and intimacy coordinators that had been required on the shoot on location in Kent qualified as well-intended “madness”.

Council spending cuts are forcing studios and venues to close, driving out the city’s creative businesses

Last year, the city of Leeds held a year-long celebration of culture , complete with festivals, newly commissioned works of art and community projects. More than 1,000 events took place, with hundreds of volunteers and local schools taking part.

This year, however, artists and ­creatives in the West Yorkshire city are being forced out of their workshops and galleries, and say the dwindling number of spaces is crushing Leeds’s creative scene.