‘It was like your worst nightmare’ – Ellie and Natasia on mums, music … and failing to make Bob Mortimer smile

Mark Mortimer, an actor best known for his role as Nick Hudson on the soap opera Another World, has died after a battle with cancer. He was 59. Mortimer died Sept. 23 “surrounded by the people he loved most after a fearless journey with cancer,” according to an obituary written by his family and posted online by Moss-Norris Funeral Home in St. Charles, Illinois.

Mark Mortimer, best known for his role as Nick Hudson on the soap opera “Another World,” died Sept. 23 after a battle with cancer. He was 59. “Mark Mortimer lived many lives in one lifetime,” his family wrote in his online obituary. “He was an Army veteran, a model, an actor, an entrepreneur and a builder. He was a husband, father, son, brother and friend. He was curious and determined, willing to take chances, start something new, change direction and figure things out along the way. But of all the titles Mark held throughout his life, the two that mattered most to him were husband and dad.”

In August 2019, Omar Rajeh sat in his bedroom, listening to the sound of pounding percussion with his world in crisis. In the midst of political instability, Citerne Beirut, a theatre and cultural centre Rajeh had founded in his native Lebanon, was forced to close, dismantled by order of the local government, who planned to build an incinerator on the site. Heartfelt … Omar Rajeh in Dance Is Not for Us. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the GuardianRajeh tells us that as a teenager, coming of age at the end of the Lebanese civil war, dance had always seemed like the most revolutionary thing he could do. Now here he is, more than three decades later, still dancing – out of frustration, defiance, resistance and a desire to connect. As the percussive score gains momentum, Rajeh’s busy body builds up a sweat. In this danced stream of consciousness, Rajeh is not always an especially elegant mover, but he dances like it’s a necessary thing to do. Part of this year’s Dance Umbrella festival, Dance Is Not for Us is a solo that appears at times like an explosion of physical instinct, but it is mostly calm, considered musings on the nature of choreography, with all its workings exposed.

Sarah Kane revolutionised British theatre with five provocative plays written between 1995 and 1999. Her final work, 4.48 Psychosis, was her most personal, confronting the clinical depression she struggled with for years. The play was first performed posthumously in 2000, after she died by suicide in 1999. The Royal Opera and Guildhall School of Music and Drama commissioned Philip Venables to adapt the play as an opera, which debuted in 2016. The composer, also known for a certain “in-yer-face” approach, set Kane’s original text almost entirely, realising its 24 disjointed sections in a raw, imaginative score teeming with minimalist licks, prickly synth-pop and consoling nods to the baroque. The libretto shifts between poetic abstraction and scathing exchanges between a patient and a psychologist. An ensemble of six female singers navigates themes of depression, isolation and the agonising choices surrounding medication. One fractured personality … Sophia Burgos, Veena Akama-Makia, Hannah Edmunds and Jacquelyn Stucker in 4.48 Psychosis.