Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields: A New Feminist Music Festival Takes Shape

31 August 2026 at 23:27

At the first Daisy Chain Fields festival, the 23-year-old pop star presented a cross-generational vision of female empowerment. (With Taco Bell activations, too.)

Gen Z ‘Chinamaxxers’ fantasise about life in China. This journalist and this artist can never go back there

The Guardian

By: Kat Wong

31 August 2026 at 18:00

A graphic novel by Melissa Chan and Badiucao imagines China and the US at war in 2035. They hope to remind young people that ‘authoritarianism everywhere is bad’

Drinking Tsingtao beers, eating congee, walking with hands behind their backs: for many young people in western countries, “Chinamaxxing” has become all the rage. Some content creators have even gone beyond the jokes about being in “a very Chinese time in my life” and have followed this passion to the Middle Kingdom: making TikToks in Chongqing’s multilayered metropolis, bathing in Chengdu’s 24-hour spas or backflipping on the Great Wall of China.

This irreverent, mostly ironic trend is jarring for some, but Chinese Australian artist Badiucao and Chinese American journalist Melissa Chan don’t want to lecture the so-called Chinamaxxers.

Costumed carnival-goers in Notting Hill – in pictures

The Guardian

31 August 2026 at 17:10

People hit the streets of west London as Europe’s largest street carnival marks its 60th year, celebrating Caribbean history and culture

The Bridge review – a funny, furious odyssey through occupation

The Guardian

By: Mark Fisher

30 August 2026 at 12:38

Assembly George Square studios, Edinburgh
Writer and actor Alaa Shehada turns a simple bus trip from the West Bank into a vivid tale of bureaucracy, humiliation and resistance

It is the simplicity of the task that gives this story heft. Recalling his formative years in the West Bank, actor and writer Alaa Shehada is asked by his mother to go on a bus journey that would take a couple of hours in any other part of the world.

His mission is to deliver a plastic jerry can filled with the family’s home-pressed olive oil to his aunt in Jordan. His obstacle is the 180m crossing point known variously as the Dignity Bridge, the Allenby Bridge and the King Hussein Bridge, depending on your political standpoint.

Fourth time lucky as Chris Cantrill’s spoof whodunnit wins Edinburgh comedy award 2026

World news | The Guardian

By: Brian Logan

29 August 2026 at 15:50

Nominated in three previous years, the rambunctious standup – one half of The Delightful Sausage – wins the prize for his show Rewilding while Marty Gleeson is named best newcomer

The annual Edinburgh comedy award has been won by the standup Chris Cantrill, two years after his comedy partner Amy Gledhill – in the raucous northern double act The Delightful Sausage – won the same prize.

Cantrill, 42 and from Bradford, received the so-called “Oscar of live comedy” for a show, Rewilding, about his new life in rural Northumberland, where an act of vandalism shocks the local community – and a spoof whodunnit ensues. It builds on the foundations laid in 2024 by Easily Swayed, which documented his move to the countryside and secured what was then Cantrill’s third nomination (but first as a solo act) for the award.

Roll up, tumble down! The show that imagines the US as a collapsing circus – in pictures

The Guardian

By: Murdo MacLeod

29 August 2026 at 07:00

At the newly reopened King’s theatre in Edinburgh, as part of the international festival, Geoff Sobelle’s Clown Show is a dizzying whirl through US history

Clown Show review – the American dream explodes over one anarchic night

Charli xcx, Reading Festival review – Pretentious? Just a bit. But Nietzsche would have loved it

The Guardian

By: Chal Ravens

29 August 2026 at 11:23

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.

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.

Fairytales pending: the fringe musicals hoping to live happily ever after

The Guardian

By: Chris Wiegand

28 August 2026 at 10:00

Edinburgh has given festival audiences a look at two long awaited musicals – Bliss and Disenchanted! – with both aiming to now scale up their spectacle

The Edinburgh fringe is mostly where new work is forged but that’s not the full picture. Amid all the hot-off-the-press shows are a number of familiar titles that have been around for years yet are only making their professional UK debut now. That’s the case with two fairytale musical productions hoping for a longer life whose festival run is a chance to engineer that happily ever after.

Bliss, co-created by Tyler Beattie and Emma Lively, won a new play award in the US in 2019 and had its world premiere in Seattle the year after. A handful of its songs were released in 2022. Now developed into what is billed as “the biggest new musical of the Edinburgh fringe”, it has a cast of 17 which exceeds regular fringe proportions – as does the running time (80 minutes rather than the standard hour).