theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall, Edinburgh
This playful performance explores loneliness, liberty and life in early adulthood through two adventurous cats and their demanding humans

Ellie Rose Amit and Charlotte Pine’s comedy about cats includes grooming, a spot of the zoomies and plenty of needy behaviour. But the joke is that these are the traits of two demanding pet owners: overanxious Shira, who has confined Iris to life as a house cat, and the vain Arlan, who makes Jeffabelle do tricks for TikTok.

Produced by Leeds University’s Aireborne Theatre, and directed by Amit, it’s full of promise and proof that student performance – increasingly priced out of the fringe – is vital to the Edinburgh festival ecology.

Monkey Barrel, the Hive, Edinburgh
The Edinburgh comedy award nominee ambles through tales of debt, chicken shops and his eccentric grandad in a show that’s loose but brimming with intelligent wit

‘If there’s one thing this show doesn’t do, it’s come to you,” says Ed Night. That’s part of the charm – and possibly a slight failing – in the south London standup’s new set. As he treads around in a circle on his small stage, Your Old Mucker unfolds at its own laconic pace, and leaves us to make meaning out of its disparate parts. The 29-year-old’s authority, his sly standoffishness and playfulness with the art form are qualities of a standup near the top of his game – albeit one who with this ambling, endearing show doesn’t get quite as much out of them as he might.

The conceit here is that Night’s writing process is, in fact, a walking one. The show traces his perambulations around his local neighbourhood, from the dentist to the butcher, from Nisa Local to the betting shop, connecting with friends and local characters along the way. Dotted throughout are references to his late grandad, whose eccentricities (a penchant for filling biscuit tins with not-biscuits; a circumcision in his 80s) are to grandson Ed a wonder and inspiration.

This newspaper’s victory in court underlines the courage of the women who spoke up and how in TV power shielded abuse

The high court’s dismissal of the actor Noel Clarke’s case against the Guardian is about more than one actor’s failed libel claim. Mrs Justice Steyn’s judgment is about power and complicity as well as the failure to protect vulnerable people. In her verdict, she agreed with the Guardian that there were “strong grounds to believe that [Clarke] is a serial abuser of women”.

The court heard testimony from 26 witnesses before concluding that Clarke had engaged in harassment, bullying and abuse of power over many years. The judge accepted some of his evidence, but found him to be neither credible or reliable. The Guardian’s journalists, by contrast, were meticulous and gave Clarke reasonable opportunity to respond as well as fairly presenting his denials. Without women speaking up, Clarke would never have been exposed.

The Talented Mr Ripley gets an upgrade in a buzzy and biting film about a desperate outsider who infiltrates the inner circle of a singer on the rise

If Tom Ripley lived in LA in 2018 and was really into lo-fi bedroom pop, he might look something like the main character of Lurker . The debut feature from Alex Russell, The Bear and Beef writer-producer, is an elegantly creepy thriller about one super-fan’s scheme to become close to his musical idol, transposing author Patricia Highsmith’s “two-man theme” into a murkier grey territory, with parasitic attachment giving way to co-dependence that blooms into something that looks like a twisted kind of love.

The lurker of the title is Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), an isolated twentysomething who lives with his grandma and works shifts at a local vintage boutique to make ends meet. After a chance run-in with his idol Oliver (Saltburn’s Archie Madekwe) at the vintage store where he works, Matthew worms his way into Oliver’s entourage and makes himself indispensable – first as a videographer, then confidante and then as someone who has the power to make Oliver’s enviable life come crashing down. “The thing I found relatable is that no one tells you how lonely being any version of an artist is,” says Madekwe. “Oliver needs someone outside the paid [members of his team] to say ‘Yeah, I fuck with it. I get it. You’re so real.’ He needs it because he knows that he’s a bit of a fraud anyway.”

Ian Comfort calls for government to recognise cultural importance of event and guarantee its sustainable future

About 2 million people are expected to take to the streets this weekend at the annual Notting Hill carnival for its mix of music, food and Caribbean culture, but for the man who runs it, there is a sense of relief to see it taking place at all.

The chair of Notting Hill Carnival Ltd, Ian Comfort, told the Guardian that the event needed to secure a sustainable future after a year of funding rows , public disagreements with the Met police , and negative press after violence last year.

The Force Awakens and its follow-ups had so few memorable characters, it’s a wonder Disney – and Oscar Isaac – are still talking about potential spin-offs

There might just be a strange irony to this week’s news that Oscar Isaac, AKA the tousled X-wing pilot Poe Dameron, is up for a return to Star Wars if the script is right. Because before the actor’s comments in a new interview with Variety , it was quite possible to forget that the sequel trilogy ever existed. Was The Force Awakens really a film, or just two hours of Disney rummaging through George Lucas’s recycling bin? Did The Last Jedi split the fanbase so violently that Brexit looked like a parking dispute? And could The Rise of Skywalker really have stunk that badly?

The problem with the post-Lucas films is that they never quite decided what they wanted to be. The Force Awakens tried nostalgia cosplay. The Last Jedi tried to set fire to nostalgia cosplay. The Rise of Skywalker then tried to urgently stitch nostalgia back together again. The result was messy, divisive, and – crucially for Disney – almost impossible to spin off.

Theatre Royal Bath
The actor’s minimal staging of the Shakespeare comedy favours stillness and feeling over comic fizz, with moving performances from Gloria Obianyo and Amber James

Ralph Fiennes has proven himself to be a Shakespearean actor with gravitas over the decades. He brings that weight to his directorial stage debut of a Shakespeare play – and a comedy at that. Not exactly known for his comic chops (there is the odd Wes Anderson film in his oeuvre), Fiennes brings a depth to this pastoral about tyrant brothers and exiles that dares to venture into sombreness. It gives the drama a fuller body without taking away from its mischief.

Played in modern dress, the court of Duke Frederick (Patrick Robinson) is less a kingdom than a suited and booted corporation. Although his usurped brother, Duke Senior (also played by Robinson) bears vestiges of the boardroom in his demeanour, he and his band of self-exiled dukes seem to have built an alternative community in the forest of Arden, inclusive, kind and living alongside nature rather than seeking a Prospero-like dominion over it.

Cambridge Dictionary’s annual release of its new entrants is a great measure of how functionally old you are

My goodness, is it time for the Cambridge Dictionary’s annual release of the new words that have made it into its hallowed listings already! It seems to come round quicker every year, doesn’t it? Possibly that should be “more quickly”. Their grammarian splinter group will let me know.

This flimsy documentary from the makers of The Tinder Swindler looks at the alleged white supremacist attack on an actor – who was accused of faking the whole thing, before charges were dropped. It’s icky, irresponsible television

In January 2019, news outlets across the world reported that the actor Jussie Smollett had been the victim of a particularly vile and disturbing hate crime. Smollett – who was, at the time, best known for his leading role in Fox’s music drama Empire – had been set upon in the early hours of the morning in his Chicago neighbourhood by two white men who had racially and homophobically abused him (Smollett is gay and mixed race). During a bitter cold snap in the city, the men had poured bleach on him and even tied a noose around his neck, while declaring they were in “Maga country”. The resulting deluge of support for Smollett is recounted in the opening of this documentary, with even Donald Trump describing the attack as “horrible … it doesn’t get any worse”.

These days, Smollett is no longer best known for his role on Empire but for his participation in what is widely understood to have been a hoax, organised by the actor and carried out for a fee by two acquaintances, brothers Akimbola (Bola) and Olabinjo Osundairo (Ola). The idea the Osundairos – who are of Nigerian heritage – had perpetrated a fake white supremacist attack made the case into instant meme fodder, while subsequent legal proceedings saw Smollett charged with having staged the whole thing.