I was sued over my film that gave a voice to the committed ‘amateur’ whose pivotal role in the search for the remains of Richard III was drowned out by louder voices in academia

About 15 years ago, Philippa Langley set out on a mission to find the remains of King Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England. Almost everyone regarded this as an impossible task. His remains had gone undiscovered for more than 500 years. It was a folly, a fool’s errand. She was out of her depth, an amateur. No letters after her name.

But Philippa diligently did the work and did her research. She had an inner conviction that she would find him, and she did. It was a staggering achievement, and yet when the news broke of this startling discovery, and it was beamed round the world, there was little to no mention of her.

Almeida theatre, London
Jack Holden has elegantly adapted Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker winner about class envy, gay culture and political scandal in 80s Britain

How to adapt a novel as big and shimmering as Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker prize winner? It’s a book that captures not just the hypocrisies of one elite, Thatcher-loving family but the hypocrisies of a whole era, with power and politics bristling beside the hedonistic explosion of 1980s gay culture.

Maybe it needs an entire series (as in the case of Andrew Davies’s TV adaptation ), but Jack Holden, whose 2021 play Cruise traversed similar ground, makes a robust go of it here. He arrives at the dark heart of the book while filleting and mixing the order of things so that the timeline of the central three sections is shorter and slicker, but also less intensely lived.

Sadler’s Wells, London
The mythological piece for 12 female dancers was developed in Saudi Arabia and pulsates with physical intensity and ancestral rage

Akram Khan is a choreographer at his best when he seems to be working on instinct. Often with his work it’s less important to ask what it means, more how it feels; not to work out exactly how he’s meshed different dance forms or redrawn mythical stories, but to get immersed in its sensory impact.

Thikra has plenty going on in that area. The piece was made earlier this year for an arts festival at Wadi AlFann, a new “cultural destination” in AlUla, an ancient oasis city and trade route in the Saudi Arabian desert. It’s a collaboration with London-based Saudi artist Manal AlDowayan, who originally built her rocky set on the desert sand. And you can imagine the early scenes of the 60-minute piece having an impact in a vast outdoor setting. Khan has a strong graphic sense, the 12 dancers in unison in bold type and satisfying lines that cut and splice. It’s crisply danced by the all-female cast, all with long hair swishing in sync.

Loading Bay, Bradford
Adaptation of Fiona Mozley’s novel wisely leaves the looming figure of Daddy unseen in this quasi-mythical tale of an off-grid family’s doomed fight against class and capitalism

Some characters are too big for the stage. Take John Smythe, the man otherwise known as Daddy in Fiona Mozley’s beguiling novel . By any perspective, not just that of Danny and Cathy, his teenage children, he is a hulk of a figure. He is not only a prize fighter, wiping out opponents in illegal bouts with supernatural ease, but he lives a wild-man existence, prowling society’s edges, off-grid and at one with nature in all its beautiful cruelty.

Faced with giving him theatrical form, writer/director Javaad Alipoor leaves him to our imaginations. Better to suggest his primal power than disappoint us with an all-too-human actor. Instead, Daddy exists in narration and reported speech, never in plain sight. It is a wise move, even if sometimes you hanker for a flesh-and-blood confrontation in a production, for Bradford 2025 , that is more descriptive than dramatic.

Barbican Hall, London
In a vivid concert celebrating the eclecticism of Eastman’s work, there was head-banging intensity, the spirt of Joan of Arc and a Lutheran battle hymn

Composer, pianist, performance artist and choreographer, Julius Eastman straddled New York’s uptown and downtown arts scenes for two decades before dying in obscurity in a Buffalo hospital in 1990. In recent years there’s been a steady resurgence of interest in him and his work – not just as a gay, Black composer, but as a significant musical personality whose maverick minimalist beats earned him a reputation for artistic confrontation.

This concert, part of US bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s Barbican residency, offered a snapshot of his eclectic output. Touch Him When, arranged here for electric guitar and performed with head-banging intensity by Jiji, explored Eastman’s belief in music as a performative art. Distortion pedals and reverb leant the music a doom-metal vibe as consonant and dissonant waves crashed and burned. At the opposite end of the spectrum was Piano 2, a tripartite work with a conventional, early-20th-century feel, presented with calm authority by pianist Conor Hanick.

The novelist and poet, who died a year ago, left a huge body of work distinguished by its melancholy wit and warmth. These are some of the highlights

Paul Bailey, who died last October aged 87 , was best known as a novelist of comic brilliance, wide-ranging empathy – even for the worst of his characters – and a cleverness that was never clinical. His fiction was frequently occupied with the impact of memories on our lives, and usually heavily driven by sharp, syncopated dialogue. But he was also a memoirist, poet and more besides – so here’s a guide to the legacy of books he left behind.

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Spending eight hours in a theatre with 70 people playing through political donkey epic asses.masses was gruelling – and a tribute to gaming’s shared joy

This weekend, I spent more than eight hours in a theatre playing a video game about donkeys, reincarnation and organised labour with about 70 other people. Political, unpredictable and replete with ass puns, Asses.Masses is, on the one hand, a fairly rudimentary-looking video game made by Canadian artists Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim with a small team of collaborators. But the setting – in a theatre, surrounded by others, everybody shouting advice and opinions and working together on puzzles – transforms it into a piece of collective performance art.

Here’s how it works: on a plinth in front of a giant projected screen is a controller. In the seats: the audience. Whoever wants to get up and take control can do so, and they become the avatar of the crowd. The game opens with a series of questions, mostly about donkeys, some in different languages, and quickly it becomes obvious that you have to work together to get them right. Someone in our crowd spoke Spanish; another knew the answer to an engineering question; I knew, somehow, that a female donkey is called a jennet.

‘The woman in the black swimsuit seems to be gazing out at a scene of natural wonder. But she’s standing in a fake sea – and looking at an artificial island’

Italy has some of the most beautiful natural beaches in Europe, so I find it fascinating that so many holidaymakers choose to go to places like the one in this photograph: a strange manufactured island with plastic palm trees. This image is from a series, Leisure Time , that was important to me. I started it at a time when I had lots of personal problems, in 2006 and 2007. I needed to do something that would change my vision, my way of seeing the world, and even to some extent reinvent myself.

I have always been interested in landscapes, cities, and the relationship between people and the environments they inhabit. The theme I decided to work on was mass tourism. I wanted to open our eyes to this strange aspect of modern life: the fact that people prefer to spend time at some artificial park or beach, rather than visit a real one.

Fresh from his Tony award for Merrily We Roll Along, the Harry Potter star will bring Duncan Macmillan’s one-person hit show to New York audiences

Daniel Radcliffe is set to star in the Broadway premiere of Every Brilliant Thing, the hit one-person play that deals movingly with depression. The actor, who won a Tony award last year for his performance in the Stephen Sondheim revival Merrily We Roll Along, will perform at the Hudson theatre in New York, from 21 February to 24 May 2026.

Written by Duncan Macmillan, along with the show’s original star Jonny Donahoe, the play has been a hit in London’s West End, where it is currently being performed at @sohoplace by Minnie Driver until 8 November. Described by the Guardian as “both heartfelt and buoyant” , it revolves around a child reacting to their mother’s suicide attempt. Determined to help her, they make a list of all the things that make life worth living – with the audience encouraged to join in by shouting out the listed reasons. As the child becomes an adult, the list continues to develop, although it is now the grownups who are in need of reasons to remain hopeful.