Breakfast With Mugabe: biting political drama finally arrives in South Africa

Unpacking the president of Zimbabwe’s psyche felt urgent in 2001 when he remained in violent power. But the play has found fresh relevance today

I am standing outside the hallowed walls of the Market theatre, Newtown, Johannesburg. This is the place where Athol Fugard – surely the greatest of South African playwrights and one of my all-time theatre heroes – staged plays including Hello and Goodbye and The Island. The latter was co-written with fellow theatre greats, actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Now it’s the turn of a little-known English writer and his play Breakfast With Mugabe. This is, as they say, one of the days of my life.

In 2001 my script felt like urgent work. Elections loomed in Zimbabwe, and Robert Mugabe was reportedly unleashing terrible violence in his bid to cling to power. To many in the UK “President Bob” had long been a monster. But what, I wondered, created the monster?

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Welsh community races to save chapel where Cwm Rhondda hymn first sung

Fundraising campaign launched after Grade II-listed Capel Rhondda, near Pontypridd, put up for sale

A Welsh valleys community has launched a campaign to save the chapel where the popular hymn Cwm Rhondda, or Bread of Heaven, was first sung.

The composer John Hughes wrote the hymn in 1907 to celebrate a new organ at Capel Rhondda in Hopkinstown, near Pontypridd.

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Fire cults and burning banshees: has Avatar: Fire and Ash sent Pandora all the way to hell?

In the third instalment of cinema’s shiny blue 3D eco fable, James Cameron drags us to the volcanic badlands to meet the ever so angry Ash People

Say what you like about James Cameron, but the man has somehow made three films, umpteen extraterrestrial biomes, and one endlessly grieving smurf wolf pack out of the phrase “don’t touch that tree”. Now, the veteran sci-fi film-maker returns with Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third instalment in cinema’s shiniest blue 3D eco fable. And from a preview of the trailer (to be released before showings of The Fantastic Four: First Steps this weekend) this is going to be yet another jaw-dropping, box-office smashing triumph of elemental, stereoscopic worldbuilding – or possibly a very long and very heavy bioluminescent deforestation story, depending on your point of view.

Where The Way of Water took us out to sea to commune with whales who cry in subtitles, Fire and Ash drags us into the scorched heart of Pandora’s volcanic badlands. Here we meet the Ash People – an angry, soot-streaked Na’vi clan who appear to have spent the last two films building up a healthy mistrust of outsiders. Imagine running into the scariest-looking Great Plains warriors Hollywood ever dreamed up, then dipping them in tar and relocating them to Mordor. They ride screaming banshees through smoke clouds, and if the trailer is anything to go by, they’ve had just about enough of Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully, his adoptive family and the entire colonial project of humanity in general.

Which is why it’s a little strange to see Stephen Lang’s Colonel Miles Quaritch, or at least the reborn recombinant that carries the returning villain’s memories, apparently sporting the same scarlet war paint as these newcomers to the franchise. Have the Ash People been conned by humanity into fighting their Na’vi brethren, or are they just the latest poor fools to fall victim to humankind’s time-honoured tradition of co-opting Indigenous resistance to fight its proxy wars?

Either way, this is a first glimpse of Fire and Ash that in terms of sheer scale, spectacle and blue-on-blue action looks likely to match anything the series has so far delivered. Oona Chaplin’s Varang, leader of the new clan, tells a terrified Kiri (the Na’vi born from the dormant Avatar left behind by Sigourney Weaver’s late Grace Augustine) that her goddess “has no dominion here”, which must be a pretty scary thing to hear when you’ve spent your entire life communing with Eywa-infused floating jellyfish. The Sullys appear to be caught up in their own family conflict, and at one point Sully basically tells Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri to stop trying to solve all their life problems with arrows and screaming.

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The Osbournes changed reality TV forever for better or worse

Ozzy Osbourne leaves behind an iconic music career, but he also helped pioneer a particular brand of intimate celebrity TV

First and foremost, if Ozzy Osbourne is destined to be remembered for anything, it’ll be his music. Few people can genuinely claim to have invented a whole new genre of something. But Osbourne, along with the other members of Black Sabbath, did exactly that.

However, Ozzy Osbourne isn’t destined to be remembered for just one thing. Because, for three short years two decades ago, for better or worse (and this is genuinely debatable) Ozzy Osbourne also changed television forever. That’s right, it would be rude to remember Ozzy Osbourne without at least acknowledging that he is the man who gave us The Osbournes.

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