Things to do in London this weekend

In Richard Jones’s staggering revival of Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionist classic, our first glimpse of Rosie Sheehy’s Young Woman is the sight of her freaking out in a press of black-clad ’20s New Yorkers. Jones’s production is an infernal anxiety machine, each hallucinatory scene immaculately crafted with its own distinct mood. Hyemi Shin’s retina-searing set is unforgettable, Benjamin Grant’s sound design skin-crawling unnerving, and Sheehy is astonishing. The whole thing is an observation that capitalism is a machine that crushes the little guy. It’s a tale of one woman standing up to the system turned into a pulverising rapture.

Outdoor spaces are big business come London summertime, and this seasonal pop-up between Waterloo and Westminster bridges is one of the biggest in London. Boasting lovely views over the river Thames and an eclectic programme of drag shows, DJs, live performances and themed club nights, it’s packed with surprises. Look out for the Dock Disco, a regular Friday night of classic house, disco anthems and dance pop bangers, Sunday party We Are The Sunset, drag brunches and a seven-hour-long Swiftageddon club night. 

It’s all getting a bit nihilistic for Barbara Kruger. The American art icon’s show of new work at Sprüth Magers is full of existential dread, hefty pessimism and grim monochrome. It’s her usual ultra-bold statement art, but in fading shades of grey. Despite being small, the show ends up being a lot more satisfying than Kruger’s big recent Serpentine exhibition. Kruger’s art doesn’t need to be adapted to fit on TV screens, or animated, or interpreted, or rehashed. Her art is best when it’s like this: in your face, simple, unadulterated. 

You’ve seen ‘The White Lotus’, and now you want to live the sweet Sicilian life. No need to leave the capital to get a slice of the iconic Italian coastline. Pop-up food market SicilyFEST is back taking over the Business Design Centre so you can earn your cannoli from your arancini. The stands will be lined with gelato, pizzas and pretty desserts that will make your mouth and eyes water. There’ll also be Sicilian artists treating foodies to performances as well as interactive classes led by some cracking Italian chefs, too.

Head to Token Studio, where you’ll be treated to a relaxing, fun 90-minute session that will involve throwing a potter’s wheel, making finger-sized miniature pottery, learning hand-building techniques. Or if you prefer to focus on design, opt for the pottery painting class, where you can pick a ready-made piece to be your canvas, be it a mug, plate or bowl. The best bit? You can bring your own beer! 

Book your BYOB Pottery Experience at Token Studio for £32 only through Time Out offers. 

It’s folklore season. For one night only London College of Fashion’s campus will be full of May Day performances, costumes, customs and rituals. Think Morris dancing workshops, pearly kings and queens, tarot readings, guided meditations as well as DJ sets and other performances. It’s all tied to its ongoing ‘Making More Mischief: Folk Costume in Britain’ exhibit, which you can check out too. 

Peckham Fringe returns for its third year with over 20 productions created by local artists and performers. The programme promises inventive, enthralling storytelling. Look out for ‘Time Fly’s’, a time-travelling adventure back to the south-east London of old and ‘Last Goal Wins’, an award-winning piece about five men trying out for the Nigerian national football team.

The cycle of 13 songs PJ Harvey has written for the National Theatre’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ‘Our Mutual Friend’ slot seamlessly into her body of work and elevate this adaptation of Dickens’s final finished novel. The show is billed as a play with songs: the tune count is a bit low for actual musical status, but nonetheless, Harvey’s songs are integral to the darkly satirical thriller that pivots on the disappearance of John Harmon, who disappeared on the day he returned to collect his inheritance following the death of his wealthy father. This story from the city is something special: Dickens’s late class drama turned into a work both elemental and righteous.

The concept of a ‘wood-fired’ London restaurant might not elicit the same reverential ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ as it did a decade ago; such an elemental technique is now commonplace, but wood-firing the Mayfair way is methodical and calculated, with just a dash of dark ages energy. Humo (‘smoke’ in Spanish) received its first Michelin star at the start of 2024, a little over a year since Colombian-born chef Miller Prada opened the restaurant down a Mayfair backstreet. Different woods and different temperatures impart different flavours on different dishes in a fittingly alchemistic fashion from raw starters of 12-day aged Hampshire trout to smoked vegetables and lamb.

Embark on an inspiring journey around the world through art at the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition 2024. The highly anticipated annual showcase returns to Somerset House this April, bringing extraordinary images – from luscious landscapes to impressive architecture, striking street shots to moving documentary projects – to an iconic location. 

Get exclusive £12 tickets to the Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition, only through Time Out offers. 

There’s been a frenzy of hype around Sam Grabiner’s debut play ‘Boys on the Verge of Tears’. It was the recipient of the prestigious Verity Bargate Award last year, and has found vocal support from big name playwrights Lucy Kirkwood and April de Angelis. But, the real attraction comes in the form of the director James Macdonald: a real industry legend. Set exclusively in a public toilet, with five main actors and over 50 characters, Grabiner has created an intimate study of men and boys, their potential for violence and pain. Following a rough chronology from boyhood to old age, with no break between the changing scenes, men from all walks of life flow in and out of the cubicles. It’s a tiny, tragic and beautiful glimpse into a public toilet's secrets.

Tchaikovsky’s ballet ‘Swan Lake’ opens with soft-lapping melodies, before building to several great crashing crescendos. And so it is with this raucously entertaining, ballet-themed gorefest. Abigail is a vampire film that pirouettes over your funny bone while sinking its teeth into your neck… over and over again. Six testy individuals stake-out a 12-year-old girl as she’s driven home from ballet practice. They drug and kidnap little Abigail (still in her tutu) and zip her into a bag during a set-piece that’s too slick to be tense. Then it’s off to the creepy isolated mansion where the rest of the film unfolds. This is a delightfully-pitched, gory horror comedy that energetically creates a crossover genre we never knew we needed: the vampire ballet. 

Can art save the world? Can it lead to world peace? Nah, probably not, but Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) believed it could. In the 1980s, the giant of post-war American art launched ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, pronounced ‘Rocky’ like his pet turtle), an initiative that saw him travel to countries gripped by war and oppression in an ambitious act of cultural diplomacy. He visited places like Cuba, Chile and the USSR and the results are on display here. As a document of a world gripped by paranoia and tension, of the slow demise of communism, of the birth of neoliberalism, it’s great. 

On a curved grey wall, Antwerp-based painter Kati Heck’s new show has laid out a serpentine journey through art history. There are riffs on Durer and Cranach, nods to mythology and the Old Testament. A ripped canvas shows ’60s superstar Donovan on a crumbling wall. Adam and Eve stand fruitless beneath a tree. One canvas is filled with cartoon-y scenes of Donald Trump, the Count from ‘Sesame Street’, a mother wiping her toddler’s arse. It’s all unfollowable, dizzying, a whorl of clashing symbolism. It wouldn’t work if it wasn’t so brilliantly painted, a collision of Hieronymous Bosch, De Chirico and Alice Neel. Every choice is so clearly deliberate, but left entirely unexplained. And that, it seems is the point. 

Never ending baskets of delicious dim sum. Need we say more? That means tucking into as many dumplings, rolls and buns as you can scoff down, all expertly put together by a Chinatown restaurant celebrating more than ten years of business. Taiwanese pork buns? Check. Pork and prawn soup dumplings? You betcha. ‘Supreme’ crab meat xiao long bao? Of course! And just to make sure you’re all set, Leong’s Legend is further furnishing your palate with a chilled glass of prosecco. Lovely bubbly.

Get 51% off bottomless dim sum at Leong's Legend only through Time Out Offers

Soho’s Chinatown will always be a symbol of culture and community in the heart of Central London. Stepping through Wardour Street’s kitsch pagoda gates today, the infectious buzz is undeniable. London’s Chinatown is always evolving, with the most recent wave of restaurants representing Malaysian, Korean, Singaporean, Thai and Taiwanese cuisine alongside regional Chinese flavours like Sichuanese, Cantonese and Gansu style classics – not to mention an entire alley of pan-Asian dessert options. Here’s Time Out’s round-up of the 20 best places to get to know the foodie enclave. 

Yes, the presence of soon-to-turn-85 stage and screen legend Ian McKellen tackling Shakespeare’s great character Sir John Falstaff is the big draw in ‘Player Kings’. But Robert Icke’s three hour-40-minute modern-dress take on the two ‘Henry IV’ plays does not pander to its star, and is unwavering in its view that this is the story of two deeply damaged men, linked grimly together. McKellen is naturally excellent as an atypically elderly Falstaff, but it also has a supporting cast to die for See it because it’s a terrific take on one of the greatest plays ever written (plus its decent straight-to-DVD sequel) blessed tremendously original lead performances.

The number of films originating from Mongolia makes every​ single one feel special. If Only I Could Hibernate follows teenager Ulzii (Battsooj Uurtsaikh), his widowed, alcoholic mother (Ganchimeg Sandagdorj) and his three younger siblings as they scratch out a living in their yurt, incongruously located in the industrialised and rapidly modernising capital, Ulaanbaatar. As bleak as a winter’s day on the steppes, yet as hopeful as green shoots emerging from a spring thaw, this is an astonishingly assured debut.

Britain is littered with symbols of death and exploitation. Public sculptures of controversial historical figures are everywhere, and now they’re in the Serpentine too, because Yinka Shonibare CBE has put them there. The Nigerian-British art megastar has filled the gallery with recreations of statues of Churchill, Kitchener, Queen Victoria and Clive of India. But they’re scaled down, their power diminished, minimised, undermined. And of course, they’re covered in Shonibare’s signature Dutch wax print. This is what Shonibare does: highlight, tear apart and subvert the legacy of British imperialism with directness, colour and wit.

Kanishka has launched a brand-new brunch menu focussing on PanIndian food, with a menu embracing the flavours of India’s various regions, from Punjab to Kerala, Kolkata to Delhi and everywhere in between. Kanishka’s skilled kitchen team, led by chef Atul Kochhar, have curated a symphony of new dishes, including Khari paneer tikka, Palak paneer and Chicken tikka pie. And the best bit? You’ll be greeted with a seasonal welcome Kanishka punch cocktail and two hours of bottomless wine or beer. 

Get brunch at Atul Kochhar's Kanishka for £35, only through Time Out Offers.

This tiny exhibition is dedicated to the miserable, chaotic, sombre depiction of feverish violence that is the last painting of one of history’s most important artists, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It isn’t in the best state of repair, but it’s still a mesmerisingly beautiful work of art. It’s a maelstrom of movement and brutality and morbidity. It’s incredible. Caravaggio would die not long after finishing this painting, but what a way to go out. Not with a whimper, and not with a bang, but with a scream of blood-drenched anguish.

Returning with another provocative, penetrating array of non-fiction films, The Open City Documentary Festival is setting up camp at London cinemas to show the best in documentary filmmaking from around the world. It all kicks off with ‘Sunless Haven’, a poetic piece of artistic filmmaking looking at the history of the London Docklands through the 20th Century. In total, there are 161 films including ‘Expanded Realities’ projects on the programme. Something for all tastes, in other words. 

Hugely influential silent US comic Doctor Brown – real name Phil Burgers, astonishingly – returns with his first proper new show in 12 years, a period that has seen him mentor and nurture the current impressive glut of LA-based US clown comics. ‘Beturns’ (all his shows begin with latter 'b') comes with no real promise beyond being the first Doctor Brown show in a decade – and that should be enough for most of us. 

Settle down for a while host of free film screenings in weird and wonderful venues across south east London. There’ll be a full and varied bill with old school classics, indie flicks, shorts and local documentary, including family-friendly films like ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ and ‘Bugsy Malone’, newer releases like ‘Rye Lane’ and ‘Wonka’, hard-hitting forgein films like ‘No’ and ‘Smile Orange’, plus docs like ‘Grace Jones: Bloodlight & Bambi’. Look out for discos, DJ nights and talks after many of the screenings. 

Henry VIII’s former gaff is already one of the most splendid-looking buildings in London, but fill it with 10,000 tulips and you’ve got something mighty special to look at. Hampton Court Palace’s Tulip Festival is one of the biggest planted displays of the colouful flowers in the UK and it’s a good excuse to celebrate the start of spring. See the buds pouring out of the Tudor wine fountain and in floating tulip vases. Plus, spot rare, historic and specialist varieties.

Good Mexican food in London is famously hard to come by. Mainly because Mexico is actually quite far from the Big Smoke. But, we’re pleased to say that things could be changing. Taquiza has a bit of a ramshackle feel to it. This is down to the fact that the space doubles up as The Carpet Shop, one of London’s best new(ish) clubs, opened by the people behind Corsica Studios. Here the pisco sours and spicy margs are flowing and the food consists of healthy sized tacos and traditional Mexican plates to share. Above everything, Taquiza is fun. The staff are laid back, friendly, and know what they’re doing; it plays cool electronic music; it’s got wacky art on the walls; it turns into a really decent club; and you get to eat with your hands. What’s not to like?

Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined through cutting-edge technology. Marble Arch’s high-tech Frameless gallery houses four unique exhibition spaces with hypnotic visuals reimaging work from the likes of Bosch, Dalí and more, all with an atmospheric score. Now get 90 minutes of eye-popping gallery time for just £20 through Time Out offers.

£20 tickets to Frameless immersive art experience only through Time Out offers 

Albert Oehlen, the heftily post-modern contemporary German artist’s approach to painting has always been to strip it back and lay it bare. What's left, whether good or bad, is painting at its basest, most obvious. These new works are heavily gridded, the picture planes clearly, visibly divided. He’s making the hidden processes of painting visible, exposing painting’s guts. He’s saying this is how the sausage gets made: it’s not magic, it’s not sublime, it’s just grids and lines and colour, it’s basic. Art is simple. It’s not about big themes like capitalism or colonialism or whatever, it’s not trying to say anything. It’s just painting, and even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good.

This 2019 drama about a Harvard professor who gets cancelled after he platforms a racist is never the play you think it’s going to be, and it’s all the better for it. Some LA critics were a little snooty about Paul Grellong’s play when it premiered there with Bryan Cranston starring. They’re wrong, it’s terrific. It has a genuinely exciting plot and a full-spectrum moral awareness of the murky motives and pitiless passions of identity politics; either of these qualities are a rare delight in new writing, and both together are an absolute treat. Brisk, well-made and punchy, it’s a reminder of why a good off-West End drama is such an enjoyable night out. 

In Leo Costelloe’s small exhibition, the young Irish-Australian artist is taking a critical deep dive into the tropes of weddings: the superstitions, the pressures, the meanings, the aesthetics. Costelloe sees the ‘wedding’ as a deeply contrived system of societal pressure, designed to form a specific feminine identity and perpetuate specific feminine norms. You could argue that marriage as an institution isn’t something desperately in need of critical discourse in 2024. But Costelloe is exploring how one person’s perfect day is another’s intentional, oppressive and nefarious shaping of gender norms. 

The very flames of hell are licking the walls and ancient wooden beams of this church in Islington (the new home of Castor Gallery), and it’s all because of Fabian Ramirez. This is the Mexican painter’s act of revenge, this is how he gets back at the colonisers for using Christianity as a weapon of conquest and oppression. The works are vast, flame-singed paintings on wood and a central altarpiece with indigenous gods tumbling in flames. This is about righting historical wrongs. In Mexico, indigenous communities have taken to Christianity all while maintaining their native spiritual practices. Ramirez’s work is a violent testament to endurance in the face of oppression, to how culture survives, even when it has been set aflame.

Photographer Nick Waplington’s ‘Living Room’ documented the community of the Broxtowe house estate in Nottingham in the ‘90s. The book was a sensation, and this amazing little exhibition brings together previously unseen photos from the same period. It’s the same families, houses and streets, but seen anew. There are scenes of outdoor life: dad fixing the motor in the sun; a trip to the shops to pick up a pack of cigs; everyone out grabbing an ice cream in the sun or play fighting in the streets. But it’s in the titular living room that the real drama plays out. It’s ultra-basic, super-mundane, but it’s overflowing with life and joy. Everyone is laughing, playing, wrestling. It’s as beautiful, powerful, genuine and moving now as it would have been three decades ago.

Tyrell Williams’s debut ‘Red Pitch’ – transferring to the West End from the Bush with a million ‘best play’ awards in its wake – is so good that it might make you like football. It’ll certainly make you like the three boys who spend their days kicking ball on their south London estate’s concrete pitch, dreaming of playing for a big team, and gassing about the big things in a 16-year-old’s life. It’s a brilliant bit of writing about gentrification, friendship, masculinity and aspiration, without ever being heavy-handed.

Elevate your Saturday lunch plans with a trip to this Indo-Chinese Brasserie. Based in the heart of Westminster, Shanghai Noir invites you to join them and immerse yourself in a realm of gastronomic delight, where every moment is infused with the essence of indulgence and refinement. Indulge in sumptuous Chinese cuisine, including Desi Chow Mein spring rolls, Manchurian Cauliflower Fritters with Jasmine rice, and a delicious mango pudding to top it all off.

Enjoy three courses and a lychee Bellini for £25 only through Time Out offers.

In a Wakefield hospital in 1980, while Sebastian Coe was running the 1500m wearing the number 254, Jason Wilsher-Mills’s parents were told he had only a few years to live. A bout of chicken pox led to his immune system attacking itself. But, he survived. Years in hospital in recovery awakened a deep creativity in him. This show is the culmination of all that struggle and creativity. There’s a hint of Grayson Perry to this show, mashed with pop culture and grizzly medical terror. Its aim is to make his illness, his trauma, unthreatening, unscary, a way of converting pain and fear into fun and colour.

Take the minds of 100 incredible bartenders (according to the Diageo World Class GB cocktail competition 2024), pour in 20 destinations from across the UK, chuck in some ice, give it a good ol’ shake and bam – you’ve got yourself a World Class Cocktail Festival. Magnificent mixologists from across the country are stirring and shaking throughout March and April to bring cocktail-sippers a seemingly endless menu of limited edition bevvies. More than 30 bars in the capital are taking part, including The Connaught, American Bar at The Savoy and F1® Arcade, and lucky Londoners will even have the chance to try out a cocktail masterclass for free. Cheers!

The story goes that modernism ripped everything up and started again; and nowhere did more of that mid-century aesthetic shredding than Brazil. Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, Ivan Serpa et al forged a brand new path towards minimalism. But Raven Row’s incredible new show is challenging that oversimplified narrative, showing how figuration, traditional aesthetics and ritual symbolism were an integral part of experimental Brazilian art from 1950-1980. The whole thing’s great. It’s a gorgeous, in-depth, museum-quality exploration of creativity at its most fertile, modernism at its most exciting and abstraction at its most beautiful. 

‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ is a musical about three generations of incomers in Sheffield’s iconic – and infamous – brutalist housing estate, Park Hill. It’s a stunning achievement, which takes the popular but very different elements of retro pop music, agitprop and soap opera, melts them in the crucible of 50 years of social trauma and forges something potent, gorgeous and unlike any big-ticket musical we’ve seen before. It has deeply local foundations, based on local songwriter Richard Hawley's music and it was made in Sheffield, at the Crucible Theatre, with meticulous care and attention. It has all the feels – joy, lust, fear, sadness, despair, are crafted into an emotional edifice which stands nearly as tall as the place that inspired it.

Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle, which she gigged around New England before scraping the money together to record it as a critically acclaimed 2010 concept album that featured the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on guest vocals as the various mythological heroes and villains. Now, ‘Hadestown’ is a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It’s a musical of beautiful texture and tone and it doesn’t hurt that Mitchell has penned some flat-out brilliant songs. It’s a gloriously improbable triumph.

British Franco-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira has transformed the Whitechapel Gallery (just as she did the French Pavilion at the last Venice Biennale) into a series of sets based on classic films; there’s the dancehall bar from ‘Le Bal’, a home from ‘The Battle of Algiers’, the coffin from ‘The Stranger’. All films made in the wake of Algerian independence in 1962, all made between Algeria and Europe, all passionate documents of liberation, the radical potential of social upheaval and the power of militant cinema. Sedira endlessly blurs lines. Are you, as a viewer of the work, an actor? The director? The audience, sat on rickety cinema seats? Sedira’s love letter to militant cinema is a celebration of the death of colonialism, she’s allowing you to taste a hint of what it might mean to shrug off the shackles of oppression.