Is actor Michael Sheen the right person to rescue Welsh theatre?

Amid closures and financial cuts, Sheen is using his clout to stimulate interest and investment in the Welsh stage. A celebrity force for good? Or is he taking the spotlight away from other, vital arts organisations?Can one star save Welsh theatre? On a spring morning in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre (WMC), 180 people are thronging for the answers. We’re in the Awen bar next to the gorgeous 1,900-capacity Donald Gordon theatre, which last summer staged the hit play Nye, about NHS founder Aneurin Bevan. This experience inspired its lead actor, Michael Sheen, to set up the new Welsh National Theatre (WNT), as he tells us today, scruffy-bearded and check-shirted, bouncing around a much smaller, makeshift stage. “Listen,” he says, responding to an apology for this stage’s minuteness, “I’ve acted in Aberavon shopping centre, so I’m used to being on anything

‘You wouldn’t pick us out as mother and daughter!’: Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter on acting together for the first time

Bridgerton star Bessie – soon to play Nancy Mitford in a new TV drama – and her mum, acting royalty Imelda, talk Sondheim, sandwiches and taking the stage together in Shaw’s sex worker scandal Mrs Warren’s Profession‘It’s amazing that I came from you,” says Bessie Carter to her mother, Imelda Staunton, during a break in rehearsals for the forthcoming revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession, in which they’ll play a mother and daughter and share a stage for the first time. She has a point. Carter, 31, best known as Bridgerton’s Prudence Featherington, is 5ft 10 and aquiline, glamorous in a maroon leather coat and silver-studded shoes. Staunton, 69, is barely 5ft tall, quiet and unassuming in slacks and a blouse, short grey hair pinned back.There’s no hint of grandeur to this theatrical dame, who was Oscar-nominated for her performance in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake in 2004, played Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter series from 2007 and was the last iteration of Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s The Crown

Julio Torres: ‘When I worked at SNL, I thought Shawn Mendes was an intern’

Your first comedy show was called My Favorite Shapes. What is your least favourite shape?A pentagon. Or an octagon. There’s a rigidity to it that I find displacing.What’s the oldest thing you own and why do you still have it?You know, I was just going into what I refer to as the forbidden closet in my apartment, which is just a door that I never open

On my radar: Kit de Waal’s cultural highlights

Born in Birmingham in 1960, Mandy Theresa O’Loughlin is better known as author Kit de Waal. After a career as a magistrate specialising in adoption and foster care, she studied creative writing at Oxford Brookes University. Her debut novel, My Name Is Leon, was published in 2016, winning the Kerry Group Irish novel of the year award. De Waal, who chairs this year’s judging panel for the Women’s prize for fiction, is a fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, where she set up a scholarship for writers from marginalised backgrounds. Her latest book, The Best of Everything, is out now (Tinder Press

Olly Alexander review – part night creature, part light entertainer

Palladium, LondonThe singer and actor hints at an outre new synth-heavy sound, drawn largely from latest album Polari. He stops short, though, of scaring his daytime TV fans“I’m all about playful subversion,” declares Olly Alexander with a grin on the final night of his UK tour. Clad in a series of outfits whose shiny buttons nod towards London’s pearly kings and queens and the dressing-up box – there’s one handily located on the left side of the stage – he is outlining the essence of Polari, the slang once used by the LGBTQ+ community, showfolk and the denizens of London’s Soho, as was.Evolving out of the vocabularies of Italian immigrants and Travellers to evade the understanding of law enforcement and mainstream society in the 19th and early-mid 20th centuries, Polari also doubles as the title of Alexander’s latest, queer-club pop-themed album. Released two months ago, it was the first under his own name; previously, he had traded as Years & Years, first as a band, then as a solo project

From The Return to The Last of Us: a complete guide to this week’s entertainment

The ReturnOut now Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) washes up looking like something the cat dragged in after 20 years away at the Trojan wars. Penelope (Juliette Binoche), his wife, has troubles of her own: a bunch of unwelcome suitors plotting to marry her and kill her son. An adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey notable for reuniting the leads of The English Patient.The AmateurOut now Rami Malek is a CIA decoder whose world is turned upside down when his wife is killed. But knowledge is, as they say, power, so he attempts to put his work in intelligence to a new purpose: personal revenge