Leonid Volkov, who was brutally attacked in March, says he shares his late friend’s belief in ‘beautiful Russia of the future’
Leonid Volkov, a close ally of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, has vowed to “never give up” fighting against Vladimir Putin despite recently being attacked outside his home.
The military alliance turns 75 soon. But there’s little to celebrate in Kyiv, as Putin’s forces continue their bloody advance
Nato’s grand 75th birthday celebration in Washington in July will ring hollow in Kyiv. The alliance has miserably failed its biggest post-cold war test – the battle for Ukraine. Sadly, there’s no denying it: Vladimir Putin is on a roll.
Advancing Russian forces in Kharkiv profit from the west’s culpably slow drip-feed of weaponry to Kyiv and its leaders’ chronic fear of escalation. Ukraine receives just enough support to survive, never to prevail. Now even bare survival is in doubt.
Second operation to remove dead tissue has ‘contributed to a positive prognosis’ for Robert Fico, health minister says
Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, remained in a stable but serious condition as the man accused of trying to assassinate him made his first court appearance.
The Slovakian health minister, Zuzana Dolinková, said on Saturday that a two-hour surgery to remove dead tissue from multiple gunshot wounds had “contributed to a positive prognosis” for Fico.
With thousands now held without charge, lawyers say Israel is signalling that no detainee is safe
Marwan Barghouti spends his days huddled in a cramped, dark, solitary cell, with no way to tend to his wounds, and a shoulder injury from being dragged with his hands cuffed behind his back.
Barghouti holds almost mythic status within Palestinian politics, seen as a figure whose potential to unify different factions has only grown during his 24 years in prison.
Researcher uncovers vast Facebook campaign and accuses Meta of ‘lack of willingness’ to counter it
The stories are doom-laden, laced with vitriolic sneers about Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ursula von der Leyen. Ukrainians are “ready to depose” their leader, Macron is breaking French “rules” with aid to Ukraine, an “uncontrolled influx” from the east is “seriously harming the Germans”.
According to new research, these are just a few examples of a vast pro-Russian propaganda campaign washing over Facebook accounts of French and German citizens, before the European parliament elections next month.
Ukraine’s president says air defences must quadruple to halt Russian advance as morale falls among troops
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said he expects Russia to step up its offensive in the north-east and warned Kyiv has only a quarter of the air defences it needs to hold the front line.
Russian forces, which had made only moderate advances in recent months, launched a surprise assault in Kharkiv region on 10 May that has resulted in their biggest territorial gains in a year-and-a-half.
Vermont State University confers doctorate in ‘litter-ature’ upon tabby for being keen hunter of mice and beloved figure on campus
Men named Max have won the Nobel prize (Planck), the Oscar for best actor (Schell), and multiple Formula One world championships (Verstappen).
A cat in the US named Max now joins those lofty ranks, having earned a doctorate in “litter-ature” when Vermont State University bestowed an honorary degree on the campus-dwelling tabby in recognition of his friendliness, a gesture which quickly achieved virality in corners of the internet dedicated to spotlighting light-hearted news.
Trump’s former fixer gave damning testimony – and he’ll return to the stand on Monday as the trial moves towards a close
Donald Trump’s criminal trial is drawing to a close, with two looming questions: what will the jury decide, and how will America react?
After weeks of testimony from witnesses including the porn star Stormy Daniels, National Enquirer boss David Pecker and former senior Trump aide Hope Hicks, the trial came to an inflection point this week with its star witness. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and attorney who has since turned into a bellicose critic of his old boss, was on the stand all three days court was in session this week. He delivered damning testimony – then faced a tough if uneven grilling from Trump’s team.
News avatars are proliferating on social media and experts say they will spread as the technology becomes more accessible
The news presenter has a deeply uncanny air as he delivers a partisan and pejorative message in Mandarin: Taiwan’s outgoing president, Tsai Ing-wen, is as effective as limp spinach, her period in office beset by economic under performance, social problems and protests.
“Waterspinach looks at waterspinach. Turns out that waterspinach isn’t just a name,” says the presenter, in an extended metaphor about Tsaibeing “Hollow Tsai” – a pun related to the Mandarin word for water spinach.
There was more business than usual and some bemused regulars after El Califa de León was rewarded for its ‘exceptional’ offering
El Califa de León, an unassuming taco joint in Mexico City, measures just 3 metres by 3 metres and has space for only about six people to stand at a squeeze. Locals usually wait for 5 minutes between ordering and picking up their food.
All that changed on Wednesday, however, when it became the first Mexican taco stand ever to win a Michelin star, putting it in the exalted company of fine dining restaurants around the world, and drawing crowds like it has never seen.
The attempted assassination of a leader sympathetic to Putin has Europe on edge. But exaggerating the fascist threat is also dangerous
The shooting of the Slovakian prime minister, Robert Fico, has dramatised the increasingly angry and polarised landscape of European politics. With just weeks to go before the European parliament elections, it is time to step back from the brink.
This eruption of violence in the midst of the campaign is so shocking that it may, at best, have a chastening effect, softening the venomous tone of political discourse by reminding democracies old and new of what they stand to lose.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
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Boxer has raised funds for Ukraine but faced criticism in the past for his apparent Moscow-leaning sympathies
On the streets of Kyiv this week, the name of the Ukrainian heavyweight boxer Oleksandr Usyk prompted a few eye-rolls, alongside expressions of admiration for his sporting prowess.
The former cruiserweight, who fights the Briton Tyson Fury for the undisputed heavyweight championship in Saudi Arabia on Saturday night, has been an active fundraiser for the Ukrainian military and humanitarian causes since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. His success in the ring is a matter of considerable national pride.
An office drone must suffer the machismo of an Australian coastal town in this barmy, low-budget thriller about a would-be wave-chaser
Here is a gloriously demented B-movie thriller about a middle-aged man who wants to ride a big wave and the grinning local bullies who regard the beach as home soil. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they shout at any luckless tourist who dares to visit picturesque Lunar Bay on Australia’s south-western coast, where the land is heavy with heat and colour. Tempers are fraying; it’s a hundred degrees in the shade. The picture crash-lands at the Cannes film festival like a wild-eyed, brawling drunk.
The middle-aged man is unnamed, so let’s call him Nic Cage. Lorcan Finnegan’s film, after all, is as much about Cage – his image, his career history, his acting pyrotechnics – as it is about surfing or the illusory concept of home. The Surfer sets the star up as a man on the edge – a sad-sack office drone who desperately wants to belong – and then shoves him unceremoniously clear over the cliff-edge. Before long, our hero is living out of his car in the parking lot near the dunes, drinking from puddles, foraging for food from bins, and scheming all the while to make his way down to the shore.
Supporters gather enough valid signatures to put measure – that would enshrine abortion rights into constitution – on to ballot
Voters in Colorado will have a say on abortion rights this fall after supporters collected enough valid signatures to put a measure on the ballot, part of a national push to pose abortion rights questions to voters since the US supreme court removed the nationwide right to abortion.
The Colorado measure officially made the ballot on Friday and would enshrine abortion rights into the constitution in a state which already allows abortion at all stages of pregnancy despite the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade.
Cannes film festival A dying director who fled from the US to Canada agrees to make a confessional film in Schrader’s fragmented and anticlimactic story
Muddled, anticlimactic and often diffidently performed, this oddly passionless new movie from Paul Schrader is a disappointment. It is based on the novel Foregone by Russell Banks (Schrader also adapted Banks’s novel Affliction in 1997) and reunites Schrader with Richard Gere, his star from American Gigolo. Though initially intriguing, it really fails to deliver the emotional revelation or self-knowledge that it appears to be leading up to. There are moments of intensity and promise; with a director of Schrader’s shrewdness and creative alertness, how could there not be? But the movie appears to circle endlessly around its own emotions and ideas without closing in.
The title is partly a reference to the national anthem of that nation, which is a place of freedom and opportunity which may have an almost Rosebud-type significance for the chief character, an avowed draft-resister refugee from the US in the late 60s, who becomes an acclaimed documentary film-maker in his chosen country. Maybe Vietnam was his real reason for fleeing and maybe it wasn’t. This central point is one of many things in this fragmented film which is unsatisfyingly evoked.
Samantha Power says barely 100 trucks of aid a day enter Gaza, far less than 600 needed to address threat of famine
Humanitarian assistance has begun to arrive in Gaza along a US-made pier, but the US aid chief said the new sea corridor could not be a substitute for land crossings, and warned that deliveries of food and fuel entering Gaza had slowed to “dangerously low levels”.
The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, confirmed on Friday that truckloads of humanitarian aid, including food from the United Arab Emirates, sent by ship from Cyprus, had been unloaded on the Gaza coast and handed over to the control of the UN.
Yonaguni is a tourist hotspot – but its location just 100km from Taiwan means residents must wrestle with the creeping militarisation of their home
In the minds of many Japanese people, Yonaguni is a sleepy paradise of crystal-clear sea and pristine beaches, where miniature horses graze on clifftops and empty roads dissect fields of sugar cane; where tourists dive with hammerhead sharks and marvel at the Ayamihabiru – the world’s largest Atlas moth.
But this tiny island, located far closer to Taipei than Tokyo, now finds itself at the centre of regional tensions triggered by a new round of Chinese aggression towards Taiwan.
‘Bakery scent’ added via microcapsules to postage stamp celebrating ‘jewel of French culture’
The French Post Office has released a scratch-and-sniff postage stamp to celebrate the baguette, once described by President Emmanuel Macron as “250 grams of magic and perfection”.
The stamp, which costs €1.96, depicts a baguette decorated with a red, white and blue ribbon. It has a print run of 594,000 copies.
Four suspects arrested at the scene of attack in Bamiyan, with four more foreigners and three Afghans reported wounded
Three Spanish tourists and an Afghan civilian have been killed in a shooting attack in Bamiyan province, central Afghanistan.
The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, wrote on social messaging platform X that he was “shocked by the news of the murder of Spanish tourists in Afghanistan”.
Young girl was among six people killed in gunfire in an area of Chiapas where shootings have become common and widespread
A mayoral candidate and five other people have been killed when gunmen opened fire at a campaign rally in the violence-racked southern Mexico state of Chiapas.
State prosecutors said a young girl was among the six people killed in the gunfire late on Thursday, along with the mayoral candidate Lucero López Maza. Two others were injured, they said.
Libertarian president Javier Milei has slashed public spending as he wrestles to tame hyperinflation, now at 289% annually
Commuters in Buenos Aires have been hit by an overnight 360% increase in subway fares, in one of the most dramatic price hikes in a harsh budget austerity campaign launched by Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei.
After weeks of hearings, a judge on Thursday lifted an order that had temporarily blocked the scheduled increase in subway fares. That cleared the way for the change to take effect on Friday morning as office workers across Buenos Aires streamed through the turnstiles of South America’s oldest underground metro.
Bodies of Amit Buskila and Itzhak Gelerenter also recovered from Gaza as Israel says 129 hostages remain in captivity
The bodies of three hostages kidnapped by Hamas, including the German-Israeli Shani Louk, have been retrieved from Gaza by the Israeli military, it announced.
The other two hostages were identified as Amit Buskila, 28, and Itzhak Gelerenter, 56, according to the military spokesperson Rear Adm Daniel Hagari, who said the three victims were taken to Gaza after being killed by Hamas at the Nova music festival.
We can only address the politics of Israel/Palestine by recognising the suffering of both Jewish and Palestinian people, writes Lynne Segal. Plus a letter from Ron Mendel
It is indeed a tragic time for Jewish people, as Dave Rich argues (The 7 October Hamas attack opened a space – and antisemitism filled it. British Jews are living with the consequences, 16 May). He rightly insists on the extreme dangers of historic and continuing antisemitism, today rising and falling with the extremities of conflict in Israel/Palestine. Yet he fails to address the specific grief of thousands of Jews, observant and secular, who have like me worked for decades for peace, and an end to occupation and land grabs in Israel/Palestine.
Rich’s article was published the day after Nakba day: commemorating the catastrophe of 700,000 Palestinians forcibly dispossessed of their homes and sent into exile to enable the establishment of Israel in 1948. Jewish criticisms of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians have always existed, but they tend to be immediately dismissed to allow only one narrative to be heard.
Cannes film festival A drama of despair plays out in a remote village, as a debt-ridden father is mortified to discover his son is gay
Here is a self-laceratingly painful tale of repression and denial in a remote Romanian village in the Danube delta, directed by Emanuel Parvu. It’s in the gimlet-eyed observational and satirical style of the new Romanian cinema, a kind of movie-making that in extended dialogue scenes seeks out the bland bureaucratic language of the police and church authorities; their evasive mannerisms, their reactionary worldviews and lifelong habits of indicating opinions in quiet voices and in code, things they don’t want to be held responsible for, and for things they want to keep enclosed in silence.
The drama concerns a careworn guy, Dragoi (Bogdan Dumitrache), who owes money to a local tough guy and is badly behind with the debt. Then he discovers that his 17-year-old son Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea), the apple of his eye – whom he is planning to send to military school next year, and whom he fondly imagines to be dating a local girl – has been badly beaten up by the money-lender’s sons. With icy rage, Dragoi takes this to be the man’s unforgivably violent way of demanding his money.
Shadow foreign secretary sets out vision for a more strategic, less elitist approach to UK diplomacy
The shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, says his family history as descendants of enslaved people will inform his work in government, as he seeks to deepen the UK’s relations with the global south and the Commonwealth.
“I will take the responsibility of being the first foreign secretary descended from the slave trade incredibly seriously,” he said in a speech setting out how Labour would reform the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), a Whitehall department that has a reputation for institutional conservatism.
The US, whose founders tried to emulate the laws and governmental structures of the Roman republic, is headed for a similarly self-inflicted collapse, director Francis Ford Coppola has said at the premiere of his first film in more than a decade.
“What’s happening in America, in our republic, in our democracy, is exactly how Rome lost their republic thousands of years ago,” Coppola told a press conference at the Cannes film festival on Friday. “Our politics has taken us to the point where we might lose our republic.”
Updated guidelines strip bishops of power to recognise ‘supernatural’ nature of purportedly divine events
Apparitions of the Virgin Mary and weeping statues have been part of Catholicism for centuries, but the age of social media has prompted the Vatican to issue a crackdown against potential scams and hoaxes.
New rules issued on Friday say that only a pope, rather than local bishops, can declare apparitions and revelations to be “supernatural”. The document, Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, updates previous guidance issued in 1978 that is now considered “inadequate”.
Attack on prime minister lifts lid on divided politics of ‘one of the most polarised countries in Europe’
On Friday morning, Father Tomáš stood solemnly in the small Catholic church nestled near a park along the banks of the Danube River in Bratislava.
He had seen an increase in visitors since Wednesday’s shock shooting of Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, which has prompted soul-searching among the country’s deeply divided society. The priest, who did not wish to give his full name, planned to hold his weekly Sunday service to pray “for peace in Slovakia, so that we find mutual respect and understanding”.
The Chinese American author of The Book of Goose pays tribute to the late writer, reflecting on the rich rewards of revisiting her stories over many years
Two days after Alice Munro died, I went to an event in New York, and found myself among strangers. A woman asked me if I’d heard that the great “Janet Munro” had died. Janet? The confusion was cleared up, and a man told me about Munro’s life story, with a detailed description of the photo used for her obituary in the New York Times. Another woman told me that, unlike most writers, Munro did not write novels, only stories. “Isn’t that interesting?” Next came the inevitable question, which people often ask of someone who writes novels and stories: “Which is easier for you?”
Easy? That’s an adjective that I’ve never associated with literature.
San Pedro Sula is rated ‘dangerous’ as effects of forest fires, El Niño and the climate crisis cause a spike in respiratory illnesses
The air quality in San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras, as been classified as the most polluted on the American continent due to forest fires and weather conditions aggravated by El Niño and the climate crisis.
IQAir, a Swiss air-quality organisation that draws data from more than 30,000 monitoring stations around the world, said on Thursday that air quality in the city of about 1 million people has reached “dangerous” levels.
‘Adversaries know migration is our vulnerability,’ says Kaja Kallas, spelling out negative consequences to Europe of Ukrainian defeat
Vladimir Putin is seeking to weaponise the threat of mass migration to divide and weaken Europe as supporters of Ukraine struggle to maintain unity to defeat Russia, Kaja Kallas, the Estonian prime minister, says.
“What our adversaries know is migration is our vulnerability,” she said. “The aim is to make life really impossible in Ukraine so that there would be migration pressure to Europe, and this is what they are doing.”
A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product, researchers have found
The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found.
A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C (1.8F) since pre-industrial times and many climate scientists predict a 3C (5.4F) rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, a scenario that the new working paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, states will come with an enormous economic cost.
Robberies, shootings, extortion and rapes have surged since the Rwandan-backed M23 militia cut off the eastern Congolese capital
In broad daylight on 16 April, three armed and uniformed men held up a city centre mobile phone shop.
Threatening staff, they helped themselves to about £700 worth of goods, before making off on a motorbike, disappearing into the busy streets of Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
French police shot dead a man armed with a knife and an iron bar who set fire to a synagogue in the Normandy city of Rouen on Friday.
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, travelling to visit the fire-damaged synagogue, said France was “deeply affected” by what he called an antisemitic act. He said the government was “extremely determined to continue to fully protect Jewish people in France, wherever they are, and Jews should practice their religion without fear”.
Local authorities will be allowed to turn unsold homes from developers into affordable housing
China will cut mortgage rates and allow local authorities to turn unsold homes from developers into affordable housing, in a series of drastic measures by Beijing aimed at propping up the country’s faltering property market.
The People’s Bank of China said it would scrap the minimum rate of interest and reduce down-payment ratios to 15% for first-time buyers and 25% for second homes. It will also create a 300bn yuan (£32.8bn) facility to support local state-owned companies to buy homes at reasonable prices, it said in a series of statements on Friday.
In Slovakia, we know what ‘restoring order’ means. After the PM’s shooting, it will be an excuse to suppress any opposition
Monika Kompaníková is a Slovakian writer and editor
Shortly after the shooting of Robert Fico, I received a phone call from my sister. She was extremely upset – not just about the shocking attack, but also about an incident on the bus on the way home from work in the moments after the news had broken. Two elderly fellow passengers reacted to the attempted assassination by blaming liberals and progressives in general, and in particular Michal Šimečka, an opposition politician and former vice-president of the European parliament. One passenger called for the death penalty to be reinstated and order to be restored.
At that point, the circumstances of the shooting were entirely unclear, information was partial, and it was too early to condemn or point the finger at anyone. My sister, who considers herself a liberal, spoke up to argue against the other passengers.
Photographer Dougie Wallace has been looking at the impact of the decriminalisation of cannabis in Thailand, from Khaosan Road to the beach resorts, such as Krabi and Phuket, that attract tourists
The decriminalisation of cannabis in Thailand in June 2022 has led to an explosion in marijuana shops across the country – especially in its tourist areas. It is sold at trendy dispensaries in Bangkok, at beachside bars across resort islands and even on river cruises. On bustling streets, green leaf logos glow in neon above shop fronts, and small stalls, set up with rows of glass jars, dot the pavement.
Town of Grünheide approved the US automaker’s plan on Thursday to double the capacity of the site, despite opposition
Environmental protesters vowed to keep up the pressure on Tesla after failing to stop plans by Elon Musk’s company from expanding its sprawling electric vehicle plant outside Berlin.
The town council of Grünheide, guarded by police and plain-clothed security guards, gave the green light on Thursday to the US automaker after a heated, nearly three-hour debate disrupted by heckling and booing from the audience of about 200 people.
Adaptation of hit comedy quiz will begin airing on CNN on Saturday nights to coincide with presidential election
Arch, ironic and understated, Have I Got News for You is the quintessential British comedy quiz, but its creators are hoping a US version of the show can translate its particular brand of political humour across the Atlantic.
A US adaptation of the show will be broadcast by CNN in the autumn, to coincide with the presidential election. It will hit screens on Saturday nights – part of a double-bill with Bill Maher’s Real Time.
Fossil-fuel dependent country hopes to provide bridge between wealthy global north and poor south at November gathering
Oil is inescapable in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The smell of it greets the visitor on arrival and from the shores of the Caspian Sea on which the city is built the tankers are eternally visible. Flares from refineries near the centre light up the night sky, and you do not have to travel far to see fields of “nodding donkeys”, small piston pump oil wells about 6 metres (20ft) tall, that look almost festive in their bright red and green livery.
It will be an interesting setting for the gathering of the 29th UN climate conference of the parties, which will take place at the Olympic Stadium in November.
Fears grow that former president will follow through on threat to roll back gun-control regulations if he wins White House
When Donald Trump last addressed members of the National Rifle Association in February, he pitched himself as a paragon of inaction on gun violence, vowing to again march in lockstep with the gun rights group if he is reelected in November.
“During my four years, nothing happened. And there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield,” Trump said at the NRA’s Great American Outdoor Show then. “When I’m re-elected, every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated.”
The army of riot police had finally retreated from Rustaveli Avenue, the broad thoroughfare in front of the parliament building, back into the barricaded parliamentary estate.
The last hour on the streets of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, had been violent. Snatch squads had grabbed protesters as officers, beating their shields with truncheons, surged forward to push the chanting crowds away from the graffiti-scrawled, imposing parliament building.
Israel is appearing at international court of justice after South Africa asked it to urgently order end to assault on Rafah
Yemen’s Houthis said they downed a US MQ9 drone on Thursday evening over the south-eastern province of Maareb, the group’s military spokesperson said on Friday.
According to Reuters, the Iran-aligned group said they would release images and videos to support their claim and added that they had targeted the drone using a locally made surface to air missile.
Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov told Russian state media the West is in danger of approaching ‘a dramatic crisis’ as forces make advances in Kharkiv
A long-range Ukrainian strike on the Moscow-controlled Belbek airbase in occupied Crimea destroyed three Russian warplanes and a fuel facility near its main runway this week, US commercial satellite company Maxar said.
The company cited satellite imagery taken on Thursday as showing that two MiG-31 fighter jets and an Su-27 fighter jet had been destroyed. It said one MiG-29 fighter aircraft also appeared to have been damaged.
Cannes film festival The choreography is impressive as people are hurled through walls, thrown off rooftops and otherwise beaten to a pulp, but the editing is frenetic and the characters cartoonish
Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City – once the most densely populated place on Earth – is the perfect movie setting: a Piranesian labyrinth of squalid high rises and dark, cramped alleys, teeming with crooks, lowlifes, addicts and impoverished families running small businesses, legit and otherwise. This 1980s-set action epic lovingly, meticulously recreates the notorious neighbourhood (which was demolished in 1994), but sadly, the backdrop is more interesting than the story.
At heart it’s a tale of a Chinese immigrant caught between rival gangs. Street fighter Chan Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam) is initially scammed by local triad boss Mr Big (a cigar-smoking caricature from veteran Jackie Chan sidekick Sammo Hung). Chan retaliates by stealing a package and, after a great bus-top chase scene, he stumbles accidentally into the Walled City, a no-go area for Mr Big’s goons as it’s ruled by local boss Cyclone (Louis Koo). As well as running a barber shop, and smoking like a chimney even though he is dying of a lung disease, Cyclone rules over the giant slum like a benign dictator, collecting rents but also looking out for its citizens and maintaining some kind of order. He and the rest of the Walled City community take Chan under their wing, and this hard-working orphan starts to feel at home for the first time – until a highly unlikely twist of fate puts all the factions on a path to all-out gang warfare.
Trio of plays co-created by Roy Williams explores British identity in the era of Brexit, Covid and Black Lives Matter
The co-creator of the Death of England series of plays has said the decade-long project has endured because, alongside difficult conversations about race and immigration, the plays have a sense of pride in being English.
Three of the plays are to be performed together at Soho Place in London this summer, taking a project that started life as a “microplay”, commissioned by the Guardian in collaboration with the Royal Court, to the West End.
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