The American humorist delighted the Royal Festival Hall with characteristically disgruntled slices of life – including a brush with cancel culture

In years to come, I can tell the grandkids I was at the Royal Festival Hall the night Keir Starmer celebrated his landslide election victory there. Will I tell them that I was at a David Sedaris reading, and left hours before the Labour leader arrived? Reader, I may. Unlike other election night entertainments I’ve attended over the years, this audience with the American humorist unfolded without reference to political earthquakes beyond the venue’s doors. The only flicker of topicality found Sedaris reading from recent diary entries, the most up-to-date contending with Joe Biden’s dithering debate performance and the debased language of US political discourse.

Of boilerplate and cliche, Sedaris is a sworn enemy, and nothing could be further from banal public-realm speech than the spry and specific essays he performs for us. By now (Sedaris is 67), his readers and audiences know exactly what to expect of the North Carolina man, and get it in spades: demure slices of life contrasting our host’s fastidiousness and seeming civility with the rudeness and/or eccentricity he finds everywhere about him in his travels through America, the world – and many an airport in between.

David Sedaris is touring

Audiences step out of their comfort zone at this annual extravaganza in the historic old town of the Swiss city, where the shows are staged in eye-catching settings

Lausanne has been the official Olympic capital for 30 years but for even longer this hilly Swiss city has hosted a summer spectacular with a dizzying array of artistic rather than athletic disciplines. This year’s lineup for the Festival de la Cité – its 52nd edition – features more than 80 shows over six days, from wildly contrasting styles of circus, dance and theatre to a participatory street parade and a music programme including choirs, screamo, reggaeton, jazz, postpunk and gabber. Not to mention Swiss-American yodeller Erika Stucky, performing in the city’s 13th-century cathedral, with Johannes Keller on the organ.

Audiences step out of their comfort zones because every show is free on these predominantly outdoor stages clustered together in the historical old town. Each performance is a gateway to another, hopes Martine Chalverat, who took over as artistic director in 2022 and formerly ran the documentary film festival Visions du Réel in nearby Nyon.

Sheridan’s 18th-century comedy of manners is staged for the Royal Shakespeare Company this month by director Tinuke Craig. Enter a backstage world of wigs, fans and frocks

Theatre by the Lake, Keswick
The Penrith town band bring warmth and plangency to an adaptation of the post-Thatcher movie, alive with movement and community spirit

Around the end of the 1990s, three popular movies about the ravages of Thatcherism on working-class communities all featured characters finding solace in culture. In Billy Elliot , it was an escape through dance. In The Full Monty , it was nightclub stripping. And in Brassed Off , it was the power of music.

Of the three, Brassed Off has the gentlest emotional arc. Its heart is in the right place, though it has none of the gender subversiveness of Billy Elliot and not quite as much bleak despair as The Full Monty. It finds a metaphor for industrial decline in the story of a colliery brass band whose fate is tied to the survival of the pit. Ten years after the miners’ strike, the band is an expression of a community under threat.

At Theatre by the Lake, Keswick , until 27 July. Then at Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough , 2-31 August; and at Octagon, Bolton , 5-28 September

‘The German production has had a standing ovation every night for 36 years. Graf went before big tennis competitions to gee herself up. And the German football team would go before an international’

Andrew Lloyd Webber said to me: “I have this story.” It was going to be an animated film based on Thomas the Tank Engine, but animation back in the early 1980s was really expensive, so that never happened. Then we started working on something called Rocky Mountain Railroad. That was going to be a train race across America to see who would have the honour of taking Prince Charles and Diana on a royal tour. There’s history for you. Andrew had a train set in his attic. I’d had one as a boy. It didn’t seem to be a daft idea. The previous show we’d done was people pretending to be cats, so people pretending to be trains wasn’t such a leap.

With tickets doubling as public transport passes and recycled props, Hans Otto Theater is embracing a €3m federal project to make culture climate neutral

A handful of Spanish conquistadors fight through thick undergrowth to emerge in the ivy-clad ruins of a fallen civilisation during a rehearsal of Austrian playwright Thomas Köck’s Your Palaces Are Empty.

Premiered last month at the Hans Otto Theater in Potsdam, south-west of Berlin, the bleak and unforgiving drama probes the wounds of a shattered capitalist world that has exploited its people and the planet’s resources.

Octagon, Bolton
Bram Stoker’s novel gets redone in the style of The Play That Goes Wrong, in an energetically performed but ultimately feeble farce

We have a cost of living crisis and a boring election and a summer that keeps stalling and, for all I know, maybe audiences have an appetite for a comedy take on Dracula – a novel famed for not being in the least bit funny. It would be hard to begrudge them such innocent pleasure – especially when it’s performed with the elan of this Octagon/Stephen Joseph theatre co-production. But, really, it is feeble stuff.

Written by John Nicholson and the theatre company Le Navet Bete (aka Al Dunn, Nick Bunt and Matt Freeman), the Bram Stoker reworking follows in the tradition of the Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen’s Guild Dramatic Society , National Theatre of Brent and, latterly, The Play That Goes Wrong . The joke is that Professor Van Helsing (Chris Hannon) wants to tell the true story of the Transylvanian count, not the version pedalled by Stoker – “you are here to be educated not entertained” – and has recruited three hapless actors to play it out with the minimum of artifice.

James Corden and Anna Maxwell Martin are starring in The Constituent, a play that asks if MPs are no longer safe. Here, its writer explores what politicians wearing stab vests means for democracy

Since the murders of Batley and Spen MP Jo Cox and Southend West MP Sir David Amess , we’ve seen a rising tide of viciousness aimed at locally elected politicians, by apparently fairly ordinary constituents. There are all manner of reasons, often surprisingly banal.

Female MPs are targeted for their gender. MPs from an ethnic minority background are disproportionately the target of racial or religious hatred. And some local MPs are targeted simply because they’re politicians, tasked with fixing problems they’re unable to fix. With a general election looming and MPs deciding which battles they can safely pick, there are fears the escalating hostility is a threat to democracy.

At the annual celebration of Broadway, major acting winners included Jeremy Strong, Daniel Radcliffe and Sarah Paulson

• The full list of winners

The 77th annual Tony awards were dominated by major wins for shows Stereophonic, Merrily We Roll Along and The Outsiders as well as actors Jeremy Strong and Daniel Radcliffe.

Stereophonic, the most nominated play in Tonys history with 13 nods, picked up five awards including best play. It tells the story of a British-American rock band in the 1970s trying to make an album.