Soho theatre, London
The Funny Women award-winner’s debut tour combines the personal and the political with varying success – but always with enthusiasm and charm

Should Kate Cheka be saving the world – or performing comedy? She grew up with a messiah complex, thanks to her feminist, socialist mum and an absentee dad serving in the Tanzanian government. This is a woman reared to make the world a better place, so what’s she doing telling jokes on stage – and winning 2023’s prestigious Funny Women award , no less?

Well, there was once a time – if you can believe it, Gen Z’ers – when we thought art might save the world. Maybe Cheka has come among us to be political comedy’s salvation? Her debut touring show isn’t the finished article, but it showcases a comic unafraid to combine the personal and the polemical, in occasionally provocative ways.

Activist who was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s influenced Malcolm X and other leader leaders

President Joe Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s. Also receiving pardons were a top Virginia lawmaker and advocates for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention.

Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.

Royal Court, London
A grubby shack that appears in a prosperous neighbourhood is the catalyst for a culture clash in South African playwright Amy Jephta’s sharp drama

A Black couple have moved into a gated suburban enclave and the white folk around them are worried. Who are they, and could they be connected to the sudden appearance of a grubby shack nearby? Who lives in that shack, for that matter, and will this blight on their rarefied landscape grow, multiply and encroach?

The racialised fear of the invading outsider is under scrutiny here, and the rich Black couple, Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko) and Bonolo (Mimî M Khayisa), are torn in their stance toward the shack and the threat it is seen to pose. Proprietorial white neighbours Chris (Scott Sparrow) and Lynette (Olivia Darnley) insist their panic is tied to community responsibility, while the jittery Andrew (Kai Luke Brummer) and Jess (Robyn Rainsford) overtly imply that any – Black? – squatters nearby will bring down the price of their property.

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Ipswich: Walton; Godfrey, O’Shea, Burgess; Johnson, Cajuste, Morsy, Davis; Hutchinson, Clarke, Delap.

Subs: Muric, Burns, Taylor, Townsend, Luongo, Hirst, Broadhead, Tuanzebe, Philogene.

Asset triples in price from $20 per token to more than $70, with at least $24bn in trading as of Sunday morning

Donald Trump has launched a cryptocurrency “meme coin” ahead of his inauguration for a second term as US president, called $Trump.

He announced the launch on Truth Social and X on Friday night. The asset has since soared in value, more than tripling in price from about $20 per token to more than $70, with at least $24bn in trading volume as of Sunday morning and more than $14bn in market capitalization.

Newspapers had reported that new president would veto UK pick, as ministers brace for a turbulent four years

Donald Trump will not block the appointment of Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to the US, according to a London-based ally of the president-elect, as ministers brace for a turbulent four years of British-American relations.

Greg Swenson, the head of the UK branch of Republicans Overseas, told the BBC on Sunday he did not believe Trump would prevent the Labour peer from taking up his post in Washington, despite reports to the contrary .

• Englishman wins event he used to skip school to watch
• Rory McIlroy admits ‘game management’ needs work

Tempestuous Tyrrell, the Dubai winner. Beware the angry golfer. Say what you like about Tyrrell Hatton’s frequent tantrums – and plenty do – but the Englishman’s ability can never be called into question. Hatton will surge back into the top 10 of the world on account of his Dubai Desert Classic victory, with a Ryder Cup return at Bethpage this year already looking a formality.

Many have disappeared from view after switching to LIV Golf. Hatton, by contrast, can still mix it with the best. This marks his second DP World Tour success since joining the rebel circuit in early 2024. Even the emergence of Rory McIlroy from the Sunday shadows was insufficient to knock Hatton off stride at the Emirates Club.

Grand theatre, Leeds
This time-hopping oddity rarely gets an outing, but Opera North’s jazzy large-scale production makes the most of its vaudeville glitz

The curtain rises on a magic show. A woman is sawn in half, and a man is suspended in mid-air when his chair disappears. Left alone on stage by the magician, their conversation reveals the pair are married to one another – and have been for the past 157 years.

Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life was a “concept” musical avant la lettre : a time-hopping pageant of vignettes in which, at intervals throughout their eternal marriage, Sam and Susan Cooper renegotiate their relationship in the face of each era’s modern concerns – framed by musical commentary from an assortment of vaudeville acts. “Good economics … awfully bad for love” intones a barbershop quartet before Sam insists on scheduling a potential third child around his business trips. Susan’s foray into first-wave feminism, meanwhile, is heralded by a trio of Shirley Temple-like Tots singing about their mothers’ neuroses.

The third book from the twice Pulitzer prize-nominated American author is a complex portrait of parallel lives on a par with the great Russian novels

Adam Haslett is one of those incandescently smart and elegant authors that the US seems to produce almost accidentally and to excess, names who haven’t quite risen to international literary stardom, but perhaps deserve to: think Jonathan Dee, Garth Risk Hallberg, Lauren Groff or Claire Messud. Haslett’s brilliant debut novel, Union Atlantic , looked into the bleak moral heart of the 2007-8 financial crisis. His second, Imagine Me Gone , was a meditation on fatherhood and depression. Now, with Mothers and Sons , he has written a book that circles around an absence: the alienation of a son – Peter, a lawyer in his 40s – from his mother, Ann, who runs an “intentional community”, a women’s retreat in the hills of Vermont.

This is a novel about practice. Chapter by chapter, we move from Peter’s world in the first person to Ann’s in the third, building up a picture of their lives, the rhythms of their days. Peter is an asylum lawyer in New York, his time spent with the desperate and destitute. His personal life is almost nonexistent – he is lonely, hopeless, trapped by his own past. After a brief and hesitant affair with a schoolfriend, tragedy strikes. He blames his mother for the guilt that has haunted him ever since. Now he buries himself in his cases. “I work – that’s all I do. I get people to tell me their stories, I try to prove what they tell me, then I do it again.” It’s a thankless task, with the state increasingly hostile and his co-workers as harassed and frustrated as he is. “Travelling into one life after another, intimacy without intimacy.” Then a new client arrives, a gay young man, an Albanian. The shame and horror of his story opens up a window into Peter’s own dark past.