Spa Weekend review – female answer to The Hangover spreads the slush with the massage oil

Traverse theatre, Edinburgh Malaika Kegode delivers a supernatural story about the strange disappearance of a maudlin folk singer Playwright and performer Malaika Kegode tops and tails this show for Theatre Royal Plymouth with a message about the allure of storytelling. In a festival city bursting at the seams with stories, it is an unnecessary observation. A more important question is about which stories we choose to tell, which resonate and which pass us by. Why, for example, did Kegode want to write a story – and it is a story rather than a play – about the strange disappearance of a maudlin folk singer? She focuses on the subsequent investigation by Meles Costas, an under-qualified true-crime podcaster, living in the shadow of a high-achieving and terminally ill mother. And she laces her story with gothic fairytale imagery: folk songs with dark-magic properties, human-to-animal transmutation and a hint of witchcraft. At Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, until 30 August; Theatre Royal Plymouth, 2–5 September; Bristol Old Vic, 8–12 September All our Edinburgh festival reviews..

As his new film Bitter Christmas is released, the legendary Spanish director turns his fire on Donald Trump, Will Smith, Netflix – and himself Black sunglasses indoors and a tufty cloud of cotton-wool hair: it can only be Pedro Almodóvar, bourgeois arthouse darling nonpareil and master of everything from screwball romps (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) to clammy thrillers (Live Flesh, The Skin I Live In) – and sumptuous melodramas such as his 24th film, Bitter Christmas, a cautionary tale about the perils of autofiction. We are sitting in the library of a London hotel and Almodóvar is dressed in a thin black windcheater, grey trousers and white trainers; add a whistle on a string and he could pass for a PE teacher. The 76-year-old director may have won more than 60 awards including two Oscars, five Baftas and six Goyas but when the shades come off today, he looks momentarily sorry for himself. He has been deaf in one ear since childhood, he tells me, and now the other one is giving up the ghost. In addition, a nasty stye has turned his left eye a gluey purple. Might he have picked it up while swimming? “I do swim almost every day because I have a pool,” he sighs. Never can those words have sounded so sorrowful...

The five-strong list features Ella Bruccoleri, Sheridan Smith, Ruth Jones, Vicky McClure and Judy Parfitt.