Guardian photographer David Levene was at the Royal Albert Hall to photograph the stars and the special performances at London’s biggest night of theatre

• No need for hard stares as Paddington: The Musical triumphs at Olivier awards

• Olivier awards 2026: full list of winners

• ‘I want to thank my amazing husband, who doesn’t exist!’ – Olivier awards’ best quotes

West End spectacular about beloved bear wins seven prizes, while Rachel Zegler, Rosamund Pike and Paapa Essiedu all recognised

• Olivier awards 2026: full list of winners

It was a night of sweet victory for Michael Bond’s marmalade-loving bear as Paddington: The Musical dominated the Olivier awards on Sunday. Amid the tuxes and gowns of a glittering ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the duffle coat-wearing bear got his sticky paws all over seven prizes including best new musical.

The award for best actor in a musical went to the duo who play Paddington: James Hameed provides the lovable hero’s voice and is the remote puppeteer, while Arti Shah performs in the furry costume. The show’s baddies, Tom Edden (as the busybody Mr Curry) and Victoria Hamilton-Barritt (as Millicent Clyde, who wants Paddington to literally get stuffed), won best supporting actor and best supporting actress in a musical respectively. Luke Sheppard was named best director for the production, which also picked up awards for costume design (Gabriella Slade and Tahra Zafar) and set design (Tom Pye and Ash J Woodward).

On productions ranging from Les Liaisons Dangereuses to John Proctor Is the Villain, an army of technical wizards help ensure London’s stage productions are believable and spectacular

What does it take to create a giant chandelier on stage, decked out with more than 100 perfectly balanced, flickering candles? What about a disco floor that dazzles the audience in a play’s final moments but is hidden from view until then? On the eve of the 50th Olivier awards, we meet the artists, apprentices, engineers and designers behind some of London’s most memorable theatrical moments this year.

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Aidan Turner, Lucia Chocarro and Monica Barbaro in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre, London

The artist will follow in the footsteps of Ariana DeBose, Cynthia Erivo and Kevin Spacey this June

The Tony awards have turned to a singer with a reputation for a high-energy, physical live show to be the next telecast host – Pink.

The three-time Grammy award winner will make her debut as emcee for the awards on 7 June at its familiar home of Radio City Music Hall.

‘I asked them the secret to a happy life. “Good genes,” replied Magdolna, who was 87. “Avoid borrowing money,” added Irén, 86’

When I saw these two elderly ladies dressed as bride and groom in a retirement home in Páty, near Budapest, my first thought was to wonder why they had chosen those particular costumes. I took their picture in the home’s lounge and afterwards we had a long conversation. I asked them about their lives, what they believed was the secret to a long life, and how to preserve a love of life in old age. They both emphasised a long and happy marriage. Magdolna, 87, on the left, lived with her husband for more than 50 years, and 86-year-old Irén for 62, until their spouses died.

In Hungary, the average pension is the equivalent of about £500 a month. It takes the talents of a magician for a pensioner to stretch that beyond basic needs and make any room for leisure, culture or travel. The health of Hungarian pensioners also falls short of what is typical in the west. And it’s really hard to get into a retirement home in Hungary. You have to wait for years for a good place.

Actor who made her name in The World According to Garp and was nominated for a Bafta for Woody Allen’s Interiors

The thoughtful, understated actor Mary Beth Hurt, who has died aged 79, enjoyed the good fortune of seeing her early career intersect with an unusually intellectual moment in American cinema. She earned a Bafta nomination as one of the three sisters in Woody Allen’s Chekhov-via-Bergman experiment Interiors (1978) before causing onscreen havoc as Robin Williams’s frisky college professor wife in the John Irving adaptation The World According to Garp (1982).

In Interiors, Hurt – making her movie debut – was cast as the directionless Joey, who belatedly achieves a kind of purpose in attempting to save her overbearing mother (Geraldine Page) from drowning. By far Allen’s gloomiest vision, the film nevertheless made $10m off a $3m budget, while Hurt did more than tread water in illustrious company. Though she lost out in Bafta’s most promising newcomer category to Christopher Reeve as Superman, the film’s minor-key success prefigured Hurt’s four-decade big-screen career.

Writer looked to topics such as computer engineering and life in a nursing home to produce richly researched books

Tracy Kidder, an award-winning narrative nonfiction writer who turned everything from computer engineering to life in a nursing home into unexpected bestsellers, has died. He was 80.

Kidder’s longtime publisher Random House confirmed his death in a statement on Wednesday: “Tracy’s gifts for storytelling and tireless reporting are an enduring reflection of the empathy, integrity, and endless curiosity he brought to everything he did.”

Olivia Dean, Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell, Jacob Alon, Self Esteem and Kae Tempest lead this year’s Ivors, with two nominations each

Olivia Dean, Ellie Rowsell of Wolf Alice, Jacob Alon, Self Esteem and Kae Tempest lead this year’s Ivor Novello awards for excellence in British and Irish songwriting, with two nominations apiece. Self Esteem’s cowriter Johan Hugo, and Tempest’s Fraser T Smith, are also credited among the leading acts.

Tempest will go up against himself in the best contemporary song category, with two nominations: one for I Stand on the Line, written with Smith, and one for Know Yourself, written with Smith and Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers. Both songs come from Tempest’s fifth album, Self Titled.

Two musicals dominate nominations while Tom Hiddleston and Bryan Cranston vie for best actor, with Cate Blanchett and Rosamund Pike up for best actress
• Olivier awards 2026: full list of nominations

Michael Bond’s marmalade-loving bear will go up against a band of fairytale characters at the Olivier awards next month, as two musicals dominated the nominations announced on Thursday.

The frontrunners for London’s biggest theatre awards are Paddington: The Musical and Into the Woods, which each received 11 nominations. Paddington, which opened to five-star reviews at the Savoy theatre, is up for best new musical, best director (Luke Sheppard), best theatre choreographer (Ellen Kane) and best actor in a musical for the duo who play the lovable ursine hero. James Hameed provides the bear’s voice and is the remote puppeteer while Arti Shah dons the furry costume. Their co-stars Tom Edden, Amy Booth-Steel and Victoria Hamilton-Barritt are also nominated for their supporting roles. Gabriella Slade’s costumes, Tahra Zafar’s puppet designs, Tom Pye’s set, Ash J Woodward’s video, Gareth Owen’s sound and Matt Brind’s orchestrations and arrangements were all recognised.

Into the Woods and Paddington the Musical are this year’s most-nominated shows with 11 nods each. See who else is in the running at this year’s awards

Best new musical
Here We Are, book by David Ives, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim at National Theatre – Lyttelton

Paddington The Musical, music and lyrics by Tom Fletcher and book by Jessica Swale at Savoy theatre

The £30,000 award went to novel A Family Matter, about a lesbian affair and a custody battle

A debut novel exploring the long-term effects of prejudice and secrecy on a lesbian couple in the 1980s has won the Nero Gold prize.

Claire Lynch was presented with the £30,000 award for her book A Family Matter at a ceremony in London on Wednesday evening.

The previously named Screen Actors Guild (Sag) awards also saw wins for the ensemble casts of Sinners and The Studio, while Harrison Ford took home lifetime achievement

• Actor awards 2026 red carpet – in pictures

Michael B Jordan, Jessie Buckley and the late Catherine O’Hara were among the big winners at this year’s newly titled Actor awards.

Previously known as the Screen Actors Guild awards, the Actors are voted on by a membership of more than 160,000 actors. The name change was to provide “clearer recognition in terms of what the show is about”.

The ITV censors had their work cut out in a protest-filled, relatively edgy ceremony that hosted ultra-expressive performances from Rosalía, Wolf Alice and more

• Brit awards 2026: the full list of winners
• ‘We’re going into a dark place’: Brit awards artists voice alarm over Reform UK’s rise

Styles opened the show with his return single, Aperture, a UK No 1 in release week which is fairly swiftly dropping down the charts, perhaps because it is a real stylistic outlier in pop right now. Euphoric yet faintly distant, it conjures the feeling when you’re on a dancefloor, slightly out of it, and gazing at the human melee around you. And so it proves here, with a performance where Styles is in the moment, jiving with his considerable band and backing singers, and twitching in time with dancers in snail T-shirts and sunglasses – and yet also one level above the moment, not letting himself become too giddy beyond a couple of grins. His vocal lines are reminiscent of that master of airy yet warm observation, Kings of Convenience and Whitest Boy Alive singer Erlend Oye, and I even detected a touch of David Bowie here too: an echo of his tailoring and particular handsomeness as Styles ages, and also the way Bowie would perform, with a thousand-yard stare that also takes in the foreground.

A Manchester move, Shaun Ryder’s bleeped-out anecdote and the odd leftfield flourish added some life to a slick ceremony – yet when it came to the prizes, commercial heavyweights tended to reign

• Brit awards 2026: the full list of winners
• ‘We’re going into a dark place’: Brit awards artists voice alarm over Reform UK’s rise

The Brit awards have perhaps borrowed a trick from the Mercury prize, which last year unexpectedly applied the defibrillator to an event that’s been on the verge of extinction for years by the simple expedient of moving it to Newcastle and packing the audience with music fans rather than music biz grandees. The Brits’ relocation to Manchester had the effect of adding at least a slight edge of chaos to a ceremony that’s become increasingly slick in recent years, largely by dint of involving Shaun Ryder, who almost immediately enlivened proceedings by telling an anecdote about being busted for drug possession during the Brits in the 90s that ITV found it necessary to bleep out in its entirety.

The show itself was too varied to suffer from the blandness that’s cursed Brits past, offering performances ranging from Rosalia’s Björk-assisted opera/gabber hybrid to Alex Warren (“what you get if you order Ed Sheeran on Temu”, as Whitehall put it) performing Ordinary with a smoking-jacket-clad James Blunt on piano, via the unexpected sight of Ghostface Killah dad-dancing with Dua Lipa during a medley helmed by outstanding contribution to music winner Mark Ronson.

The 26-year-old dominates in Manchester, landing the night’s biggest prizes as Rosé, Wolf Alice and Mark Ronson also take top honours

• Brit awards 2026: the full list of winners
• Alexis Petridis: This year’s Brit awards found a flicker of chaos – but the winners were never in doubt
• ‘We’re going into a dark place’: Brit awards artists voice alarm over Reform UK’s rise

Olivia Dean was the big winner at the 2026 Brit awards, taking home awards for artist of the year, pop act, song of the year for her Sam Fender duet Rein Me In, and album of the year for The Art of Loving.

In less than a year, Dean has leaped to the forefront of British pop thanks to The Art of Loving, her second album. With songs that get to the heart of the joys and frustrations of casual modern dating, she is enormously relatable, while her sophisticated and cosmopolitan songcraft, deftly finessing styles such as bossa nova, trip-hop, neo-soul and jazz together, has given her an unusually broad and cross-generational appeal.

As Olivia Dean swept the board, there were eye-catching performances from Sombr, Raye, Rosalía and more, while Jeff Goldblum and Maya Jama lit up the red carpet

After a Grammy and a global breakthrough, the 26-year-old singer could sweep the board at next week’s Brits. Her closest collaborators explain her massive appeal

Saturday’s Brit awards will feature performances from heavy hitters such as Harry Styles and Mark Ronson – but all eyes will be on Olivia Dean, the Londoner who has become one of the UK’s biggest breakouts in years, thanks to her second album The Art of Loving and its mega-smash UK No 1 single Man I Need. Nominated for five awards, this year’s ceremony is likely to serve as a coronation for Dean, who has found international success on a scale that most contemporary British artists struggle to achieve.

The Art of Loving focuses on love in all its permutations, applying meditations on friendship and romance to a light, gauzy blend of bossa nova, throwback R&B and indie-pop. Dean delivers each song with unfussy exuberance – she somehow captures both the otherworldly poise of Diana Ross and the charm of your best friend killing it at karaoke – and has become the voice of a generation whose romantic lives have been complicated by dating apps and other digitally mediated mating rituals.