Anna Boghiguian sinks a boat in Margate, Emma Critchley takes soundings in St Ives and Guy Oliver examines his masculine identity in Edinburgh – all in your weekly dispatch

Anna Boghiguian: The Sunken Boat: A Glimpse Into Past Histories
Decayed and broken boats, puppet-like figures and sand feature in a salty installation about the sea as a space of world history.
• Turner Contemporary, Margate , until 26 October

A huge brolly; sibling revelry; poetic Paris; first aid for youngsters; Regency blackmail; blackly comic YA fiction and more

A Totally Big Umbrella by Sarah Crossan, illustrated by Rebecca Cobb, Walker, £12.99
Rain ruins all Tallulah’s favourite things until she finds a really huge umbrella – but it’s so big it holds her back. Could there be worse things than getting wet? Enchanting and imaginative, this gentle, playful picture book addresses an anxious child’s need to find control.

The Elephant and the Piano by Colette Hiller , illustrated by Nabila Adani, Magic Cat, £7.99
Short-tempered and destructive, Bonti the elephant is all alone – until the music of a piano reaches him. A luminous, touching picture book, based on a true story.

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh
There’s a hint of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet in the cocksure, poppy aesthetic of this charismatic display of acrobatics, tumbling and clowning

It wouldn’t be the Edinburgh fringe without at least one new spin on Hamlet. This spunky 60-minute version created by Sam Landa and Emma Owens combines a radically trimmed text with aerial acrobatics, tumbling and clowning. Sensitively delivering Shakespearean verse and executing sophisticated circus requires a niche skill-set; some lines fall flat but Landa and Danielle Diniz’s choreography often deepens a story limited to the personal not the political. The enterprise is executed with panache by a charismatic cast of 10.

Who’s there? A ghost in white, twisting and turning to the song Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, later returning to use an aerial pyramid. The show casts Old Hamlet (Arthur Morel Van Hyfte) and Hamlet (Maddox Morfit-Tighe) at a similar age, which movingly emphasises how they see themselves in each other, although the ghost’s recurrent “remember me” voiceover sounds more horror movie than tragedy.

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
Faustus is not damned alone in a parable about western hubris leading to war, colonialism and environmental exploitation

As told by Goethe and Marlowe, the story of Faust is of one man’s journey into temptation. Having explored the outer limits of human knowledge, this renaissance man can go no further. Unless, that is, he signs a pact with the devil. In exchange for his soul, Mephistopheles gives him all the earthly pleasure and intellectual satisfaction he desires.

But sins have consequences and in this ambitious show by William Kentridge for South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company , a reworking of a 1995 production, Faustus does not take this journey towards damnation alone: the world comes with him. Now, his list of job titles extends to missionary and enslaver, and his travels across the African continent lead to war, exploitation and environmental catastrophe. If there were an eighth deadly sin, it would be that of colonialism.

High court rejects actor’s claim that accusations against him by more than 20 women were false and part of a conspiracy

The Guardian has successfully defended a libel action brought by the actor Noel Clarke over an investigation by the newspaper in which he was accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women.

In a high court judgment handed down on Friday, Mrs Justice Steyn rejected Clarke’s claim. He had said the allegations set out in the Guardian’s investigation were false and that he had been the victim of an unlawful conspiracy.

There were strong grounds to believe that over 15 years, he used his power to prey on and harass female colleagues.

He sometimes bullied female colleagues.

He engaged in unwanted sexual contact, kissing, touching or groping.

He engaged in sexually inappropriate behaviour and comments.

He was involved in professional misconduct.

He took and shared explicit pictures and videos without consent, including secretly filming a young actor’s naked audition.

The author on having to keep his love of books a secret as a child, struggling with JG Ballard, and the Russian poem he says is the ‘best thing I’ve ever read’

My earliest reading memory
Sitting on the floor while our primary teacher, Mrs Craig, read to us about Odysseus and the blinded Cyclops. The story transported me to a hillside on an island in ancient Greece. I think that moment put the idea in my head that books, the best ones, were a kind of magic.

My favourite book growing up
In my teens I stopped reading, like lots of boys. My mum was the only bookish person in our family, almost everyone else was obsessed with our farm. My grandma scolded me one day for reading in daylight hours; she said there couldn’t possibly be so little to do on the farm that a boy should sit and read a book. She swept me out of her kitchen to find some work to do. And I felt ashamed that she thought I was idle.

(Tan Cressida/Warner Records)
With a sunlit disposition and paeans to his daughter, the mood turns lighter on the US MC’s sixth album – but the glitching, crashing beats are as esoteric as ever

The launch party for Earl Sweatshirt’s sixth album was, by all accounts, a confounding affair. Some attenders came away convinced that Live Laugh Love contained guest appearances not merely by Vince Staples, but actor/rapper Donald Glover and comedian Dave Chappelle (it doesn’t, although all three contributed to a fanzine produced for the event). At one juncture, the DJ announced the arrival of “my brother, Earl Sweatshirt” before the appearance of someone who was visibly not Earl Sweatshirt – he was Asian, and apparently goes under the winning stage name Gary Underpants – performing a succession of Earl Sweatshirt songs. In the aftermath, at least one online music title didn’t seem sure whether it actually was a launch party for a new album or “an elaborate prank”: would a man whose grim worldview seemed summed up by the title of 2015’s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside really release something called Live Laugh Love?

Of course, Earl Sweatshirt has form when it comes to confounding album launches: Sweatshirt’s last album, 2023’s Voir Dire , was secretly available on YouTube under a fake name for at least three years before it was officially released, according to its producer the Alchemist. And more broadly, this kind of thing fits with Earl Sweatshirt’s idiosyncratic approach to his career.

(XL Recordings)
Marcus Brown’s second album makes a plea for big feelings in earthy vocals, rolling breakbeats and a contender for song of the summer

Marcus Brown is a diehard romantic. His second album as Nourished By Time might be darker and more dystopian than his critically acclaimed debut , but at its core remains a bloody, beating heart. Absorbing and cinematic, The Passionate Ones expands Brown’s unique vision for post-R&B: his aching, tremulous, earthy vocals swim under rolling Baltimore club breakbeats, flickering synths, gated reverb and uncanny looping samples. And all the while, he makes a plea for big feelings in the face of a numbing world.

Blaring as if from a busted speaker, opening track Automatic Love transforms boyband-y platitudes – “my body won’t feel nothing until my skin touches you” – into lyrics with real jeopardy, sharpened by the threat of looming societal collapse. Max Potential , a big 80s synth-rock number, co-opts corporate language to marvel at the pain of heartbreak, treating it as a fluorescent sign of life. Often Brown sings with such wide-mouthed, full-hearted commitment that he could be laughing or crying, but single Baby Baby is witty and aloof, with casual talk-singing and a surfy guitar line as he calls for a global strike to “make the gravy train stop”.

Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan lead a star-packed adaptation of Richard Osman’s popular murder mystery series – plus Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning mafia classic

Richard Osman’s wildly popular series of mystery novels has, inevitably, reached our screens, with Chris Columbus taking on the first book. We’re very much in “cosy crime” country – no Glass Onion-style knowing winks here – with the action set in and around a well-heeled rural retirement home. Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth, who used to be in “international affairs”, is the prime mover of the titular cold case investigation group, which also includes former trade unionist Ron (Pierce Brosnan), psychiatrist Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley) and Celia Imrie’s nurse/cake obsessive Joyce. The murder of a co-owner of the home leads the quartet on a lightly comic, reliably twisty hunt for the killer.
Thursday 28 August, Netflix