Globe theatre, London
A spunky Helena and an inspired Puck elicit cheers and laughter in Emily Lim’s generous, creative and clever show

I can’t remember the last time I got the giggles in the theatre but director Emily Lim’s joyful take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream just about undid me. It’s generous, creative and clever, always with an eye to making the audience feel included. With gloriously extravagant costumes (concept by Fly Davis), a set that spontaneously blooms from designer Aldo Vázquez, hearty folk music by Jim Fortune and effervescent comic performances, this is the rarest of things: a Dream the whole family can enjoy. Just cover the kids’ eyes for the slightly naughtier bits.

The Globe is the perfect space for Lim who has spent much of her career folding drama and community together, particularly on the National Theatre’s Public Acts project. The audience interaction elements aren’t just a fun add-on here but a vital part of the show. In fact, we’re so fully integrated into the action that in the closing scenes, one happy spectator – as part of a brilliant running gag – joins Puck on stage for a hand-tying ceremony to spontaneous cheers all round.

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Coventry-supporting Japanese has used his rebel streak and risk-taking instincts to spur on Oliver Bearman this season

There is no one quite like Ayao Komatsu in Formula One. Haas’s Japanese team principal, a rugby-playing Coventry City fan who left his home country to escape the constraints of conformity, is F1’s rebel without a pause.

As Haas enter their first home race of the season in Miami this weekend, they are on no little roll. Fourth place in the championship is the highest position held by a US team after three races in the sport’s history and Komatsu has engineered it in a sport he once viewed as his great escape.

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Yiewsley by Daljit Nagra; Mer de Glace by Małgorzata Lebda; The Intentions of Thunder by Patricia Smith; Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak by Rishi Dastidar; Dark Night by St John of the Cross, translated by Martha Sprackland

Yiewsley by Daljit Nagra (Faber, £14.99)
Given the relish with which Nagra pushes and pulls at English, it’s worth noting that Yiewsley is a real west London suburb. This location allows him to continue his career-long exploration of childhood working-class Sikh experience and, through it, wider questions of identity. But as Nagra turns 60, location is becoming increasingly a matter of time as well as space. The classic struggle of each first generation to arrive in Britain, and the pressure on its kids to make good, now sits within a 1960s and 70s time capsule. Enoch Powell and the National Front cast violent shadows, but parkas, school blancmange and cricket strike a sweeter, almost elegiac note.

Mer de Glace by Małgorzata Lebda, translated by Mira Rosenthal (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Much as they have in prose, Fitzcarraldo are awakening British poetry publishing to the glamour of braininess. Mer de Glace is named for a dying French glacier, but the sequence is set on the 1,047km-long Polish river Vistula, along which Lebda ran in 2021. Images of fires and firesides recur: we are all of us out in a wild, vulnerable world. This is ecopoetry at its most profound and informal, challenging and pleasurable. Rosenthal’s quietly fluent translations give us “books that help us close the mouth of night”, light as “Baltic mercury” and, as the runner nears the end of her journey, a “pelvis tilting / towards the open sea”.

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The Artemis missions are paving the way to civilizational decisions. It’s time to ask not just what we can do – but whether we should do it

This month’s splashdown of Artemis II was rightly celebrated as a technical achievement. Four astronauts traveled farther from Earth than any humans in history and returned safely. It is an extraordinary thing to send people into deep space and bring them home again. Nobody should deny that.

But the real significance of Artemis II lies elsewhere.

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Myth, ritual and community are drawing new energy and believers to Devon town on edge of Dartmoor

Stroll through the Devon town of Ashburton, or pop into the Old Exeter Inn on West Street, and you’re almost bound to bump into a storyteller, a mythologist, a pagan – perhaps even a friendly witch.

The town on the edge of craggy Dartmoor, home to about 4,000 people, is becoming a magnet to those drawn to the old folky ways and the reimagining of 21st-century versions of earthy rural traditions.

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With a feral energy and a Liam Gallagher growl, the Dublin band’s beguiling music is a great evolution of a venerable genre

From Dublin
Recommended if you like Lankum, the Mary Wallopers, the Pogues
Up next Debut EP It’s a Hell of an Age out now, playing festivals this summer and touring the UK in autumn

Madra Salach means “dirty dog” in Irish, which feels about right for a group of lads bringing a feral, snarling energy to the country’s latest folk revival. Their sound builds ably on some of the architects of that resurgence – the eerie shruti box droning and carefully layered instrumentation of Lankum, the shimmering wails of Lisa O’Neill. Add a hint of Liam Gallagher to the mix – frontman Paul Banks’s voice has an astonishing force and clarity, and he affects a tempestuous, attack-and-withdraw relationship with the microphone – and you’ve got a very exciting package indeed.

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New law proposes up to 20 years in prison for promoting ‘foreign interests’, and restricts those who work with or are funded by overseas partners

Ugandan opposition figures, human rights organisations and legal experts have condemned a sweeping bill that proposes up to 20 years in prison for promoting “foreign interests”, and imposes restrictions on a broad range of people and organisations that work with or receive funding from overseas partners.

The protection of sovereignty bill 2026 is being fast tracked through parliament, with debate expected to conclude before the presidential swearing-in on 12 May.

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Claire Freemantle accused of causing death and serious injury by dangerous driving when 4x4 hit school in south London

Claire Freemantle, 49, has been charged with causing death and serious injury by dangerous driving after two eight-year-old girls were killed when a 4×4 crashed into a primary school in Wimbledon, south London, in July 2023.

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Against shifting party loyalties, Gaston Browne is on course to win 15 of the 17-seat parliament

Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, is set to win a fourth term in the country’s snap general election with preliminary results showing his Antigua and Barbuda Labour party (ABLP) on course to win 15 seats in the 17-seat parliament.

Addressing supporters early on Friday morning, Browne said: “You have spoken, you have spoken clearly. You have indicated that the Antigua and Barbuda Labour party is the best institution to run this country.”

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