‘It’s easier when nobody’s watching’: inside the secretive and sublime freak-folk of @

Hugo Weaving leads a delightful drama about the trials and tribulations of a bunch of friends of a certain age, and the bluegrass wunderkind returns with a remarkable new album..

Summerhall, Edinburgh Angele and Malcolm Galea’s two-hander cycles through grief and sorrow as a broken-hearted hero is trapped in purgatory A fairytale plunges the reader into a dilemma then resolves it. But what if the happy ending never arrives? Will the tale just circle around into a netherworld, never finding a conclusion? That is the prospect in this two-hander by Malta’s Angele and Malcolm Galea, a couple whose experience of pregnancy loss finds expression in a thwarted fairytale – the kind of tale, perhaps, they might have read to their daughter...

Reading Festival There’s not much time to dig into her deep catalogue of future-facing pop, but she satisfies the hardcore “Time itself is a circle,” as the rock’n’roll philosopher Nietzsche once said, accurately foreshadowing Charli xcx’s only UK festival appearance this summer. Like her performance on Glastonbury’s Other Stage last year – a pyrotechnic farewell to the puke-green reign of Brat – Charli’s Reading and Leeds appearance is a not-quite-headline slot that also follows a rowdy set from grime don Skepta. As before, her sunglasses remain glued on throughout. Yet in the past 14 months, everything else in Charli’s pop factory has undergone a hard reset. She’s released two albums – a grandiose, gothic soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and last month’s high-concept Music, Fashion, Film, an album of raw, glitching micro-rock, with guitars shredded into Tetris-like pieces, and fitted with lacerating lyrics about shopping, egotism and mortality. She’s also launched an acting career, thrown a big fat celebrity wedding and, somewhere along the way, found time to rehearse her biggest, most vertiginous show to date...