Hawaii: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans review – a feather-filled thriller full of gods, gourds and ghosts

British Museum, LondonThis retelling of Captain Cook’s death and the merging of two cultures is a trove of miraculously preserved wonders – but beware of the shark-toothed club!Relations between Britain and the Pacific kingdom of Hawaii didn’t get off to a great start. On 14 February 1779 the global explorer James Cook was clubbed and stabbed to death at Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay in a dispute over a boat: it was a tragedy of cultural misunderstanding that still has anthropologists arguing over its meaning. Cook had previously visited Hawaii and apparently been identified as the god Lono, but didn’t know this. Marshall Sahlins argued that Cook was killed because by coming twice he transgressed the Lono myth, while another anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere, attacked him for imposing colonialist assumptions of “native” irrationality on the Hawaiians.It’s a fascinating, contentious debate

Three board members and board chair resign from Adelaide festival as Randa Abdel-Fattah sends legal notice

The Adelaide festival is facing an unprecedented leadership crisis after three board members resigned this weekend.The journalist Daniela Ritorto, the Adelaide businesswoman Donny Walford and the lawyer Nick Linke stepped down at an extraordinary board meeting on Saturday following the board’s controversial decision to dump the Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the 2026 writers’ week program.Separately on Sunday evening, festival board chair Tracey Whiting confirmed that she had decided to resign, “effective immediately”.She did not detail her reasons for resigning, saying only in a statement: “Recent decisions were bound by certain undertakings and my resignation enables the Adelaide Festival, as an organisation, to refresh its leadership and its approach to these circumstances.”“My tenure as Chair has been immensely enjoyable, as has working with the terrific AF team

Adelaide festival did not dump Jewish columnist from 2024 program despite request from Randa Abdel-Fattah and others

The Adelaide festival board did not dump a Jewish columnist from its 2024 lineup at Adelaide writers’ week, despite being lobbied by a group of 10 academics – including Randa Abdel-Fattah – to do so.On Saturday South Australia’s premier, Peter Malinauskas, claimed that the board had dumped the New York Times pro-Israel columnist Thomas Friedman in 2024, and reiterated his support for the festival board’s decision on Thursday to remove Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian Australian academic, from this year’s program.“I note the Adelaide Festival also made its own decision to remove a Jewish writer from the Adelaide Writers’ Week program in 2024 in very similar circumstances,” Malinauskas told the Guardian through a spokesperson on Saturday.“I support that decision, and the consistent application of this principle.”On Saturday News Corp publications picked up on the premier’s statement, reporting the apparent inconsistency between the public outcry against Abdel-Fattah’s removal compared with the alleged removal of Friedman two years earlier, which did not ignite the massive boycott the writers’ week is now seeing, making the 2026 event look increasingly untenable

Eddie Izzard: ‘I once ran 90km in just under 12 hours. That was a tough day’

When you started performing your one-woman Hamlet, how much did you labour over your delivery of the play’s most iconic lines, such as “To be or not to be”?The first thing I found when I was rehearsing Hamlet was that I felt very at home. I thought, “That’s unusual – I should be quaking in my boots!” I just felt very at ease and happy to be there. But the first time I performed “to be or not to be” on stage, there was a sense of – aren’t bells supposed to ring here? Isn’t there supposed to be a klaxon?I come to “to be” in a slightly different way each night so hopefully the audience haven’t seen it done that way before. I was a street performer for years, so I know how to talk to an audience, which is what they were doing in Shakespeare’s time; they were performing to the people, not at them. Actors got into this fourth-wall thing in the 1800s, it wasn’t there in Elizabethan times

My cultural awakening: Losing My Religion by REM helped me escape a doomsday cult

In 1991, I was living in a commune with 200 other people in Japan, as a member of a cult called the Children of God, which preached that the world was going to end in 1993. Everything I did – from where I slept each night, to who I was allowed to sleep with – was decided by the head of my commune. I was encouraged to keep a diary, and then turn it over to the leaders every night, so they could comb through it for signs of dissent. I was only allowed to listen to cult-sanctioned music, and I was only allowed to watch movies with happy endings, because those were the types of films of which the cult’s supreme leader – David Berg – approved. The Sound of Music was one of Berg’s favourite films, so we watched it on repeat

From Hamnet to Bridget Christie: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

HamnetOut now Bring the tissues for this emotional Oscar hopeful which sees Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley star as none other than William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, whose son Hamnet died at the age of 11. It is based on the book by Maggie O’Farrell, and Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) directs.David Lynch: The DreamerBFI Southbank & BFI Imax, London, to 31 JanuaryMarking what would have been the director’s 80th birthday, this new season includes screenings of key films such as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, as well as lesser-seen work, such as six of his short films and all eight episodes of his animated webseries Dumbland. There’s even a David Lynch VJ night and a quiz evening.GiantOut now Up and coming star Amir El-Masry toplines this sports drama depicting the rise of British boxer Prince Naseem Hamed, from untested no-mark all the way to world champion – with a little help from trainer Brendan Ingle (Pierce Brosnan)