Donmar Warehouse, London
Patrick Marber’s debut play about a group of poker players brims with banter, but this pallid 30th-anniversary revival exposes its weaknesses

In 1995, two British playwrights made their debuts with all-male, six-character chamber-pieces strongly influenced by Pinter and Mamet, and set over one long, tense night in London. Jez Butterworth’s Mojo and Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice proved to be superficially dazzling calling cards rather than enduring classics. Now a pallid 30th-anniversary revival of the latter reveals its weaknesses.

Set in a restaurant where the manager Stephen (the Paul Bettany-esque Daniel Lapaine) and his employees Frankie (Alfie Allen), Sweeney (Theo Barklem-Biggs) and Mugsy ( Hammed Animashaun ) are gearing up for a late-night card game, the play brims with bants.

At Donmar Warehouse, London , until 7 June

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Joshua Bonnetta spent 8,760 hours recording a pine – then honed it down into a four-hour album full of creatures, cracking branches and quite possibly the sound of leaves growing

What does a landscape sound like when it’s not being listened to? This philosophical question was a catalyst for film-maker and artist Joshua Bonnetta, who has distilled a year of recordings from a single tree in upstate New York – that’s 8,760 hours – into a four-hour album, The Pines. As Robert Macfarlane writes in his accompanying essay, The Pines is a reminder of the natural world’s “sheer, miraculous busyness”, its “froth of signals and noise”. It is rich with poetic meaning, and resonant amid the climate emergency.

“It started as a personal thing,” Bonnetta explains from his studio in Munich, where he relocated from the US in 2022. For over 20 years he has made sonic records of places as private mementos, but recent experiments with long-form field recording led him to push himself “to document this place in the deepest way I could”. On a residency in the Outer Hebrides between 2017 and 2019, Bonnetta made the sound installation Brackish , a month-long continuous radio broadcast from a weather-resistant hydrophone – an underwater mic – by a loch. “I started to leave the recorder for a day or two, then it just got longer,” he says. “Amazing things happen when you’re not there to interfere … This allows you a different, very privileged window into the space.”

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SoFi Stadium, Inglewood, California

The singer delivers a rousing, seven-act spectacle as she performs many of her country songs on stage for the first time while also harking back to her previous dance-leaning era

Beyoncé doesn’t just take the stage – she takes the narrative back. On opening night of her Cowboy Carter world tour at the four-year-old SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, she brings forth a sweeping, theatrical spectacle that reclaims country music, reframes American identity and reminds everyone who’s still driving pop’s evolution after all these years. Her nearly three-hour, seven-act performance draws heavily from Cowboy Carter – her Grammy-winning country epic – and threads in nods to Renaissance, the ballroom-infused predecessor that lit up stadiums barely two years ago. Rather than stake a claim in country, Beyoncé goes deeper: celebrating the Black roots of the genre and exploding its boundaries with precision, power and polish.

Outside SoFi, vendors hawk more cowboy hats than you’d see at a Los Tigres del Norte show. Inside, anticipation sizzles. Projected across the massive stage-length screen: CHITLIN’ CIRCUIT – a nod to the historic Black music venues where blues, country and rock took shape. The show begins with American Requiem – the Sign o’ the Times-drizzled opener from Cowboy Carter – followed by a haunting Blackbiird. Then comes a defining moment: a Hendrix-inspired Star-Spangled Banner, laced with the thunder of Freedom, flashing red, white and blue. The screen reads: “Never ask permission for something that already belongs to you.”

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The acclaimed writer of His Dark Materials says the third volume in The Book of Dust series will portray a ‘dangerous, breathtaking quest’

Philip Pullman has revealed he will tell the final part of Lyra Silvertongue’s story in The Rose Field, which will come out this autumn.

It has been six years since a book about Lyra has been published – and 30 since readers first encountered her in Northern Lights, the first in Pullman’s His Dark Materials children’s fantasy trilogy. The bestselling novels, which have since been adapted into a TV series by the BBC, take place across a multiverse and feature “dæmons” – physical manifestations of a person’s soul that take the form of animals.

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The American actor told Bill Maher’s podcast that he had asked Quincy Jones about the singer’s sexuality and felt he couldn’t ‘play that character 100%’

The actor Terrence Howard has said that he declined the role of Marvin Gaye in a film, because he didn’t want to kiss another man.

Speaking to Bill Maher on his Club Random podcast, the actor said the “biggest mistake” of his career was turning down the leading role in a separate biopic of the singer Smokey Robinson – which Robinson had personally asked him to play.

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Edward Berger will helm the Ridley Scott-produced screen version of the 1994 novel by Tim Winton, which has been in development in various incarnations for 25 years

Edward Berger, whose papal thriller Conclave won best film at the Baftas and was nominated for eight Oscars, has signed on to direct Brad Pitt in a big-screen version of Tim Winton’s novel The Riders.

The film will be financed by US studio A24, produced by Ridley Scott and written by David Kajganich, a frequent collaborator of Luca Guadagnino.

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Monty Python and the Holy Grail is widely considered to be among the best comedy films of all time, and it's certainly one of the most quotable. This absurdist masterpiece sending up Arthurian legend turns 50 (!) this year.

It was partly Python member Terry Jones' passion for the Middle Ages and Arthurian legend that inspired Holy Grail and its approach to comedy. (Jones even went on to direct a 2004 documentary, Medieval Lives .) The troupe members wrote several drafts beginning in 1973, and Jones and Terry Gilliam were co-directors—the first full-length feature for each, so filming was one long learning process. Reviews were mixed when Holy Grail was first released—much like they were for Young Frankenstein (1974), another comedic masterpiece—but audiences begged to differ. It was the top-grossing British film screened in the US in 1975. And its reputation has only grown over the ensuing decades.

The film's broad cultural influence extends beyond the entertainment industry. Holy Grail has been the subject of multiple scholarly papers examining such topics as its effectiveness at teaching Arthurian literature or geometric thought and logic, the comedic techniques employed, and why the depiction of a killer rabbit is so fitting (killer rabbits frequently appear drawn in the margins of Gothic manuscripts). My personal favorite was a 2018 tongue-in-cheek paper on whether the Black Knight could have survived long enough to make good on his threat to bite King Arthur's legs off (tl;dr: no).

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Spanish director compared the US president to Franco and said he wondered whether it was appropriate to visit country while he is in power

The veteran Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has launched a broadside against the US president, Donald Trump, while accepting an award in New York.

Speaking on stage at the Lincoln Center on Monday evening, he said he had been in two minds as to whether to travel to the US to pick up his Chaplin award.

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She started singing in her family’s yurt before a Goethe-Institut residency led her to jazz and life in Munich. The distance from home is ‘bittersweet’ – but both styles, she says, are about trusting your instinct

Growing up in the icy Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, singing was as natural as speech for Enkhjargal Erkhembayar. “Every day after my parents came home from working in the local power factory, they would gather with a group of friends in our yurt to unwind and someone would always begin to sing,” she says. “Soon, we would all join in, singing old folk songs to keep warm and to express ourselves long into the night.”

As Enji, 33-year-old Erkhembayar is now taking this music into international concert halls, having forged a beguiling hybrid of Mongolian folk music with acoustic jazz improvisation. She anchors her performances in the circular-breathing vocal style of Mongolian long song – a folk tradition where syllables are elongated through freeform vocalisations – her delivery tender and delicate, full of yearning emotion.

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