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Entertainment

Caryl Churchill’s magnificent Cloud 9 reaches for the skies – the National Theatre has done it proud

National Theatre, London The experimental 1979 drama gleefully muddles roles in a century-spanning caper that bounces from colonial Africa to hippy London Caryl Churchill’s time-hopping 1979 drama is not revived as often as it might be, perhaps because it is so magnificently madcap. Bouncing from a first act satirising Victorian life in colonial Africa to a second act exploring sexual liberation in 1970s London, it could easily roll off-kilter in the wrong hands. There is also its complicated framework. Cloud 9 is a play in two distinct parts which follows some of the characters a century on,

The Guardian
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Sports

Jockey Tom O’Brien, Cheltenham festival winner, dies aged 39

O’Brien rode more than 1,000 winners over jumps ‘Tom meant so much to so many people across our sport’ Tom O’Brien, who rode more than 1,000 winners over jumps including five Grade Ones and two at the Cheltenham festival, has died at the age of 39 after being diagnosed with cancer. O’Brien, who retired from race riding in April 2023, had a close association with Philip Hobbs’s stable near Minehead throughout his 20-year career in the saddle and enjoyed his most prestigious Grade One victories aboard Hobbs’s Thyme Hill in the Stayers’ Hurdle at Aintree in April 2021 and the Kauto Star Novice Ch

The Guardian
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Entertainment

‘Like having your brain squeezed’: Succession’s Jesse Armstrong and more on the rollercoaster of TV writers’ rooms

As co-writer of new thriller Hunting Alice Bell, our film critic entered the hallowed Room – and was struck by its support, buzz, abrasion and chocolate snacks. He asks legendary showrunners about their experience ‘Write, write, write until your fingers break!” That was Chekhov’s advice to writers. Until I started writing for television I thought I understood what he meant. I thought I knew what writing was: the solitude, the making yourself do it, the finger-shattering pain of doing it seriously, on your own. As well as being chief film critic for the Guardian, I have written fiction and in s

The Guardian
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