A new play by David Greig opens at the Hampstead Theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company next week. A theatre director as well as playwright, Greig (b. 1969) is one of the most prolific and artistically ambitious playwrights of his generation and a key figure in the current burgeoning of Scottish theatre. In addition to an extraordinarily diverse range of plays such as Europe (Traverse Theatre, 1994), The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (Tron Theatre, 1999) and Damascus (Edinburgh International Festival, 2009), his work includes adaptations such as his version of Euripides’ The Bacchae, starring Alan Cumming (National Theatre of Scotland, 2007), translations and plays for young people.

Dazzling and surprising, this Tate Britain retrospective by the 1998 Turner Prizewinner Chris Ofili should erase memories of the media sniping about him making money from using the so-called "gimmick" of incorporating elephant turds in his paintings. It will also confirm his status as one of the greatest contemporary British artists.

Marisa dos Reis Nunes (b. 1973) is an African-Portuguese singing superstar whose music has deep roots in fado, Portugal’s dark-blue, intensely poetic national music, but which over the course of five albums has gradually taken on inflections of jazz, blues and bossa nova. Born in Mozambique to an African mother and a Portuguese father, Mariza (like all good divas she has long since dispensed with meddlesome surname, converting along the way the soft S in her forename to a zippy Z) grew up in Lisbon, where she fell in love with fado (it translates as “fate”), the starkly melancholic strain of Portuguese folk music that originated in Africa and Brazil but which found its form in the cafes, bars and whorehouses of Lisbon’s working-class neighbourhoods in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

It always used to be said that boarding school prepares you for every hardship. Whether that includes prison in one of the most impenitent dictatorships in Africa is not a question that was put to Simon Mann in last night’s edition of Storyville. Mann, still incarcerated when the BBC caught up with him, was awaiting a pardon from President Teodoro Obiang, the very potentate he had attempted to topple five years earlier. Never mind that they like to keep a battery and electrodes handy for interrogations, Mann wasn’t about to slag off the great man’s excellent hospitality.

The stage of the Barbican is alive with black dudes in wheelchairs going bonkers. It's an extraordinary spectacle. To rocketing afro-funk, backed by a drum-kit of boxes and bells, Staff Benda Bilili's frontmen are rolling their chairs back and forth. Two of them face each other and perform loosely synchronized hand dances, another wearing an ecstatic grin clambers out of his wheelchair.

Jillian Edelstein, the distinguished photographer, is joining theartsdesk. She grew up in Cape Town and in 1985 moved to London, where within a year she had won the Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year award. It was to be the first of many such accolades. She has since established a reputation as one of the leading portrait photographers of the age, her work appearing widely in this country but also for American publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Interview.