Metropolitan gatekeeping has kept Marlowe marginalised | Letters

The Guardian’s call to re-read and honour Christopher Marlowe is welcome (Editorial, 29 August). But in Canterbury, his birthplace, that work was already done and misrepresented by the Guardian’s review last year. In 2022, I produced The Marlowe Sessions: the first complete performance and recordings of his plays in over four centuries, staged at the King’s School, where Marlowe studied, with award-winning actors, immersive spatial audio and high‑definition filming.This was no vanity project but a bold, community-rooted undertaking in the shadow of the pandemic, paying above-union rates to dozens of creatives when work was scarce. Audiences embraced it, some travelling from abroad

Man found dead at Burning Man identified as Russian who ‘poured his soul’ into camp

Law enforcement officials investigating a homicide at the Burning Man festival in Nevada have identified the victim, federal authorities announced on Wednesday.The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages the Black Rock Desert national conservation area where the festival is held each year, said in a statement that the man who was killed on Saturday had been identified as Vadim Kruglov of Russia.Officials launched a murder investigation over the weekend after a festival attendee found an “obviously deceased” man “lying in a pool of blood” on Saturday, the final night of the event, and alerted police. The incident occurred between 8pm and 9.15pm, according to the BLM, as the festival was setting fire to a wooden effigy, known as the burning man

Common People Dance Eisteddfod: how a ‘dickhead dancing’ competition snowballed into a juggernaut

The Brisbane project, now in its seventh year, started as a whim – but has developed a cult following, with hundreds signing up each yearGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailGrowing up in Brisbane, Bryony Walters asked her mum if she could do ballet. “She just straight up said, ‘You’re too fat for a leotard’,” she recalls. “I know that’s a reflection of her relationship with her own body, but that kind of thing had me pretty fucked up for a pretty long time around body and food.”It also affected her relationship with exercise, and movement in general. “It always seemed like a punishment that I was inflicting upon myself,” Walters, now in her late 30s, tells the Guardian

How Graham Linehan’s gender activism led to career armageddon

It was as he was lying on a hospital trolley, after surgery to treat testicular cancer in 2018, that Graham Linehan picked up his phone and first definitively waded into the issue of trans rights.According to his memoir, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, and subsequent media interviews, the Irish-born comedian could not remember quite what he wrote in those groggy early tweets but it nailed “my colours to the gender-critical mast”.He did recall the response of one of his readers: “I wish the cancer had won”.“My ordeal had begun,” Linehan wrote. “Cast adrift, I was about to lose everything – my career, my marriage, my reputation

No culinary war, no sweary saucier: why The Cook and the Chef is still the best food TV

When did we decide making food should be stressful? I believe it was around 2009, when MasterChef Australia took off, with its explosions and tears and plate-throwing; of course we ruthlessly exported it, like the Hemsworths.Along the way, cooking went from being an act of service to an extreme sport. As a result, you can now watch people shout and cry as they decorate a mille-feuille on most of the streamers. Cooking is now a form of combat – there are Cake Wars, Cupcake Wars and Culinary Class Wars – and frequently, pure spectacle. You can make a cake that looks like a lifesize Superman (ahem, Super Mega Cakes) – but, as I said out loud while watching two contestants have a fight about time management, when is someone going to fucking eat something?Most new cooking shows are not really about food at all, but drama

Bath’s Holburne museum to unveil ‘art chamber’ of Renaissance masterpieces

Beneath the Georgian city of Bath, a gleaming treasury of Renaissance masterpieces created for kings, queens, church leaders and scientists is about to be unveiled.Based on the idea of the Renaissance kunstkammer – an art chamber – the basement room at the Holburne Museum is crammed with scores of exquisite pieces of silverware, paintings, bronzes and ceramics.They include an astonishing model of a silver ship, a rare mechanical celestial globe and a silver-gilt vessel likely to have belonged to Henry VIII.“It’s wonderful having pieces here that you’d usually see in places like the Met in New York or the British Museum,” said Chris Stephens, director of the Holburne.The treasures were collected over many decades by the Schroder family, who made their fortune as merchants and bankers, and have been loaned to the Holburne for at least 20 years