The timing of this tour, to celebrate the 15^th anniversary of their self-released, lo-fi masterpiece Mwng, could not be more fitting. The album was inspired, in part, by Welsh language punk band Datblygu, and the left-wing political feelings that ran through that band’s work. Fast forward to now and London looks like an island of red surrounded by a sea of blue following the recent election – and there are a lot of people here aching for escape after Thursday's events.

The phrase “improbable life” crops up more than once in Greg Olliver’s highly engaging documentary Turned Towards the Sun about the poet Micky Burn (its title is that of the writer’s autobiography).

If the thought of the annual trek to Hay-on-Wye for the literary festival in May fills you with as much gloom as it does me (and I don’t have to go as far as most of our readers), you might do worse than sample the town’s chamber music festival this weekend as a healthy change or at least a soothing antidote.

There can be few modern plays as testing for a female actor as Manfred Karge’s Man to Man. When Tilda Swinton took it on at the Royal Court in 1987 and brought to the many roles of this one woman show her androgynous intensity it was the performance that made her name. Here in Cardiff for the Wales Millennium Centre’s revival, Margaret Ann Bain gives one of the most tireless and faultless performances a Welsh stage has seen in some time; a breathless, kinetically poetic 70 minutes that is never anything less than entirely captivating.

For many the story of Welsh rugby star Gareth Thomas will be familiar. It has been told in many forms, and powerful and inspirational as it is, many times too. Thomas (known to all bar his mam as “Alfie”) is now not just a totemic figure in the sport he graced for 16 years, but a symbol of courage and hope for the LGBT community and indeed anyone who has at some point in their lives felt the walls closing in.

The casual theatre-goer may be forgiven for thinking that, in Wales at least, serious theatre is going through a phase of chronic disregard for the audience. Yvonne Murphy’s all-female Richard III, performed in the rafters of the monolithic Wales Millennium Centre, is as serious as theatre gets, but finally crippled by its seeming disregard for the audience experience.

First there was the movie, the album, the book and the app. Now there is the tour. American Interior, Gruff Rhys’s postmodern narrative concept, has spread tentacles in any number of media. At the heart of it is the mythic story of John Evans, a young Welsh explorer who in the 1780s took himself off deep into the unvanquished heart of America in search of a myth, the lost Welsh-speaking tribe of Madog. A serpentine river odyssey that involved him in vast geopolitical forces, it has spawned a suite of songs about the solitude of adventure.

What Anne-Sophie Mutter is to the violin, Alison Balsom to the trumpet and Sabine Meyer to the clarinet, so is Sioned Williams to the harp. Though Meyer had the glass-ceiling distinction of being the first woman in the Berlin Philharmonic, Williams’s service to the BBC Symphony Orchestra has been longer (nearly 25 years so far as principal harp). And while all four artists have had major new works composed for them, the harpist’s commission of six pieces to celebrate her 60th birthday would seem to be a record.

It hardly sounds like the springboard for an album, a film, a book and an app. In the 1780s a young Welsh explorer called John Evans journeyed across the unmapped North American continent in search of a tribe of Welsh-speaking Native Americans. His only source for the tribe’s existence – and linguistic preference – was a legend which claimed that a Welsh prince by the name of Madog ab Owain Gwynedd discovered the New World 300 years before Columbus. It’s no plot spoiler to reveal that Evans did not find the tribe.

Buried deep in the final credits for theatre director Matthew Warchus's second feature film, Pride, is a shout-out to his late father for teaching his son the twin virtues of compassion and comedy. Both those qualities, as it happens, are on abundant display in this buoyant venture from Warchus fils which works on multiple levels, all of them richly engaging.