The Hollywood star is to appear at Theatre Royal Drury Lane in Shakespeare’s late play about sorcery. But what is the secret to playing the great magician?

I have one thing in common with Andrew Lloyd Webber: we both saw John Gielgud play Prospero at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1957. The big difference is that, since Lord Lloyd Webber now owns the theatre, he was able to suggest Shakespeare be revived at the Lane for the first time in 67 years in the shape of a new Jamie Lloyd production of The Tempest starring Sigourney Weaver. It is an imaginative piece of casting and set me thinking, as someone who has looked on a storm of Tempests, about Prosperos of the past.

The play itself is, as Anne Barton once wrote, “an extraordinarily obliging work of art”: it is open to multiple meanings and endlessly diverse stagings. Prospero can also be played in a variety of ways but, surveying the 40 or so productions I have seen, I have picked out four key interpretations. There is Prospero the magus, the impresario, the colonialist and the despot. The categories are far from being mutually exclusive. Indeed one sign of a great Prospero is the ability to combine them all but at least they give a handy guide to the role’s complexities.

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Royal Zoological Society of Scotland calls for tougher laws after three-month-old Roxie dies from Bonfire Night stress

The owner of Edinburgh zoo has linked the death of a baby red panda on Bonfire Night to fireworks and called for tighter regulations.

The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) said vets blamed the death of three-month-old Roxie on 5 November on her reaction to fireworks in the area.

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Despite his absurd persona and obscene wealth, would-be boxer’s support of female fighters is worthy of note

Jake Paul is having his hands wrapped in the locker room as his older brother, Logan, who also became rich and famous on YouTube, speaks earnestly to him. “You’ve expanded your mind, your circle, your emotional intelligence and your capabilities,” Logan tells Jake.

“From making silly home videos to changing the entire landscape of combat sports. Everyone in this room knows just how powerful a being you are and that’s why we’re all here, including Netflix. One day, if I run for president, I’d be honoured to have you as my vice-president or maybe secretary of defence. You’ll be in charge of the red button. The all-powerful nuke that also happens to be at the end of your right hand.”

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The move has been described as ‘chilling’ by activists and rights groups as arrests mount over dress code breaches

The Iranian state has said that it plans to open a treatment clinic for women who defy the mandatory hijab laws that require women to cover their heads in public.

The opening of a “hijab removal treatment clinic” was announced by Mehri Talebi Darestani, the head of the Women and Family Department of the Tehran Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. She said the clinic will offer “scientific and psychological treatment for hijab removal”.

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English football grounds in the late 1980s could be grey and downbeat but that changed thanks to Manchester City fan Frank Newton

Amidst the depressing backdrop of hooliganism and the imminent threat of ID cards, grounds during the 1988–89 campaign could be downbeat, grey and sometimes largely deserted. On the face of it, life could have been especially grim for Manchester City fans, given that this was now the second consecutive campaign they’d competed in the Second Division.

But City still had the sixth-highest average attendance across the four divisions and, in their shiny sky-blue kit, had harvested a rich crop of English talent from their youth team, including lightning-quick winger David White, midfielder Paul Lake – tipped for an England call-up – and forward Paul Moulden, who’d plundered an absurdly high number of goals at youth-team level and was now scoring for the first team too. A year before, they put an eye-catching 10 goals past Malcolm Macdonald’s Huddersfield Town, with Paul Stewart (who was sold to Tottenham at season’s end), Tony Adcock and White each grabbing a hat-trick. But what also caught the eye was the fact that on the terraces, City fans really had gone bananas.

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The V&A’s Great Mughals shines a light on a cultured and enlightened reign over India and south Asia that still wields influence today. Take a close look at some of the remarkable artefacts of that era

Perhaps the best known cultural remnant of the mighty Mughal empire, which held sway across what is today Afghanistan, Pakistan, northern India and Bangladesh in the 16th and 17th centuries, is the English word “mogul”, denoting someone of almost unimaginable wealth and power. Just how wealthy and powerful the Mughal emperors were is demonstrated in a new exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which can afford to offer the best known physical remnant of the empire, the Taj Mahal , only passing mention among a galaxy of remarkable paintings, illustrated manuscripts, textiles, carpets and spectacular objects made from precious stones and metals, some of which have rarely been displayed before.

“Of course we nod to the Taj Mahal,” explains curator Susan Stronge. “And we have architectural drawings and models. But it is just one, admittedly exceptional, part of a much larger story.”

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This may be a rational move – but it should not be used as an argument to hack away at the corporation until it has little left to offer

What is Gary Lineker worth to licence-fee payers? One obvious way to think about that question is to measure what else you could get with his £1.35m pay packet, a large chunk of which has just been offloaded by the BBC : 8,000 television licences, 40 NHS nurses, 26 BBC employees on the corporation’s median salary, eight Keir Starmers, seven Chris Suttons, six Alex Scotts, five Mark Chapmans, or a house somewhere outside Elstree . And that’s mad, obviously. He says the names of the football teams and asks Alan Shearer whether something was a red card or not – and it can’t take more than a couple of days a week. There is absolutely no way to justify it.

The other way of thinking about it is a lot less concrete, and a lot harder to turn into an overheated demand to scrap the BBC . You could begin with the observation that, as well as being massive and unjustifiable, Lineker’s pay deal cost less than four hundredths of a percent of licence fee income this year. You might note how lucky the likes of Amanda Holden and Stephen Mulhern, not obviously more talented, are that their ITV deals are treated as commercially sensitive, and therefore secret. And you might also say that in the end, since the BBC has a comfortably larger audience share than any of its commercial rivals, it isn’t that surprising if it has to pay somewhere in the same universe as the going rate.

Archie Bland is the editor of the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter

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Competition pitting Premier League U21s against fifth-tier reserves fails to inspire a paltry Wealdstone crowd against Southampton

Fifth-tier Wealdstone defeated Premier League Southampton 3-1 on Tuesday night: a remarkable result at first glance but one that came with caveats.

Southampton’s Under-21s went to north-west London to play Matt Taylor’s heavily rotated Wealdstone in the National League Cup at Grosvenor Vale. The competition was revived last month with a 32-team, four-group format featuring 16 sides from Premier League 2 , and 16 from the league’s fifth rung.

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Reports of sonic boom level thunderclaps around the stadium. Are you in earshot, any OBOers local and got the skinny on the storms? Drop us a line in the usual way, links on the left flank of this page.

Some wet weather reading? Martin Pegan has got you covered as he digs into how time waits for no man, not even Australian cricketers:

Australian cricket has had several reminders that Father Time remains undefeated. The lingering effects of an end for every cricketer and every era have been hammered home in recent decades as fallow years have followed bumper crops of all-conquering Australians. Yet it remains to be seen whether the lessons of the past have truly been learned as the current men’s Test team starts another summer of cricket rolling towards a cliff edge.

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