London

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Thames Festival

TV The Shooting Of Thomas Hurndall
After the superb ‘Secret Life’, Rowan Joffe’s next drama promises to be no less controversial, addressing the shooting of the British peace activist by an Israeli sniper. Sept, C4.

CLASSICAL & OPERA BBC Proms: Simon Rattle
Sir Simon returns with his new outfit, the Berlin Philharmonic, for two nights (Sept 2 and 3) conducting Messiaen’s ‘Turangalîla Symphony’ then Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. Not to be missed. Sept 2-3, Royal Albert Hall.

DANCE Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray
One of this autumn’s most hotly anticipated artistic events, Matthew Bourne’s ‘Dorian Gray’, opens at Sadler’s Wells on Sept 2. It’s the first new production in three years from the man whose all-male ‘Swan Lake’, ‘Nutcracker’ and ‘Edward Scissorhands’ still – with very few exceptions – make both critics and audiences reach ecstatically for superlatives. This updating of Oscar Wilde’s fable whisks it into the contemporary world of art and politics. Will the devil be wearing Prada? Go and see. Sept 2-14, Sadler’s Wells.

MUSIC Breeders
Deal or no Deal? The sweet-voiced alt-rock aristocracy twins return to the UK to do the promotional duties for ace new album 'Mountain Battles'. Sept 3, Shepherd's Bush Empire. Feature continues

MUSIC Bestival
The popularity of ‘the new Glastonbury’ continues to soar, as word of mouth spreads about its excellent music, progressive dressing-up policy and multifarious opportunites for silliness. Despite the festival’s relatively late-in-the-season billing, this crazy global-warming stuff has ensured good weather for the past few years – could this be the year to break the tradition? Probably not. We’re all doomed. Sept 5-7, Isle of Wight.

SPORT Rugby Union: London Double Header
The first crunching tackles of the new Premiership season will take place at Twickenham rather than club grounds, as the capital's professional quartet meet for this now-traditional double-header. Sept 6, Twickenham Stadium.

THEATRE Lipsynch
Robert Lepage returns to the Barbican with a nine-hour epic (performed over three nights) linking nine lives, spanning seven decades and spinning a variety of stories that are set in war-torn Vienna, pre-revolutionary Nicaragua and present-day London. In each narrative we encounter people who have lost the power of speech and people for whom speech is the only lifeline. In English, French, German and Spanish with English surtitles. Sept 6-14, Barbican.

SPORT Cycling: Tour of Britain, Stage 1
This increasingly prestigious eight-day event is now the longest stage race in Britain since the Milk Race of the early 1990s. The opening day will see the 16 six-man teams jockeying for position over ten laps of an 8.5-kilometre circuit in the very heart of the capital. Such close-quarters action guarantees a compelling spectacle. Sept 7, Victoria Embankment.

CLASSICAL & OPERA Don Giovanni
Simon Keenlyside sings the title role in Francesca Zambello’s production of ‘Don Giovanni’ at the Royal Opera House. His Donna Anna is to be sung by young rising Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya, and Kyle Ketelsen, who stole the show in Carmen, is the Don’s sidekick Leporello. From Sept 8, Royal Opera House.

ART Charles Avery
Four years into its proposed ten-year completion time ‘The Islanders’ is Charles Avery’s epic project to detail the cosmology, topology and characters of an imaginary island, through a complex combination of text, beautifully detailed drawings, sculpture and installation. Avery’s project is full of philosophical propositions and problems and weird and wonderful characters and creatures, and this will be the first opportunity to see all the work completed to date, accompanied by a major new publication. Sept 10-Nov 8, Parasol Unit.

MUSIC Stevie Wonder
The greatest living musician in all of history visits London for the first time in more than a decade. Tickets start at a bargain £130 – surely a small price to pay for upper-tier seating in the historical O2 Arena. If last year’s American tour is an indicator, and Stevie has a sense of fiscal morality, expect a lengthy set heavy on classics and light on ‘That’s What Friends Are For’. Sept 11, O2 Arena.

Francis Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain (courtesy the Tate © Estate of Francis Bacon)

ART Francis Bacon
‘The visitors were shocked by paintings which were so mercilessly horrible that their minds boggled at the sight of them.’ This was how critic John Russell described a 1945 show of the work of Francis Bacon, a Dublin-born window-dresser turned visceral painter of human pain and torture. As well as a quintessential fixture of London’s after-hours demimonde, Bacon became the pre-eminent painter of a collective mind and body, newly broken by two World Wars. The Tate stages this major retrospective to celebrate 2009’s centenary of his birth, with the biggest display of his work seen here since 1985. Sept 11-Jan 4 2009, Tate Britain.

FILM Pineapple Express
It’s ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ with the emphasis on the former as ‘Freaks and Geeks’ alumni Seth Rogen and James Franco reunite for a gleefully old-school tale of potheads on the run. Directed by poetic, experimental indie legend David Gordon Green (‘George Washington’) and written by ‘Superbad’ scribes Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the film combines classic ’70s-era road-movie thrills with up-to-date Apatow family gross-out-with-a-heart comic exploits. With amazing advance word and a string of hysterical online trailers, ‘Pineapple Express’ has late-summer sleeper hit written all over it. Released Sept 12.

FILM The Romance of Astrea and Celadon
Possibly the final masterpiece from, arguably, France’s greatest living director, Eric Rohmer’s essay on courtly love – an adaptation and re-imagining of Honoré d’Urfé’s novel of bucolic goings on between shepherds and lovers in fifth-century France – is a cinematic and sensuous delight. Here Rohmer elegantly marries his lifelong affection for the elaborate dances of the youthful heart with his subtle allusions to the forms and concerns of classical literature with an extraordinary lightness and vigour. The touching performances are by Andy Gillet and Stéphanie Crayencour, the marvellous pastoral cinematography by Diane Baratier. Released Sept 12.

AROUND TOWN Thames Festival
The eleventh annual Thames Festival takes place between Westminster Bridge and Tower Bridge over the weekend, with an extensive programme of entertainment on and beside the Thames. On Sunday evening Victoria Embankment and Blackfriars Bridge close to traffic for a night carnival and the festival concludes spectacularly with a fireworks display from a barge on the river between Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridges (9.45pm). For full details visit the website: www.thamesfestival.org. Sept 13-14.

TV Tess Of The D’Urbervilles
Just ten years since the last adaptation, but here’s new Bond girl Gemma Arterton in the lead role for the Beeb’s take on Thomas Hardy’s gloomfest. Mid-Sept, BBC1.

CLUBS matter Launch Party
We can’t tell you who’ll be playing or how much admission will be, but the opening weekend of this brand new, purpose-built venue inside the O2 will be spectacular. The team at Fabric are behind matter, and the multi-purpose venue, which is likely to stage more live gigs than pure DJ-led sessions, has been designed to deliver the best sound and visuals in a venue of this size (approximately 2,500 capacity) in the world, so, ahem, watch this space! Sept 18, matter, O2 Arena, SE10.

ALTERNATIVE NIGHTLIFE John Waters presents This Filthy World
They say: John Waters’s rapid-fire one-man spoken-word vaudeville act celebrates his film career and joyously appalling taste of the man William Burroughs once called ‘The Pope of trash’. Says Waters: ‘All young people need somebody bad to look up to, and I hope I can be that for you tonight.’ Sept 18, Hammersmith Apollo.

FILM Tropic Thunder
If you happen to see reams and reams of tabloid column inches ranting about actors going black-face, it’ll be on the back of this new Ben Stiller directed war comedy, ‘Tropic Thunder’. With a plot that sounds eerily similar to ‘The Three Amigos’, this foul-mouthed film sees a star-studded cast (Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey, Tobey Maguire and Tom Cruise) as a group of actors playing a platoon of grizzled soldiers who are plunged into a real war to give the film they’re making some authenticity. The trailer is very funny, and, in case you were wondering, it’s Robert Downey Jr who breaks out the boot polish. Released 19 Sept.

AROUND TOWN Open House London
This annual London-wide event offers the opportunity to view, free of charge, a huge range of buildings of architectural interest which are not normally open to the public. As well as the government buildings, private homes, historic houses, schools, town halls and other buildings open for tours, there are also site visits to ongoing construction projects. Certain events require pre-booking. A full programme is available mid-August and can be ordered in advance. Sept 20-21, 09001 600 061 (60p/min). Printed programme avail mid-Aug, £4, PDF version £3 (www.openhouse.org.uk).

'Perô' at the Unicorn Theatre (© Dirk Bwalda)

KIDS Perô
Dutch company Speeltheater’s production is a simple tale told with puppets and operatic music, which explores the dilemma of shy village baker Perô, who is competing for the heart of the fair Colombina with smooth charmer Paletino. Age 6+. Sept 24-Oct 12, Unicorn Theatre.

ART Cold War Modern
It was not just the political map that was transformed by the Cold War; the visual world changed irrevocably too. From the brutalist architecture of the Eastern Bloc to the futuristic domestic designs of Dieter Rams at Braun, culture shouldered some of the burden of postwar growing pains between 1945 and 1970, while also experimenting with the latest technologies and materials. The V&A has gathered over 300 objects that reflect both the fears of nuclear devastation (in Stanley Kubrick’s satirical ‘Dr Strangelove’) and the fantasies of space flight (with an original Sputnik and an Apollo mission suit) that characterised this anxious era. Sept 25 -Jan 11 2009, V&A.

KIDS Ghosts in the Gallery
This autumn play at the Polka, written by Paul Sirett, brings to the stage 500 years of history as displayed in the National Portrait Gallery. Age 8-13. Sept 26-Nov 1, Polka Theatre.

AROUND TOWN Open Rehearsal
This festival gives Londoners and tourists behind-the-scenes access to major arts venues, including the Southbank Centre, the Barbican and the National Theatre. Performances of theatre, music and dance offer opportunities to engage with the capital’s rich cultural offerings. See the website, which goes live on Aug 22, for details: www.openrehearsal.co.uk. Sept 26-28.

ART Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko’s huge swathes of blurry-colour clouds never fail to impress and engage visually, but he never regarded his work in such purely abstract or decorative terms. Instead he believed his pictures could provoke emotional and even religious responses in the viewer. Whatever you make of this complex Russian emigré’s claims to transcendental artistry, there’s no disputing that he became one of America’s best mid-century painters and one of the world’s most popular artists. The Tate’s selection focuses on Rothko’s ‘Late Series’ and will include many mural-sized canvases from Japan and the US that have not been seen here before. Sept 26 -Feb 1 2009, Tate Modern.

AROUND TOWN In Memoriam
Commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, this exhibition focuses on the experiences of men, women and children, including a soldier, a nurse, a prisoner-of-war, an artist and a widow, during World War I. Exhibits include a letter written by Captain Charlie May, who died on the first day of the Battle of The Somme, and a rosebud from a wreath which lay on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in 1920. From Sept 30, Imperial War Museum.

DANCE Dance Umbrella
‘Daring to leap into the unknown is what Dance Umbrella is all about’ raved Time Out’s critic about this highly influential contemporary dance festival. Now celebrating its thirtieth year, it shows no sign of slacking in its championing of dynamic figures in the dance world, both old and new: Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris and Stephen Petronio will be presenting new work, as will French newcomers Julie Guibert and Jean-Baptiste André. This year the festival will also be expanding into dance venues in east London. For full details check www.danceumbrella.co.uk. Sept 30-Nov 8, various venues.

July | August | September