Guitarist, singer and songwriter who performed with John Renbourn, Bert Jansch and Ralph McTell

When Bruce Springsteen played the Berlin Olympiastadion in May 2012, he began with a powerful song about an East Berliner celebrating freedom. Few, if any, in the crowd would have realised that the original version of When I Leave Berlin was written in 1971 by an English guitarist and singer-songwriter, whom Springsteen failed to mention.

Wizz Jones, who has died aged 86, never did enjoy the success of many of his contemporaries, but was a folk scene hero with a dedicated following, particularly among other musicians. In his 2010 autobiography, Life, Keith Richards describes meeting Wizz while he was at art college, before joining the Rolling Stones: “Wizz Jones used to drop in, with a Jesus haircut and a beard. Great folk picker, great guitar picker … I think I learned Cocaine from him – the song and that crucial fingerpicking lick of the period, not the dope …”

Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Echoes of Gaza and Guantanamo ripple through the violence of Shakespeare’s paradoxically poetic play, immaculately staged by the RSC

It is not just heads that roll in Shakespeare’s bloodiest drama. Hands and tongues are chopped off and bodies are mutilated until they are mere meat, then cooked and fed to loved ones, as we follow the fortunes of Roman general Titus (Simon Russell Beale ) after a triumphant campaign against the Goths. The killing of his first prisoner and the subsequent marriage of Tamora, Queen of the Goths (Wendy Kweh) to new emperor Saturninus (Joshua James) sets off a circuit of hate-fuelled violence that raises the ante at every turn.

A metal grille around the stage for Max Webster’s production suggests the imminent letting of blood. The first of the horrors – the dismembering of Tamora’s son, limb by limb, even as she begs for mercy – takes place off stage, Greek-style. You hear his screams and the squelch of metal on flesh.

Milton Court, London
The group were joined by the Elmore, Kyan and Oculus quartets to perform three of Shostakovich’s quartets alongside a newer work by Elena Firsova

A decade ago, marking 40 years since the composer’s death, the Carducci Quartet played Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets in a remarkable day-long marathon . This year is the 50th anniversary, but how do you follow that? For the Carduccis, the answer was to look outwards: programming the Shostakovich quartets they’ve played so often across five concerts alongside works by the Russian composer’s students and sharing their platform with newer, up-and-coming groups.

The Carduccis opened this penultimate concert with Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 4, which runs from spare, plaintive folksiness to full-throttle pseudo-klezmer. The former showcased the Carduccis’ exquisitely blended tone. The latter, the drama that can be generated from rustic pizzicatos, the hard catch of bow hair on string, the intensity of a cello melody eked out of a stratospheric thumb position. But there was also a hint of business as usual – the first violin always dominant, energy always injected by the cello, the overall sound always mellow.

Film character actor who also appeared in the 1980 US TV mini-series of Shogun and in Tenko and House of Cards in the UK

Damien Thomas, who has died aged 83 after suffering from progressive supranuclear palsy, was an actor best remembered for taking the leading role of a wicked count turned into a vampire in Twins of Evil, a 1971 film combining gothic horror, black magic rituals and two Playboy playmates in the title parts.

The movie’s trailer billed him as “Hammer’s new master of the macabre”, alongside Peter Cushing as the witch-hunting Puritan religious sect leader Gustav Weil, whose orphaned nieces, Maria and Frieda, played by the identical twins Mary and Madeleine Collinson, live with him in an Austrian village. “It was quite difficult to tell the twins apart, but I used to pretend I knew which one was which,” Thomas said.

Mercedes-Benz stadium, Atlanta

The record-breaking Grand National tour brings together two stylistically opposed stars and continues an internet-breaking feud

Just when it seemed as if Kendrick Lamar had dropped his grudge against Drake, it turns out his ‘ game over ’ coda to the Super Bowl halftime show was just the end of regulation. On the Grand National tour, a four-month long stadium circuit for the Grammy-sweeping album GNX and SZA’s reissue album Lana, Lamar takes the music industry’s most bitter rivalry match into overtime.

The score-keeping has not stopped. The Grand National tour’s opening date in Minneapolis last week totaled more than $9m from more than 47,000 spectators, giving Lamar claim to the highest grossing hip-hop concert of all time – surpassing the record Eminem set after playing Melbourne, Australia in 2019. That’s what you get when you pair the hottest rapper in the game with an R&B queen who is coming off the critical and commercial success of buddy comedy One of Them Days , SZA’s film acting debut.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
The choreographer pairs the semi-improvised score with similarly loose structures that reflect on collective action and identity

Contemporary choreographers love minimalist music. Its rhythmic repetition, unceasing momentum and layering of phrases provides a useful framework for movement, as in Lucinda Childs’ Dance set to Philip Glass and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Fase , to Steve Reich. Now German choreographer Sasha Waltz tackles Terry Riley’s seminal 1964 piece In C.

Riley had an interest in psychedelia and altering consciousness (it was the 60s after all) and this is music that can lead you to zone in or zone out, lose track of time or be vividly aware of every quaver. It’s built on 53 cells, like riffs, repeated as many times as the players choose, on any combination of instruments. Here they are played admirably by the London Sinfonietta as part of the Southbank’s cross-disciplinary Multitudes festival .

At Queen Elizabeth Hall, London , until 30 April

When Bethesda surprise-released a remake last week, I revisited its world with my son to see if the magic was still there

For a 10-day period the summer of 2006, in between handing in my resignation at my first job on a games magazine and returning to Scotland to start university, I did almost nothing except eat, sleep and play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my Xbox 360. I hauled my TV from the living room of my small, unpleasantly warm flatshare into my bedroom so I could play uninterrupted; it was all I could think about. My character was a Khajiit thief, a kind of manky lion in black-leather armour with excellent pickpocketing skills. One afternoon, I decided to see whether I could steal every single object in the smallish town of Bravil, and got caught by the guards a couple of hours in. I did a runner, dropping a trail of random plates, cheese wheels and doublets in my wake, and the guards pursued me all the way to the other side of the map, where they finally got entangled with a bear who helpfully killed them for me.

I bet a lot of you will have had a similar experience with a Bethesda game – if not Oblivion, then Skyrim or perhaps Fallout 3. There’s something intoxicating about these role-playing games, the way they lay out their worlds for you like a buffet, inviting you to gorge. Go where you like! Learn some weird spells and try them out on bandits! Nip into a cave to fight a necromancer and end up getting ambushed by vampires! Open-world games such as this are exhaustingly common now but Oblivion was the first one I ever played. Lately I’ve been devouring it all again, after Bethesda surprise-released a remake last Friday.

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

Even though it came out only last year, I was so impressed with Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires that I am on my second reread. As all around me institutions fall and norms fail, I feel the moment requires audacious re-imaginings of history or possibilities of thought, and on both a political and imaginative level, Enrigue delivers with his wild telling of the meeting between Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma.

Blendo Games/Annapurna Interactive, PC
This attempt to cosy-fi an immersive sim game is full of ‘zany’ gags as you rescue cats from a spaceship, but it gets a bit too saccharine

When it comes to gamer-gatekeeping, there are few genres as snootily guarded as the immersive sim. From PC classic System Shock to the Dickensian Dishonored 2 , these system-heavy sandboxes are video gaming’s equivalent to avant garde electronica or the films of Darren Aronofsky, adored by critics and genreheads but largely baffling to everyone else. Much like those elitist fandoms, the im-sim’s loudest cheerleaders often look down on linear blockbusters with similar sneer. No, Assassin’s Creed player, you cannot sit with us.

While massive games such as Tears of the Kingdom have recently flirted with elements of the genre, there’s still a surprising lack of breezier, beginner-friendly immersive sims. Enter Blendo Games’ Skin Deep – an attempt to cosy-fi the genre. Doing away with the sour-faced sci-fi of Deus Ex, Skin Deep sends you hurtling into space with a premise ripped straight out of a noughties web comic. You play Nina Pasadena, an insurance commando sworn to rescue feline fleets from raiding pirates. As you answer each well-insured tabby’s urgent distress call, Nina quietly sneaks across the raided ship, using whatever tools she can cobble together to rescue her kitty clientele.