Things to do in London this weekend

Much-loved fried chicken emporium Morley’s is going to shower you with free chicken. A complimentary wing extravaganza is going to take place on Saturday celebrating Morley’s recent Fried Chicken Sauce team-up with Heinz. It’ll take place from noon to 2pm at two London shops – in Brick Lane and Brixton Hill – with free trays of wings with splodges of the special sauce on the side. The London stores will have performances from local DJs, and from 3-5pm at Morley’s Brick Lane there’ll be open mic performances and special guest DJs. 

This regular music market is back, providing artisan produce and street food alongside its mega vinyl booty. Find records on sale from all sorts of indie labels including AD, Because, Big Dada, Brainfeeder, Chess Club, Chrysalis, Dead Oceans, Dirty Hit, Fire, Jagjaguwar, Late Night Tales, Matador, Marathon, Ninja Tune, Secretly Canadian, Third Man and more. Once you’ve flipped through as many sleeves as you can manage take a look at stalls from artists and makers, or neck back a pint from the London Brewers’ Market. 

‘Blue Beard’ is, Emma Rice’s adaptation of the enduring French folktale about a young woman who marries the titular aristocrat and moves into his castle, only to discover that he has brutally murdered his many ex-wives. In true Rice style, it’s a dreamlike, song-drenched show framed by the Convent of the three Fs, a group of ‘fearful, fucked and furious’ women headed by Katy Owen’s hysterically bolshy Mother Superior, who for reasons we only discover at the very end is wearing her own blue beard. Expect an extremely pleasurable couple of hours of Emma Rice doing what she does best.

Take note Richard Curtis: just because you’re making a romcom, it doesn’t mean you can’t blow stuff up. With The Fall Guy, stuntman-turned-filmmaker David Leitch and his bang-on-form stars, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, have nestled a frisky, winsome romantic comedy inside the framework of a full-throttle action movie and conjured up a perfect night at the movies in the process. Expect a cocktail of brilliant stunt set pieces and electric star power. 

In cinemas worldwide now.

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. 

There are many things to like about the Spanish-ish bistro Lita. First, there’s the location; tucked onto a pleasant side street in Marylebone. Second, is the warm, inviting room. Third is the brazenly open kitchen. More interesting than all that though, is the man on the pans, Luke Ahearne. A dynamo of a chef, he has finally been granted a room of his own after toiling at a run of impressive restaurants; The Clove Club, Luca, and Corrigan’s Mayfair. Lita itself brands itself as a ‘southern Mediterranean’ restaurant, which means lots of fish, citrus, olive oil and ruddy, moist meats.

Gillian Cosgriff’s ruthlessly cheery interactive hour which took home the top award at 2023’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, is all about finding happiness in the mundane. The Aussie performer structures her performance around a game she vox-pops to the (very willing) audience, where you’re asked to come up with a ranking of ten things you ‘like’ before she writes them down in her ‘Book of Good’. Often, these will be as simple as ‘wearing a wireless bra’ or ‘getting a USB in the socket for the first time’ – or, in Cosgriff’s case, ‘bus drivers waving at each other’. The optimism is endearing and the real humour comes with her various flashback stories and musical numbers she weaves throughout. This is less ‘live, laugh, love’ and more ‘what can make the crap parts of life a little less crap?’ 

Fag-stained, booze-drenched, stumbling and slurring: John Deakin captured the lows of Soho at its height. He was the photographer of choice for Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and all the other artistic degenerates of central London in the 1950s and ’60s. A handful of his photos have been brought together in this small exhibition by the influential writer and ‘psychogeographer’ Iain Sinclair, who used them to create a new semi-fictionalised biography of Deakin called ‘Pariah/Genius’. It’ll make you desperate for a bigger show. 

This city-wide celebration of all things crafty is back for its tenth year, and the V&A will be hosting events and workshops so you can really get involved in the artisnal fun. Look out for the Craft Symposium featuring panel discussions and keynote speeches from craft-industry experts, curator talks and maker demos from weaver Caron Penney and master embroiderer José Luis Sánchez Expósito. 

A wild concept is taking over EartH this month. From the mind of renegade director, DJ and skateboarding legend Harmony Korine, this night marks the first London screening of AGGRO DR1FT, a new film featuring rapper Travis Scott. Following this, the party heads downstairs where you’ll dance to the live sounds of Evian Christ and Harmony Korine aka EDGLRD who promises a mind-boggling audiovisual experience. If the New York show is anything to go by, this is going to be wild. 

EartH, N16 8BH. Fri May 10, 8pm From £55.11.

There was a lot of love in the last years of Michelangelo Buonarotti’s life. Already hugely successful, the Renaissance master dedicated his final decades to loving his god, his family, his friends, and serving his pope. The proof of that love is all over the walls of this intimate little visual biography of the final years of his life, filled with his drawings and letters and paintings by his followers. We’ve had a lot of Michelangelo drawing shows in recent years, but the drawings in the last room of this show are incredible. They were never meant to be seen, they're frail, weak things, but they’re also an amazing vision of one of history’s greatest painters. 

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. 

Cinemas are fun, but generally speaking they’re more of a wintery activity – unless you make it al-fresco, that is. Enter the Drive-In at Embassy Gardens! The west London development is hosting back-to-back screenings of classic, crowd-pleasing blockbusters (‘The Lion King’ and ‘Mamma Mia’, to name a couple), interspersed with trivia challenges and family screenings. Essential cinema snacks and cocktails will be rustled up by The Alchemist, and there’ll be pic ‘n’ mix too. 

Obsessive, repetitive, maximal: Nnena Kalu’s art is like an act of physical, aesthetic meditation. She takes textiles, plastic, unspooled VHS tapes, netting and rubbish and binds and rebinds it over and over. In the process, she creates hanging bundled forms of countless colours and textures. They hover like disembowelled organs, hearts and guts constructed out of detritus. They look tense, dangerous, ready to burst.

Presented by Tongues on Fire and supported by BFI, the longest-running South Asian film festival in the world is back for its 26th edition this spring. It’s set to host its opening gala at the BFI IMAX for the first time ever, with a premiere of the film Minimum, a directorial debut about the tumultuous beginnings of an arranged marriage, and closing night will feature a screening of Lord Curzon Ki Haveli, a film about four South Asians who meet at an unplanned dinner, at the Regent Street Cinema. There’s also an Emerging Curators Gala as part of the festival’s LGBTQ+ strand, as well as a screening of Amu to mark 40 years since the anti-Sikh riots in India, plus loads more.

It’s been a walloping six years since Richard Herring has created one of his pedantic, surreal, invariably high-concept offerings – in large part because he’s finally found something like mainsteam success with his Live from Leicester Square Theatre podcast series. Now he returns to frontline service with a show about his 2021 brush with testicular cancer. 

At Between The Bridges every Sunday this summer, SoLo Craft Fair will host the South Bank Summer Market, with over 60 traders selling a huge variety of bits and bobs from art, jewellery and fashion to kids’ products and more. Everything will have been created by independent designers from across the capital and if you want to try your hand at making something, there’ll be free workshops on site.

The batshit fever dream that Kristen Stewart’s fans have been waiting for, ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ also happens to be the best B-movie of the year. Too early for such lofty claims? Consider the evidence: a single montage includes Ed Harris’s mulleted mobster petting horned beetles, bodybuilder Katy O’Brian pumping iron in Richard Simmons shorts and a tank top adorned with the words ‘Burning Love’, and Stewart’s lost moll reading a paperback called ‘Macho Sluts’. Director Rose Glass infuses a hothouse atmosphere with wickedly unsparing insight – and just a touch more humour – to turn genre tropes inside out in this retro-noir fantasia. 

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. 

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

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.