Orange Tree theatre, London
Camaraderie, comedy and a love of the trade shine through in April De Angelis’s group portrait of Nell Gwyn and the other female actors who were the first to be permitted on the English stage

April De Angelis’s 1993 play is more a snapshot than a coloured-in portrait of the first cohort of women to be permitted on to the stage. Still, it is an entertaining and enlightening ensemble work that captures the delicate moment in 17th-century stage history when these pioneering women straddled empowerment and economic independence with sexual objectification and hostile moral judgement.

Nell Gwyn, played spiritedly by Zoe Brough, is famously known to be among these early female actors, but De Angelis draws out several others stories and plaits five lives together, on and off stage. There is Mrs Betterton (Anna Chancellor, giving a glinting performance), something of an elder who brims with stage wisdom and technique; Mrs Marshall (Katherine Kingsley), a steely type whose former affair with an earl has left her vulnerable to heckling and attack; Mrs Farley (Nicole Sawyerr), who starts off as a soapbox Christian before taking to the stage; and finally Doll (Doña Croll), who assists them.

Despite what the White House might think, the US’s founding document does not contain the phrase ‘the president is the law’

The answer key to this quiz was recently removed from usa.gov

Lawrence Douglas is a professor of law at Amherst College in Massachusetts

It has hosted a huge spider and a pickled shark – and despite financial pressures, there can be little doubt about the gallery’s seismic impact

Opening night at Tate Modern, 25 years ago this May, was the kind of party that defines an era. Stars of the arts world and politics, including prime minister Tony Blair, attended. All of them were dwarfed by a giant ­spider – Louise Bourgeois’s visiting sculpture – perched on the gangway over the vast, packed Turbine Hall.

For Alex Beard, particular joyous moments still stand out, but not just from the evening: “It was a remarkable night, but I most clearly remember the first morning, 12 May, when I walked around outside, really early doors, and saw people lining up right around the building. I talked to the first person in the queue, who told me this was something they’d been waiting for all their life,” recalls Beard, who was deputy director of Tate.

New CPS guidance aims to boost use of deletion orders after Observer revealed systemic failings

The Crown Prosecution Service is to update its guidance on so-called “revenge porn” crimes to stop perpetrators being allowed to keep explicit photos of their victims.

The Observer revealed last month that magistrates courts were routinely failing to make orders for the deletion of content linked to intimate-image abuse cases – and that prosecutors were failing to request them.

Private understanding ensures tending of British military graves in Russia and Crimea, and Soviet graves in UK

In graves at Murmansk, Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok, in Russia, lie the bodies of 663 British military personnel. Most of the dead lost their lives in the period just after the first world war, when allied troops were sent to support rightwing White forces in the Russian civil war against the Bolsheviks, while 41 are casualties from the second world war Arctic convoys.

Their resting places have been tended over decades by the Russian military and by private contractors, paid by the UK’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission. But after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, economic sanctions meant Britain could no longer pay for the graves to be maintained.

The ‘class clown’ from the racy BBC sitcom discusses his return to the stage, the draw of the dark side and preparing his parents to see him in ‘full bum’ nudity on screen

For the past five weeks, Joshua McGuire has been in a whitewashed room in north London pretending to be a rhinoceros. The 37-year-old actor isn’t in a performance art piece or strange social experiment, but rather starring in director Omar Elerian’s new production of Eugene Ionèsco’s 1959 absurdist play, Rhinoceros ; it is his first stage role in seven years. “It sounds mental but it’s the theatre of the absurd, so it’s meant to be baffling at points,” he says with a smile, back in human form in a white T-shirt and cap while on a break from rehearsals, where he is clearly enjoying taking on the story of a small French town whose inhabitants gradually turn into rhinos.

If you have watched a British comedy over the past decade, it’s likely you’ve seen McGuire in it. The endlessly energetic performer is usually found next to the leading man, sporting a frizz of curly hair and delivering anxious one-liners or slapstick pratfalls. He has featured in everything from Netflix series Lovesick to Richard Curtis’s About Time and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn . On stage, meanwhile, he had his breakthrough in Laura Wade’s 2010 satire on the British upper classes, Posh , playing a member of a fictionalised version of the Bullingdon Club, and has since starred opposite Daniel Radcliffe in David Leveaux’s 50th anniversary production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead .

Women at Holyrood cite lack of support from party, abuse in chamber and online, and tolerance of bullying

Holyrood is becoming a “hostile environment for women” and a significant number of female MSPs in the Scottish National party are stepping down before the May 2026 elections, citing lack of support from the party, tolerance of bullying, and abuse in the chamber and online.

Almost four years on from the election of a record number of 58 female MSPs across all parties in 2021, 14 SNP women have so far said they will not stand again, accounting for 23% of the party’s current MSP group.

The pioneering food writer and historian talks of her fear of running out of words – even as she is writing her 22nd book

My lunch companion is a living institution. Self-taught cook, traveller, recipe collector, historian and anthropologist Claudia Roden has reshaped how we think about food, its cultural heritage and social meaning.

It’s not just celebrated chefs such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Moro’s Samantha Clark who pay tribute to her pioneering work. The historian Simon Schama once observed that “she is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Proust was a biscuit baker”.

Pontiff says he has ‘had the opportunity to experience the Lord’s patience’ and pays tribute to ‘tireless care’ of medics

Pope Francis greeted a large crowd of pilgrims gathered outside Gemelli hospital in Rome in his first public appearance in more than five weeks, before being discharged from the hospital on Sunday.

The pontiff, who is recovering from pneumonia in both lungs, made the brief greeting and blessing from the balcony of his hospital room shortly after the release of the text for his Sunday Angelus.