Things to do in London today

The seemingly unstoppable David Attenborough has achieved more since hitting retirement age than most of us - let’s be honest, all of us - will achieve in our entire lifetimes. This new immersive film is his second major project since turning 99 in May, following his more traditional documentary Ocean. Produced by Open Planet Studios, Our Story sees the Jerwood Gallery at the Natural History Museum transformed into a smaller version of the Lightroom in King’s Cross (a sort of projection-based theatre). While ‘immersive’ is a word exhausted by overuse, ‘immersive documentary’ is emerging as a fairly distinct genre with clear hallmarks. As with the Lightroom’s shows, Our Story is based around powerful digital projectors beaming the film onto the four walls of the space, wrapping around the surfaces so there are different images whichever direction you look. You are indeed immersed. It’s still a narrative documentary film, in which Sir David tells us the story of the planet from fiery, lifeless rock to the advent of mankind to a possible future. Attenborough narrates, and appears at the start and end. There’s a fair smattering of expectedly dazzling wildlife footage. But Our Story isn’t really a nature doc in the style of Attenborough’s most famous works, and rather than painstakingly captured original footage of animals, it uses pre-existing stuff plus heavy use of CGI to supplement its storytelling. Occasionally this feels like a minor letdown: though they’re not trying to...

As well as putting on mega stars – with this year’s lineup including Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo and Zach Bryan – every year BST Hyde Park also hosts Open House, an eight-day-long event that’s mostly free to attend. On this year’s Open House lineup is House Gospel Choir, Dub Pistols, Trojan Sound System, South London Samba and many more. Plus, if you feel like getting raucous there’s a Bongo’s Bingo party. There are plenty of kid-friendly events, such as West End Kids and Brainiac Remixed. And other than the music, BST is hosting eight open-air cinema nights, showing flicks including The Goonies, Wicked singalong, The Fall Guy and Dune Part 2. 

‘Weather schmeather’ say the people behind Rooftop Film Club. Stratford and Peckham’s rooftop cinema institutions are firing up the projectors early this year – Peckham’s Bussey Building screen opens on April 10, and Roof East in Stratford from April 17 – and they’re employing a secret weapon against a bit of chilly night air this spring: snuggle power. Two-person ‘fireside loveseats’ come with a personal wood-fired heater and hot beverage (regular, snuggle-free seating is available). On the programme are recent hits like Wicked, Nosferatu, Anora and Moana 2, as well as evergreen classics (La La Land, Notting Hill, 10 Things I Hate About You, When Harry Met Sally…), and a Friends watch party. Tickets come in at £18 for adults and £8 for children, and there’s a 20 percent discount if you book before the end of March.

Popping up each summer on the steps where the Regent’s Canal passes Granary Square, Everyman’s Screen on the Canal is one of the city’s best loved outdoor cinemas, thanks to its atmospheric setting, eclectic programming and the fact that it doesn’t cost viewers a penny. And this year’s pop-up will be looking more Instagrammable han ever before, thanks to designer and architect Yinka Ilori, who has created an eye-popping screen design echoing ‘the fantastical landscapes’ explored in Disney movies. Pop down on a sunny afternoon to catch live coverage from Wimbledon every day of the tournament, plus the usual mix of live sports, classic movies, family-friendly flicks and recent hits including Breakfast at Tiffany's, Grease, Parent Trap, Top Gun: Maverick, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Encanto. Best enjoyed with a couple of tinned cocktails and some picky bits from the nearby Waitrose, or classic cinema snacks from Everyman’s on-site bar.  Check out the full film schedule here.

There’s loads going on at British Summer Time’s eight-day Open House, with orchestral performances, DJ sets, workshops, family-friendly activities, and assorted Pride festivities. Nestled in them amongst them are free evening movie screenings. Things kick off with ‘The Garfield Movie’ on Monday, June 30 and finish with a showing of ‘Dune: Part Two’. In between you’ve got your pick of ‘Thelma’, ‘The Goonies’, a singalong version of ‘Wicked’, ‘The Fall Guy’, ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ or ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’. 

From screeching tube carriages and blaring rickshaws to the lulling podcast we listen to on our commute and the music that soundtracks our walks, noise is constantly shaping our lives, and in bigger, deeper ways than we might at first realise. The Baribican’s Feel the Sound exhibition promises to be a multi-sensory journey into our personal relationship with sound and an exploration of how the world of listening goes way beyond pure audio. Eleven commissions and installations will take over the Barbican Centre from the entrance on Silk Street to the Lakeside Terrace, all exploding visitors to frequencies, sound, rhythmic patterns and vibrations that define everything around us. Even the Centre’s underground car parks will be part action as it’s transformed into a club space. There’ll also be the chance to sing with a digital quantum choir and experience music without sound. Plus, look out for collabs with Boiler Room celebrating underground club culture, Joyride which will mix ‘boy racer’ subculture with DIY music communities and Nexus Studios which will fuse neuroscience and design to capture visitors’ emotional responses to music. This is ‘an invitation to awaken the senses, embrace our sonic world and discover the sound in each of us’, says the Barbican. Sounds like a hit.   

It’s up to every primary school parent to wrestle with their own conscience as to whether it’s appropriate to take their dinosaur-loving child to Jurassic World: Rebirth (rating 12A) this summer. But regardless of how much a wuss your kid is, a new installment in the franchise inevitably means a glut of family-friendly mesozoic-related shows. London is full of them this summer holidays, and foremost is the ‘official’ show Jurassic World: The Experience, which was last seen here three years ago at ExCel London (then called Jurassic World: The Exhibition), the last time a Jurassic World film came out.  God help me, I also saw it the last time around, and can report that the only significant change is the location: it’s now staged at NEON, a new venue just outside Battersea Power Station that will apparently be dedicated to similar immersive events. I don’t have a lot to say about NEON – it’s basically a big box – but the Power Station redevelopment is quite a fun place to take little ones to after the show, which is pretty brief.  It’s all good clean cretaceous fun The premise is the same as before. The experience is roughly 45 minutes long and begins with us boarding a ‘ferry’ to get out to Isla Nublar, home to Jurassic World. A handful of impressively gigantic animatronic herbivores greet us, along with some fun interactive bits, and then it’s on to the incubation lab where we can pet a ‘baby dinosaur’ (a puppet) and muck around with more displays. Next up we witness...

Roll up ageing ravers, curious young clubbers and anyone who just fancies hitting a dance floor and still being home in time for Emmerdale. This hour-long virtual reality experience promises to transport you back to the height of the Acid House era during 1989’s Summer of Love. Having premiered at the London Film Festival back in 2022, the hour-long experience takes over the The Pit at the Barbican for ten weeks this summer. The handiwork of filmmaker Darren Emerson and is soundtracked by some of the era’s biggest bangers, from Joey Beltram’s ‘Energy Flash’ to Orbital’s ‘Chime’. Sadly, there’s no discount for anyone old enough to remember Shoom. 

The Natural History Museum is capable of turning in some pretty giddy exhibitions: notably, the recent-ish Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature revolved around a series of fictional magical animals invented by JK Rowling. Fair warning, though: the venerable museum’s first ever space-based exhibition is pretty sober stuff, that steadfastly refuses to sensationalise its subject. If you want to know what an alien invasion might look like or how realistic Star Wars is then there isn’t a lot for you in Space: Could Life Exist Beyond Earth? But if you’re interested in the actual question ‘is there life out there and how would we detect it?’ then this is the exhibition for you, made with the usual sophistication and care that defines the NHM’s temporary exhibits (which are always considerably less faded and more contemporary than its permanent collections). The entire exhibition is dimly lit, with soothing background music playing everywhere – the vibe is serene spaciousness, graceful emptiness and cosmic stillness. We begin on Earth, with the first galleries examining the extraterrestrial origins of life here. Nobody can exactly say how life on Earth first came to be, but there’s little doubt that its building blocks – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and water – were brought to us by asteroids, of which there are several bits here, some of which you can even touch. The carefully curated exhibition instils an appropriate amount of awe Correctly contextualised, it’s hard not...

This new, free exhibition at the British Library is aimed at young audiences aged two to nine and offers them and their families a chance to explore the institution’s gargantuan collection via imagination and play. The exhbition is divided into four themed areas: a library, outer space, the depths of the jungle, and to the bottom of the ocean floor. Works they’ll enounter include a Victorian record from the Library’s Sound Archive featuring animal sounds, a near-200-year-old photo of the Moon by Welsh astronomer Theresa Dillwyn Llewelyn, a colourful nineteenth century Thai manuscript depicting elephants frolicking and a mapby sixteenth century cartographer Abraham Ortelius that depicts an Iceland surrounded withsea monsters. In other words, it’s not just a collection of dusty tomes: any children with any curiousity about the world should be fascinated. It’s free but spaces are limited – online booking is advised. 

This review is from the Open Air Theatre in August 2019. A reworked version of Jamie Lloyd’s Evita will transfer to the London Palladium in summer 2025, with big US star Rachel Zegler playing Eva Perón. Go HERE for the new review. Forget everything you know about ‘Evita’: this one properly rocks. Gone are the romanticised shots of sun-soaked South America, sliced out are the filler numbers clogging the score and deleted is the simpering, blonde starlet. Instead, Jamie Lloyd’s production wipes the gloss off Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical, creating a pumping, sped-up ‘Evita’ edged with dirt, rust and grime. It starts literally with a bang. Grey confetti falls like funeral ashes blasted from a cannon, marking Eva Peron’s death. From there, it’s a mass celebration of blue-and-white streamers, flares, cheerleaders and names on placards. The feel is more Maradona than Madonna, a tribute perhaps to a country England knows best through the World Cup. Or, a clever nod to the overlap between the unified chanting and colour coordination of a political rally and the behaviour inside a football stadium.  It’s a more critical portrayal of the Peróns than, for example, Alan Parker and Oliver Stone’s film provides. Yet one of the best aspects is how Samantha Pauly’s Evita owns her reputation and herself. Bounding around in a white slip dress and sneakers – the costume department definitely got the ’90s revival memo which also includes boyband braces and baggy suit pants –...

Michael Shannon interview: ‘I think TV is garbage – I certainly don’t watch it’. It’s a trap, almost, to think of Eugene O’Neill’s final play A Moon for the Misbegotten as a sequel to his miserable masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Sure, they share the character of Jim Tyrone, a dissolute young actor in Long Day’s Journey and a dissolute older actor here. But you go in expecting despair and instead find something that’s more like an episode of Steptoe and Son.Maybe that’s down to director Rebecca Frecknall – now a master of whipping the lesser-revived plays of the American canon into shape – putting space between this and the old workhorse of Long Day’s Journey (which we’ve seen three times in London in the last 13 years): not the faded grandeur of a seaside home here, but a wooden yard full of splintered timbers pointing into the sky, messy and dusty.The production itself, though, is anything but dusty. From the first moment, every line is a punch or a jab or a dagger. Peter Corboy and Ruth Wilson as siblings Mike and Josie burst onto the stage and whack each other with dialogue, and their fists. Fed up with his dad Phil’s drunkenness and slave-driving on their rock-infested farm, Mike is leaving. All that’s left to Phil is daughter Josie, whose sleeping around has made her ‘the scandal of the neighbourhood’, and their landlord Jim Tyrone who may or may not sell the farm to them and who may or may not be in love with Josie.David Threlfall is a hoot as Phil,...

  General advice is to stay away from hornets’ nests, especially if you are the West End and you want people to have a nice time and pay lots of money for a ticket. Mark Rosenblatt’s debut play goes against general advice. In fact he finds the biggest hornets’ nests he can and prods at all of them, and sees what comes flying out. What does come out is pretty spectacular. Despite recently winning what seemed like every single award that had ever been invented, and turning round the faltering fortunes of the Royal Court Theatre, there was never a guarantee that his play about (‘about’ seems like a fairly inadequate word) Roald Dahl’s antisemitism – and the deep trenches of dispute about Israel – would work in the West End. At the Royal Court you expect that kind of politics. The West End is for musicals and celebrities.But it does work, just as brilliantly. First off there’s John Lithgow (also all the awards) stooping and scowling his way into Dahl, charming in his grandpa-ish grumping at the beginning. He’s a walking metaphor: a giant – of literature, of stature – and big. But friendly? If you knew nothing about him except the good stuff – Charlie, Matilda, Mr Fox – you’d be charmed by his strong will, his passion and compassion. It’s 1983, he’s got a bad back, his house is being noisily renovated, he’s recently got engaged, and has a new book coming out so no wonder he’s grumpy. When his publisher suggests he moves temporarily to a nearby cottage, his crabby reply is, ‘I...

Nicholas Hytner’s exuberant 2019 take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream was simply too much fun to leave to the history books: what a joy it is to have it back. To bring you up to speed, it’s a show in the same lineage as the Bridge’s recent Guys and Dolls: designed by Bunnie Christie, half the audience sit in the round, while the other half stand on the floor where the fairy-filled action of Shakespeare’s comedy unfurls on mobile platforms that rise and fall around them (I stood, only cowards sit).  It is joyously queer: pretty much everyone in it gets a crack at snogging everybody else. And Hytner’s key textual intervention is swapping the bulk of fairy monarchs Oberon and Titania’s lines, meaning that it’s JJ Feild’s Oberon – not Susannah Fielding’s Titania – who has it off with Emmanuel Akwafo’s exuberant Bottom. Has much changed since last time? It doesn’t feel vastly different conceptually, though new leads Feild and Fielding put a different spin on what are very explicitly the lead roles. As is tradition they also play the characters of Theseus and Hippolyta in the bookending Athens-set sections, but there is the strong suggestion that they in fact play the same characters throughout.  Feild is harder edged and more menacing than his predecessor Oliver Chris in the Athens sections; when playing Oberon there’s a softness and vulnerability there. It’s a performance sympathetic to the production’s suggestion that the bulk of the play is Theseus’s dream, in which his cruel...

Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi recently wrote an article for a major British newspaper in which he waxed effusively about how his Broadway smash had been inspired by the band Led Zeppelin. I wonder if his lawyer was holding a gun to his head as he wrote it, because while the Zep may have been a tertiary influence, Stereophonic is very very very very very very very clearly about Fleetwood Mac. There are Fleetwood Mac fan conventions less about Fleetwood Mac. Hell, there are incarnations of Fleetwood Mac that have been less about Fleetwood Mac.  Specifically, it’s a lightly fictionalised account of the recording of the Anglo-American band’s mega-selling Rumours album, and while not every detail is the same, many are identical, from the cities it was recorded in (Sausalito then LA) to the gender, nationality and internal-relationship makeup of the band, to details like female members ‘Holly’ (aka Christine McVie) and ‘Diana’ (aka Stevie Nicks) moving out out the studio accommodation they were sharing with the band’s menfolk in favour of their own condominiums.  Which l hasten to say is all to the good, even if it frequently feels like a miracle that Stereophonic has stormed Broadway – becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time – without being derailed by legal issues (though there is a lawsuit against it from Rumours producer Ken Caillet, who has accused Adjmi of ripping off his memoir).  Of course, it is a great subject for a play. The story of how erstwhile...

This review is from the original 2017 Old Vic run for Girl from the North Country, in July 2017. It returns to the theatre with a new cast in July 2025. Whatever you do, don’t call it the ‘Bob Dylan musical’. Yes, the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman may have once described himself as ‘a song and dance man’. But playwright-director Conor McPherson’s bleak, Dylan-soundtracked ‘Girl from the North Country’ is a play with songs that avoids the trappings of musical theatre like the plague – there are no dance routines, no happy endings, and the Old Vic stage remains dimly lit and half-shrouded in darkness. Dylan himself had no creative input, but one assumes it was always implicit in his licensing of the songs that it wasn’t ever going to be a big tits-and-teeth West End show with Bob’s name in lights. Taking place in the Dustbowl at the height of the Great Depression, ‘Girl from the North Country’ extracts the Steinbeckian strand from Dylan’s oeuvre, and might be imagined as an extra story that didn’t make Todd Haynes’s haunting, Dylan-inspired film ‘I’m Not There’. It’s set at an inn in Duluth, Minnesota (Dylan’s hometown) in 1934. Nick Laine (Ciaran Hinds), the gruff owner of the establishment, has many problems, not least the apparent dementia of his wife Elizabeth, played by Shirley Henderson in a truly bewitching turn, intense, otherworldly, almost rockstar-like. The show is set entirely in the inn, and follows the Laines and their patrons, who range from Joe (Arinze Kene), an...

It’s been more than a decade since Dickie Beau broke through with his uniquely weird shows that involve him lip-syncing to archival recordings, while he embodies the voices with movement and props and fun stuff like that. But Showmanism, expanded from its first iteration which premiered in Bath in 2022, feels like a reckoning with the form and with himself.Beau cuts a sinewy, ethereal figure on a dotty set (stunning design by Justin Nardella) where an astronaut helmet, an orange tree in a bath and an iPod suspended in mid-air are just some of the disparate objects that make up his cabinet of curiosities. Lights and drapes and television sets surround him, and a ladder plunges into the floor and up into the ceiling, like he’s in a treehouse in space.On the surface, the show is a history of acting. That’s what he was commissioned to make anyway. And it starts out on brief: some classic ‘I’m stuck in a box’ miming, recordings about Ancient Greek theatre, interesting musings on audiences and actors from the likes of Ian McKellen and Fiona Shaw. Beau puts on costumes, strips down, embodies each voice in a different way.These scenes are really enjoyable. When it risks getting up its own arse with solemnity and loftiness, Beau shoves some absurd touch in there – a silly movement, a funny prop – and besides, what’s not to like about listening to a long theatrical anecdote from Ian McKellen while a mostly naked man cavorts in a cosmic treehouse? It’s just that there comes a point...

There has been some opaque messaging around this 25th anniversary revival of Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis. Gathering together the original creative team and cast – which includes current RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans – I’d half got the impression this would be a case of ‘same people, different take’. But it’s clear from a cursory look at any photo from 2000 that this is that show, brought back. And James Macdonald’s production returns to us as somewhat luxury theatre. 4.48 Psychosis was originally staged in the Royal Court’s tiny Upstairs studio. Which made sense: mounting a formally challenging work that heavily foreshadowed its writer’s suicide was obviously a delicate business in the immediate aftermath of her death. Now, however, her passing is less raw, the play is an acknowledged modern classic, and this revival sold out aeons ago (although you can still get tickets on Mondays).  Why restage this production when 4.48 Psychosis never really enjoyed a major UK revival? (the Young Vic did it with a Romanian actor and a French director… 16 years ago). Why not at least transfer it to the bigger Downstairs theatre? Is it meaningfully different from how it was 25 years ago? I can’t answer those questions, but I can tell you that I was rapt for the entire 70 minutes. Is 4.48 Psychosis bleak? I mean duh, yes, The critic Michael Billlington famously described the orginal production as ‘a suicide note’. I’m not sure that’s true, though it’s obvious why he said...

This musical masterpiece is fiddly in more ways than one. Written by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein, 1964’s Fiddler on the Roof is a brilliant but disarmingly complicated work, for which every production must find a balance between the lighter stuff – shtetl nostalgia and the weapons-grade quipping of its milkman protagonist Teyve – and the fact that it’s a story about the end of rural Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, that clearly foreshadows the Holocaust.  Recent British productions have tended to play up the grit of the story, which is based on the Yiddish short stories of bona fide shtetl dweller Sholem Aleichem. However, that can have its own pitfalls when the writing is undoubtedly more funny than sad. But director Jordan Fein’s superb take – a transfer from Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre – manages to find its own, brilliantly idiosyncratic balance. The tone here is, for the most part, drolly surreal, a dark clown show underpinning everything from the gags to the choreography (by Julia Cheng) to Fein’s penchant for a weird tableau. Jewish life in the village of Anatevka has a constant absurdity to it as Adam Dannheisser’s Teyve must attempt to placate his five daughters and their extremely modern ideas about love while also sucking up to the local Russian constable in the hope the pogroms will be gentler. Key to all this working is US actor Dannheisser as Teyve. Avoiding the obvious temptation to tackle the role as if he’s delivering a stand up...

There has been a note of enigma to the promotion of this new West End drama by largely unknown US playwright Lila Raicek. The official line is that it’s a response to Ibsen’s The Master Builder but not a rewrite, but there has been a pointed refusal - in cast interviews and other publicity - to say any more about the specifics of the play. Having now seen My Master Builder I’m not sure I’m any the wiser as to what the big secret was. Perhaps it’s simply that a full plot summary felt like it was virtually begging interviewers to ask star Ewan McGregor about the end of his first marriage. Or if we’re going for the idea that there was a more poetic mystery, I guess the big revelation is that the play is somewhat autobiographical. It’s *My* Master Builder because Raicek has incorporated her own life into it, or at least one experience (that she owns up to, anyway). She was invited to a posh dinner party and realised upon arrival that she’d been cast as a pawn in a weird psychosexual drama between her hosts, a married couple. First world problems and all that, but it gave her a route into updating Ibsen’s odd late play about a tortured architect haunted by a past encounter.  Henry Solness (McGregor) is a starchitect who lives in the Hamptons with his publisher wife Elena (Kate Fleetwood). They are throwing a party for the completion of a local arts centre he’s designed, that is intimately connected to the sad early death of their son. It doesn’t take long to determine their...

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too. It starts, like any good procession, with a load of geezers with trumpets, parping to herald the arrival of victorious Caesar. As they blare, a Black soldier in gorgeous, gilded armour looks back, leading you to the next panel where statues of gods are paraded on carts. Then come the spoils of war, with mounds of seized weapons and armour piled high, then come vases and sacrificial animals, riders on elephant-back, men struggling to carry the loot that symbolises their victory. The final panel, Caesar himself bringing up the rear, remains in Hampton Court, so there is no conclusion here, just a steady, unstoppable stream of glory and rejoicing.  The paintings are faded and damaged, and have been so badly lit that you can only see them properly from a distance and at an angle. But still, they remain breathtaking in their sweeping, chaotic beauty.  Partly, this massive work is a celebration of the glories of the classical world and its brilliance, seen from the other side of some very dark ages. But along with its rise, you can’t help but also think of Rome's demise, of what would eventually...

As anyone who has ever tried to secure a booking at the London Fields Lido on a warm summer day will know, us Londoners love a good dip. So it’s only natural that the capital’s Design Museum should stage an exhibition dedicated to our adoration of swimming.  With more than 200 objects, Splash! presents a whistle-stop tour for water babies taking us all the way from bizarre Victorian bathing carriages, to the present-day mermaidcore TikTok trend. From the politics of the pool (and who gets to learn to swim) to the evolution of swimwear and pool architecture, Splash! covers a lot of ground. The show is split into three sections – the pool, the lido and nature – and perhaps the most fun part, each section is designed to mimic different swimming spaces which feature in the exhibit, including the London Aquatics Centre and the art-deco Penzance Jubilee Pool.  In the first part, ‘the pool’, is quite the collection of stuff, focussing largely on Olympic swimming – a model for the London Aquatics Centre, a swimming cap belonging to Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini, a jumper knitted by Tom Daley, and a 1984 David Hockney poster for the Los Angeles Olympics are all show. It also wouldn’t be an exhibition about pool design without some pretty Wes Anderson-style photography. The highly controversial LZR racer swimsuit is another gem on display – the suit designed by Speedo and NASA was responsible for 94 percent of swimming gold medals at Beijing 2008, and was subsequently banned for...

‘Wherever conflict erupts, sexual violence is present.’ So it’s surprising that until 2025, the UK has never had a major exhibition on sexual violence in conflict. This year the Imperial War Museum is hoping to shed light on the topic that remains widely under-discussed.  Through first-person testimonies, objects, artwork, propoganda posters and papers, Unsilenced will investigate the different ways in which sexual violence in conflict can manifest. It will span the untold stories of child evacuees, victims of trafficking, prisoners of war, and survivors from the First World War to present-day conflicts, and highlight the ongoing efforts of those fighting for justice and working to prevent conflict-related sexual violence. It’s expected to be a sobering, ground-breaking exhibition.  NB: This exhibition includes cases of rape, sexual humiliation, torture and child abuse in conflict. IWM advises that this exhibition is only suitable for those aged 16 or over.   

Sculptor Giuseppe Penone – famously part of the Italian movement Arte Povera, a group Inspired by the politics of 1960s and who used everyday materials in their work – has been fascinated with the relationship between man and nature since the late 60s, when he began his interventions with the natural world. This Serpentine exhibition is the most comprehensive presentation of Penone’s work in the UK and will extend beyond the gallery with his famous tree sculptures extending into the Royal Parks.

The clothes we wear, the sheets we sleep on, the carpets beneath our feet. Textiles are everywhere; we can’t escape them. That’s what this show at the Fashion and Textile Museum sets out to explore: the long-running connection between us, the earth, and textiles, in just about every sense of the word.  As the exhibition points out from the get-go, we humans have relied on woven fabric to perform practical tasks for millennia, weaving reeds together to create vessels, protecting our delicate little heads from the hot sun with wicker hats and making nets to catch fish. They are the global artform. We use textiles to express our individuality through clothing, to tell stories and mark life milestones. We also use them, the exhibition argues, to communicate our deep, inherent love of animals, to show evidence of abstract thought and to interact with technology.  It sounds impressive on paper, but in practice, this exhibition lacks depth. There are certainly some beautiful, intricate, intriguing objects here: a ‘three-factorial’ weave inspired by betting odds, strings of shiny beetle wings, an applicé wearable art coat and a hand-painted Chinese wedding cloth showing a hare preparing the potion of eternal youth with a mortar and pestle. But it hops swiftly between multiple cultures and time periods, making vague points illustrated with what sometimes seems like a random assortment of objects, mainly from the last century (the most rare, and one of the oldest pieces in the...

What is a portrait, really? What is its role? And what makes it different from ‘just’ a photograph of a person? These are all questions that spring to mind when walking around A Thousand Small Stories, the first ever retrospective of Eileen Perrier’s photography. Since the 1990s, the London-born photographer has used her camera to capture individuals in their local communities, and this show highlights some of her finest work.  In ‘Red Gold and Green’ – a series of pictures taken of British Ghanaians in their London homes – Perrier sets up rolls of fabric in block colours, matching the Ghanaian flag, acting as a DIY professional backdrop. But elements of their private lives sneak into shot, adding a sense of intimacy: we spot framed family pictures, a vinyl collection and other nicknacks, like a Hendon rotary club wall hanging. The result feels personal, as though the family home is an extension of the self. Discrete references to the formal rituals of portraiture – the dreaded school photo day, an awkward extended-family get together – continue throughout her practice. In ‘Nation’, a series of photographs of commuters on the Paris metro in 1999, plasticky red seating doubles as a background, uniting the windswept strangers in their shared surroundings. In ‘Peckham Square Studio’, she uses Victorian photography techniques, with a hidden headrest for the sitters – but the photographs aren’t uptight, they’re vibrant, with a movement and cleanness that feels hyper-modern. ...

Walking through the high-ceilinged halls of The Perimeter in Bloomsbury, where natural light spills across bare walls and polished floors, you might not expect to stumble across something so disturbing and intimate. Gaaaaaaasp is London-born artist Alexandra Metcalf’s first solo institutional exhibition, turning the gallery’s four floors into a disorienting world of 1960s patterns and clinical sterility, brought together under themes of domestic and gendered labour. In the first room, the ceiling drops oppressively low beneath the flicker of harsh office lights. The walls are covered in 1970s vintage wallpaper; a dull, yellowed floral that seems steeped in years of cigarette smoke. The carpet is a muted, corporate grey-blue and chairs line the edges of the room. A muffled dialogue loops continuously from a TV screen mounted high in the corner, playing recordings from the artist’s own visits to abortion clinics and therapy sessions over the years. The space recalls a clinical waiting area, but it also suggests something more metaphysical: a kind of purgatory, where time is suspended, judgment is quietly present and trauma lingers. In Gaaaaaaasp, the domestic is destabilised. On the top floor, an open trunk has enormous needles piercing its lining like weapons. Another room is configured as a hospital unit, with two 1960s nightstands with bed springs erupting from vintage trunks lit by collapsing surgical lights. The floor is covered in faded pink linoleum, the colour of a...

At first, this show seems distinctly uninviting to anyone not deeply in the fold with today’s art scene. It fills three floors with austere works by artists I mostly haven’t heard of. Found objects, subtle installations and elliptical messages abound here; it’s enough to draw a groan from any contemporary art cynic. In the first room, dodging between Gilli Tal’s installation of looming streetlamps and hearing what sounds like an urban field recording by Solomon Garçon, you might feel like you’re navigating a party full of strangers. No artwork is given any context beyond a spreadsheet-like booklet containing the artist’s biographical details and the artwork’s medium, date of creation and exhibition history.  That last, seemingly unimportant detail brings the show to life. Reading through the handout’s fourth column, you’ll see the names of a number of grassroots artist-run exhibition spaces. Almost every artist in the show has been involved in or shown their work at such a venue. Many are now defunct and I’m sure none were ever as well-appointed as this gallery. It is this detail – call it the show’s DIY-pedigree – that animates Fake Barn Country. This is an exhibition about exhibitions This is an exhibition about exhibitions and about exhibition-making as an act of passion, generosity and curiosity shared between artists. Every image, sound and object here is like a mushroom grown from a vast, international and intergenerational network of mutual support and encouragement...

Having studied at Goldsmiths College with them in the late 1980s, the late Pakistani-born intermedia artist Hamad Butt is often associated with the YBAs. As this impressive survey exhibition, travelling from IMMA in Dublin, reveals, the body of technically ambitious and precisely engineered sculptural work completed before his untimely death at 32 is entirely singular. Navigating the thin boundary between desire and danger, this exhibition will reveal Butt as a subtle master of both chemistry and social critique.

Chaotic explosions of wood, scrap metal and cotton cascade through the gallery in the work of Brooklyn-based artist Leonardo Drew. Known for using found natural materials that are oxidised, burned, and left to decay, Drew creates visceral, large-scale installations that reflect on the cyclical nature of existence. His sculptures evoke the scars of America’s industrial past, while also suggesting forces beyond human control. At the South London Gallery in London, Drew will unveil a new site-specific work that engulfs the walls and floor of the main space, with fragmented wood appearing as if battered by extreme weather, natural disasters, or what he calls ‘acts of God.’