Speaking after his best actor victory, Lithgow said Donald Trump’s administration ‘has done some shocking, destructive things’ especially its takeover of the Kennedy Center

The actor John Lithgow has described Donald Trump’s second presidency as “a pure disaster” for the arts in the US. Lithgow, speaking after his best actor victory at the Olivier awards in London on Sunday, singled out Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center , Washington DC’s national institution for the performing arts. “Our administration has done some shocking, destructive things,” he said, “but the one that grieves me most is taking over the Kennedy Center.”

The US president is now chair of the prestigious cultural complex (which was founded as a government-funded, bipartisan venue) and has installed new board members and a new interim leader, loyalist Ric Grenell. The board had been in the process of selecting a successor to outgoing leader Deborah Rutter, who in January announced her intention to step down after 11 years.

Atmospheric fantasy sees paladin Bhodie enter a cursed realm and die on repeat to rescue a red-haired maiden

Maybe it’s because of a sense that we are expendable parts in the great capitalist machine, that the endlessly repeating death trope has been increasingly respawning in movies – from Edge of Tomorrow to Mickey 17 and now this Canadian sword’n’sorcery caper. With its sisyphean vibe and implacable mood, it also owes a fair bit to the Dark Souls video games; though it’s not a masterpiece on that level, it nevertheless has a grim self-conviction that grips despite its low-budget limitations.

Paladin Bhodie (Jeremy Ninaber) – who apparently asked the barber for the Gondor bob and beard trim – agrees to enter a cursed realm to rescue red-haired maiden Avalon (Kristen Kaster), who is central to a humanity-saving prophecy. Needing to collect three magic stones to open up an exit portal, he makes a pact with the Keeper demon (Shane Nicely) for a magic talisman that can resurrect him enough times to beat the stones’ guardians. It turns out Avalon – no slouch with the steel herself – has made the same arrangement, only to die multiple deaths at the hands of the first adversaries: a pair of bloodthirsty witches.

Bandmates pay tribute to friend and ‘Ace of Bass’ who helped forge the post-punk band’s sound

Dave Allen, the bassist for British post-punks Gang of Four, has died aged 69. His surviving bandmates, vocalist Jon King and drummer Hugo Burnham, said that Allen had been suffering from early-onset mixed dementia.

Burnham said in a statement: “It is with broken yet full hearts that we share the news that Dave Allen, our old music partner, friend, and brilliant musician, died on Saturday morning. He was at home with his family.”

Kate Folk on Sky Daddy, a book about sex, death and plane crashes that’s taking off in these turbulent times

If we told our forebears that we could soar in the sky nearly seven miles above the ground, they would stare at us agog. But now air travel is one big grumble: it’s degrading, everyone is ill-mannered and you used to get free peanuts in this country, but now the peanuts are not free. Air travel, like everything else, is about the politics of resentment. The skies are feeling a lot less friendly, and that’s before you get to a year in which Americans have experienced profound tragedy in the air , as well as significant cuts to an already strained Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

In this turbulent time for flying lands Sky Daddy, the unusual debut novel by Kate Folk, a San Francisco author and screenwriter whose short story collection Out There was released in 2022. Sky Daddy is narrated by a woman called Linda who, like many of us, lives her life in dogged pursuit of love. She just wants that love to come from a commercial airplane in free fall. “I believed this was my destiny,” Linda tells us, “for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate mid-flight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity.”

The actor said he was ‘barbecued’ after a complaint on the set of Being Mortal in 2022, which shut down production on the film

Bill Murray has said he feels he was “barbecued” by a sexual misconduct allegation on the set of a 2022 comedy, which led to the film being cancelled and his reaching a financial settlement with the woman who accused him of straddling her and kissing her.

“It wasn’t like I touched her,” said Murray to the New York Times in a new interview. “I gave her a kiss through a mask. And she wasn’t a stranger.”

Murray defended his actions to the paper, saying that the complainant was “someone that I worked with, that I had had lunch with on various days of the week”. The actor put his actions down to trying to be amusing in a strained and claustrophobic setting.

Kings Place, London
A chamber reduction of Das Lied von der Erde formed the centrepiece of this spring-themed concert

Back when Mahler’s symphonies were still rarely played in Britain – and, yes, there really was such a time – Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) was the most familiar of his major orchestral works. Much of that was the legacy of Kathleen Ferrier’s inimitable recording of Das Leid’s final song, Der Abschied (The Farewell) under Bruno Walter before her early death in 1953. But then came the Mahler renaissance of the 1960s and performances of The Song of the Earth – in effect a six-movement song symphony for tenor and alto – became part of the new and much more varied Mahlerian picture.

Renewed interest in chamber reductions of Mahler has been part of this change. Iain Farrington’s version of Das Lied for the Aurora Orchestra is the latest example, and formed the centrepiece of this spring-themed concert under Nicholas Collon. As with Arnold Schoenberg’s 20th-century version, completed by Rainer Riehn, the reduction is abrupt, with just a handful of solo strings and winds in place of a full orchestra. But most of the detail is still there, allowing the winds to be heard with particular clarity, and, under Collon’s fluent and vigorous direction, it still packs a true Mahlerian punch.

The next entry in our series of writers highlighting their go-to comfort watches is a look back to the 1961 Tony Hancock comedy

For me, memorable and/or uplifting film experiences tend to be around individual moments – the resurrection scene in The Matrix for example, or Dizzy’s “ I got to have you ” in Starship Troopers. (Do either really hold a candle to Mel Brooks’s A Little Piece of Poland number in the To Be Or Not to Be remake? The jury is still out.) But without wanting to sound like either a retro bore or a they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to fuddy-duddy, I turn to Tony Hancock’s yuk-heavy feature vehicle from 1961 for its unfailing ability to cheer me up.

I think I must have first watched it in the 1980s on TV, after my dad solemnly recited one of the film’s great moments , when Hancock offers a hunk of cheese to a blue-lipsticked beatnik Nanette Newman and says, with a sort of slack-jawed terror: “You do eat food?” Newman, as it happens, is perhaps The Rebel’s most amazing sight: otherwise known as the apparently-prim English star of the first Stepford Wives movie, a middlebrow popular-culture staple in the UK for her washing-up liquid TV commercials , she is tricked out here in a fantastic exi get-up – dead-white face paint, Nefertiti eyeliner, lank copper-coloured hairdo – at almost the exact same moment in time that the Beatles were being talked into ditching their teddy boy quiff.

Sketched in cinematic black and white, this illustrated interpretation of the late author’s postmodern detective novel is a ‘stone-cold masterpiece’

It was a wrong number that started it – literally in the case of The New York Trilogy . In 1980, or thereabouts, Paul Auster twice answered the phone, only to hear a voice ask: “Is this the Pinkerton Agency?” (Pinkerton is a legendary American detective bureau.) He told the caller they had a wrong number, yet he was soon filled with regret. Here, surely, was a story: why hadn’t he asked any questions? But never mind. While a third call never arrived, in its place came inspiration. Out of the disappointing silence, Auster spun the first volume of his trilogy, City of Glass , a literary hall of mirrors that made him famous.

City of Glass was published in 1985. Nine years later, under the brilliant eye of Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus , Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli created a graphic adaption of the book, produced with Auster’s approval, and it was widely acclaimed as a work of art in its right. Only now, however, is the cartoon form of the trilogy at last complete. Ghosts , the second volume, has been drawn by Lorenzo Mattotti , an Eisner award-winning Italian comics artist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker and Le Monde , while The Locked Room is again the work of Karasik , a celebrated figure in comics (he began his career at Raw , the magazine run by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly). Both were overseen by Auster before his death in April last year, at the age of 77.

Amid awkward kisses and fears of fainting, winners at the Royal Albert Hall thanked their collaborators, spouses … and chartered accountants

Director Robert Icke on the unexpected effect of staging the tragedy Oedipus:

We’ve had such a nice time – it turns out incest really brings people together!

Romola, I think I’m going to faint!

I just won an Olivier for playing an iceberg!

I would like to thank Annie Ernaux for reminding us all that the story of a normal woman’s life can be extraordinary

There are four nominees and I don’t understand how you can choose between these four handsome hunks

Thank you to Rosenblatt and Hytner. Which sounds like three people doesn’t it? Like a firm of chartered accountants. Rosen, Blatt and Hytner. I’d use them. Thanks to all three of you!

Trust me to make it awkward with a kiss!