The National Theatre is worried about a shortage of skills from costume designers, to set creators, to computer technicians

The decline of drama as a school subject has had a serious knock-on effect on the live entertainment business. While it is harder now for a budding star to imagine a stage career, the more immediate impact is on theatres’ skills and craft departments.

The problem is a top priority for Indhu Rubasingham, two weeks into her high-profile job as artistic director at National Theatre . Now she and the NT’s executive director, Kate Varah, are announcing a move to boost the supply of skilled workers across the country, from costume designers and makers to set creators and computer technicians.

Amid closures and financial cuts, Sheen is using his clout to stimulate interest and investment in the Welsh stage. A celebrity force for good? Or is he taking the spotlight away from other, vital arts organisations?

Can one star save Welsh theatre? On a spring morning in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre (WMC), 180 people are thronging for the answers. We’re in the Awen bar next to the gorgeous 1,900-capacity Donald Gordon theatre, which last summer staged the hit play Nye , about NHS founder Aneurin Bevan. This experience inspired its lead actor, Michael Sheen, to set up the new Welsh National Theatre (WNT), as he tells us today, scruffy-bearded and check-shirted, bouncing around a much smaller, makeshift stage. “Listen,” he says, responding to an apology for this stage’s minuteness, “I’ve acted in Aberavon shopping centre, so I’m used to being on anything.”

Sheen’s latest venture arrives after a hell of a few months, as we Welsh people say, for English-language theatre in Wales. In December, the Cardiff-based National Theatre Wales (NTW – a separate organisation, founded in 2009) closed down, stripped of all Arts Council funding. In January came a cross-party Welsh Senedd report, A Decade of Cuts , revealing Wales ranked second to bottom for cultural spending in Europe (at £69 per person, above only Greece; by comparison, the UK received £91, neighbouring Ireland £149 and poll-toppers Iceland £691).

How do I explain this complicated situation to him, for example when we are watching the rugby?

As the English son of Irish parents, my son is not above playing both sides of the national divide. Among his schoolfriends, he evokes his Irishness for the mild exoticism it provides to his multicultural classmates here in Walthamstow.

When watching Ireland play football or rugby, however, he instantly becomes a diehard England fan. ‘You’re both,’ we told him last month, when he looked dejected after a Six Nations game (such comforts are, regrettably, unnecessary after football matches). ‘You’re English like your friends, but you’re Irish like us, as well.’ ‘Hmm,’ he said, with considered disagreement. ‘You’re actually from Northern Ireland, Daddy, not Ireland.’

The former US Navy Seal on working alongside the Ex Machina director to produce a war movie that’s as true to life as possible

Ray Mendoza, 45, served for more than 16 years as a US Navy Seal and training instructor before leaving to work as a Hollywood military adviser, specialising in choreographing gunfight sequences for movies including Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024). It’s with Garland that he’s now co-written and co-directed the film Warfare , a claustrophobically immersive account of an ill-fated surveillance mission that he survived in Ramadi province, Iraq, in 2006. Two men, among them Mendoza’s best friend, sniper and medic Elliott Miller, were badly injured by al-Qaida insurgents, and the attack intensified as the Seals sought to evacuate their wounded. The film, described in the New Yorker as “a work of hyper-exacting realism”, opens in the UK on 18 April.

How do you feel about war films in general?
I feel not seen. It’s actually embarrassing to watch them – they don’t get our culture right, we don’t speak that way. People have asked, are you worried that Warfare may trigger veterans and active-duty military? I think it does the opposite. It’s saying, you’re not forgotten, you are seen. Oftentimes, what is more triggering is seeing what we go through not accurately represented.

Can the new Black Mirror compete with reality? Plus, Holocaust documentaries from Sam Mendes and Simon Schama, a pioneering British Sign Language thriller – and a nice bit of tension on Doctor Who

Black Mirror ( Netflix )
Doctor Who (BBC One) | iPlayer
What They Found (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Reunion (BBC One) | iPlayer

Looming back for a seventh series, what has Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones’s Black Mirror become? Streamer-binge futuristic dystopia for doom-scrolling millennials? Whatever it is, can it compete with the crazed reality of the Trump era?

Jonathan Reynolds says parliament’s intervention was ‘dramatic’ but needed to secure Britain’s ‘economic security’ by keeping Scunthorpe plant running

Laura Kuenssberg asks Jonathan Reynolds why the government was so slow in passing the emergency laws to save British Steel (when weeks ago – on 25 March – British Steel said it might have to close the furnaces).

Q:“ Why did you let it get to this Thursday when the coal is about to run out that you actually made this decision?”

Because I don’t think in any job, in any role in government, you take emergency powers of the scale that happened yesterday until you have that emergency situation.

We have been negotiating in good faith. We have been expecting, as I think is reasonable, an economically rational partner on the other side.

Over the last few days, it became clear that the intention of Jingye was to refuse to purchase sufficient raw material to keep the blast furnaces running – in fact, their intention was to cancel and refuse to pay for existing orders.

The company would therefore have irrevocably and unilaterally closed down primary steel-making at British Steel.

• André Onana culpable for both goals in Lyon on Thursday
• Off-field problems add to Amorim’s desire to protect him

André Onana has been rested by Ruben Amorim for Manchester United’s trip to Newcastle on Sunday, after the No 1 was culpable for both goals in Thursday’s 2-2 Europa League draw at Lyon .

While Altay Bayindir is set to make his Premier League debut at St James’ Park, the 29-year-old is likely to be recalled for Thursday’s quarter-final, second leg at Old Trafford, the Guardian understands. Onana was left behind when United travelled to Tyneside on Saturday.

In a triumph of bling over restraint, the bride will get a hen do in space and a party on a super-yacht

Well done us. It can’t be long before Jeff Bezos personally extends his thanks , as he did when we – Amazon employees and Amazon customers – paid for his flight to sub-orbital space, but let’s not wait. As soon as Monday, when his fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, is due with five friends on a rocket trip, Amazon givers could be witness, again, to the kind of unfettered excess that is only possible if everyone, at every level, contributes, even if it’s only via permanent surveillance and a surrendered toilet break .

But no one puts it better than Jeff, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, did himself, after he took his inaugural Blue Origin space trip in 2021. “You guys paid for all this.” More recently, we provided funds – that might not exist without the company’s pitiless working conditions – for Sánchez’s pink diamond engagement ring , proudly exhibited, estimated value, $3m. The billionaire delivered it, an enchanted Vogue writer reported , in the sweetest way, on his massive new yacht, “hiding the ring under her pillow after a starlit dinner à deux”. Few passions have been as exhaustively documented as that between these seasoned lovebirds. (Favourite saying: “Love you to space and back.”) And this week, prior to funding the solemnisation of that love – a June wedding in Venice – it will duly be our privilege to watch Lauren’s hen flight slip the surly bonds of Earth.

Serpentine South Gallery; National Gallery, London
The arte povera veteran’s passionate celebration of trees risks being eclipsed by the real ones that surround it. And a 19th-century Mexican polymath becomes the first Latin American artist to have a solo show at the National Gallery

A tree towers upwards in Kensington Gardens, slender but unimaginably strong, grey boulders perched like vultures among its branches. Another gestures directly to the sky, twigs spreading in eloquent appeal. A third can be seen at great distance, shattered as if by lightning, its broken glory shining bright cold in the sunshine.

For one exhilarating moment it seemed as if the acclaimed Italian artist Giuseppe Penone had come upon these trees and simply adjusted them, with poetic ingenuity, to emphasise their exceptional strength and beauty. Then, just as viewers were discussing how miraculous trees are – everyone stunned, everyone photographing this radiant glade – someone knocked on a trunk. And we heard the hollow ring of cast bronze.