Things to do in London this weekend (16-17 August)

It’s one of those Fringe successes people dream of mimicking. Since debuting in Edinburgh in 2014, Duncan Macmillan Every Brilliant Thing – co-written with its original star Jonny Donahoe – has earned rave reviews and performed all across the globe. Now it’s on the West End. Over the course of its three-month stint, Donahoe, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins and Minnie Driver will all take the lead role, but we see Lenny Henry. Dressed in a colourful patterned shirt, he sends smiles soaring across the crowd from the outset. The conversation about mental health has moved on since 2014. Nevertheless, the play’s message still lands today. For all its sorrow, the play gleams with hope. It is a truly brilliant thing.

Enter the oddly inviting, tunnel-like space that is now the second London outpost of the very delicious Speedboat Bar. One of London’s best Thai restaurants, nothing has been lost in translation when it comes to Speedboat Bar 2.0. The Bangkok-inspired flavours still hit hard, with the seriously spicy chicken salad with green mango kerabu a must-order, alongside a compelling crispy pork with creamy black pepper curry, as well as a whole sea bream in addictive makrut lime sauce. Much like at the Rupert Street original, no order is complete with a plate of chicken skins with zaep seasoning. Open until 1am on Friday and Saturday nights (and midnight during the week), it’s also a great bet for a late-night feed-up. 

Now in its fourth year, South Facing might still be a fledgling festival compared to some of the other events on the calendar, but it continues a long and impressive legacy of live music events at the Crystal Palace Bowl. It’s confirmed a diverse mix of events for its 2025 run, including hip-hop legend Busta Rhymes – joined by Redman, Big Daddy Kane, Chali 2na and more; multi-platinum Dutch dance duo Tinlicker; Basement Jaxx; as well as Flackstock, Mogwai & Lankum and Morcheeba.

‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’. The Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani’s new commission for Somerset House takes the sleep of reason as its starting point. In the grand Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court, she has installed a ten-metre-tall blue figure, who lays supine, gently breathing with closed eyes. We’re told that this ethereal, childlike giant has slept through ‘warnings of present and imminent catastrophes, political and social disaster and environmental collapse.’ Art with a message often risks being didactic, prioritising its statement over its aesthetic experience. Here, though, is a deft balance of content and form: a nuanced message, contained within immediately impressive and accessible art.

If laughter is the best medicine, this gut-twisting tale of vanishing kids from American comedian-turned-horror auteur Zach Cregger comes with its own built-in cure. Put simply, if Weapons wasn’t the best horror movie of the year – pipping even the mighty Sinners – it would probably be the best comedy. The last 30 minutes alone is hands down the most satisfying final reel I’ve winced through – and corpsed at – in absolutely ages, a whirlwind of laughs and scares that ties up the movie’s knotty narrative in a singular fashion.

Jean-Francois Millet was an artist of the people. Born to a farming family, he spent his life painting rural workers and the conditions of their labour. This exhibition, marking the 150th anniversary of his death, presents an impressive array of his work, which went on to inspire Vincent van Gogh among other artists. Heads down and backs bent, there is a melancholic, weathered beauty to Millet’s characters.

Keen to see some live music this summer but disinclined to fork out hundreds on London festival tickets? King’s Cross’s Summer Sounds festival is the perfect solution. Coal Drops Yard is putting on the tenth anniversary of its free outdoor gig series. Visitors can catch an eclectic programme of gigs encompassing everything from classical and folk music to jazz and indie rock over the eleven-day festival. Highlights include a Bob Marley tribute gig from double MOBO Award-winning saxophonist YolanDa Brown (Friday August 15), while families can check out a host of free workshops and activities at Family Sundays. 

In the Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space, two Iranian-Canadian artists are having fun with language. Sculpture, video and found objects all find their place in this playful exhibition that juxtaposes words and images to show us the precarity of truth and meaning in today’s world. From a hyper-realistic sculpture to a repurposed electric motorway sign, Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi find many ways to combine the quotidian with the uncanny.

This new play by American writer Doug Wright comes to the Barbican from Broadway heralded by a 2023 Tony Award for star Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) and is about someone you’ve likely never heard of. Oscar Levant was a pianist – best known for playing George Gershwin’s music – and a humourist, who popped up in a handful of films including An American in Paris. This play re-imagines the events surrounding his chaotic appearance as a guest on The Tonight Show in 1958. It's fragmentary and frantic – culminating in a truly virtuosic piano performance by a spotlit Hayes, who looks agonisingly at his own hands as if they belong to a stranger. It’s hauntingly powerful and the apex of this funny and devastating play.  

Freakier Friday is a sequel that makes barely a lick of sense but is infectious, ridiculous fun and feels like a trip back to simpler times. The 2003 original had Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as Anna and Tess, a bickering mother and daughter who undergo a body swap and learn to understand each other. Two decades years later, Tess is a renowned therapist who psychobabbles any conflict into submission. Anna is now a music exec, mum to a rebellious teenager and due to marry sweet chef Eric. After the female family members visit a dodgy ‘psychic’ at Anna’s bachelorette party, the teens and adults switch bodies and have to figure out their differences in order to swap back. There are almost endless holes you could pick in its logic and storytelling, but it gives you few reasons to want to. This Friday’s freakier, but it’s kind of… funner too.

Edinburgh isn't the only place with a bursting, brilliant fringe, and indeed, as the Scottish capital’s iconic annual event becomes ever more expensive, the once scrappy outsider Camden Fringe looks ever more like a serious alternative for the London-based. Returning for its nineteenth edition, it’s smaller than Edinburgh by a long shot, but still boasts hundreds of events all over Camden, taking in everything from the expected stand-up sets and experimental theatre to kids’ shows, dance, and even magic. Runs tend to be for a night or two rather than the entire month, and prices are bargain basement by London standards: many shows are less than a tenner, none are much more than that. 

Love sushi, dumplings or noodles? Inamo’s got you covered. This high-tech spot in Soho or Covent Garden lets you order from interactive tabletops, play over 20 games while you wait and even doodle on your table. Then it’s all you can eat pan-Asian dishes like Sichuan chicken, red dragon rolls and Korean wings with bottomless drinks. Usually £113.35, now just £33 or £26 if you're in early at the weekend!

Get Inamo’s best ever bottomless food & drink brunch from only £26 with Time Out Offers.

Hollywood stars don’t come as classy as Sophia Loren. This programme of films curates by the BFI, Cinecittà and Cinema Department of the Ministry of Culture of Italy, celebrates oven 70 years of the glamazon actress with screenings of 4K restorations and cinematic classics. Loook out for talks including Sophia Loren: Hollywood Italian Style as well as screening including: Good Folk’s Sunday (Anton Giulio Majano, 1953), Heller in Pink Tights (George Cukor, 1960), Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Vittorio De Sica, 1963), Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966), Saturday, Sunday and Monday (Lina Wertmüller, 1990) and The Life Ahead (Edoardo Ponti, 2020).

Fresh from winning a Best Documentary Oscar for 20 Days in Mariupol, a fly-on-the-shattered-wall depiction of the brutal 2022 siege by Putin’s invading army, the insanely brave Ukrainian filmmaker-reporter Mstyslav Chernov has picked up his camera and found somewhere even more dangerous to go: a pencil-thin strip of blasted forest just outside the destroyed village of Andriivka in eastern Ukraine. The fields on both sides are sewn with landmines, making the task of capturing the village a forest crawl of hidden Russian bunkers, random shellfire and sudden death. Its vérité view of combat is intense and confronting. What makes it so impactful is the first-person nature of the footage – suddenly, the tools of modern warfare have become filmmaking tools too. It’s a groundbreaking view of the horror and pity of war, I can’t remember a cinematic experience quite like it. It’s devastating and extraordinary.

You’ve probably heard of ‘Instagram face’. This summer, Somerset House is dedicating a whole exhibition to things like the internet’s inclination for everyone to look exactly the same. In Virtural Beauty, Somerset House will explore the impact of digital technologies on how we define beauty today. The show will display more than 20 artworks from the 'Post-Internet' era, an art movement concerned with the influence of the internet on art and culture. It will feature sculpture, photography, installation, video and performance art, with highlights including ORLAN’s Omniprésence (1993), a groundbreaking performance in which the artist live-streamed her own facial aesthetic surgery, and AI-generated portraits by Minnie Atairu, Ben Cullen Williams, and Isamaya Ffrench. 

★★★★ 'Frameless has managed to create something genuinely exciting' - Time Out

Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined beyond belief, through cutting-edge technology. Situated in Marble Arch, Frameless plays host to four unique galleries with hypnotic visuals and a dazzling score. Enjoy 90 minutes of surreal artwork from Bosch, Dalí and more for just £24!

Get £24.80 tickets (originally £31) to Frameless, only with Time Out Offers.

The time is once again Nye, as Michael Sheen returns to the National Theatre to reprise firebrand politician and NHS founder, Aneurin Bevan, in Tim Price’s play, after it originally debuted last year. The state of the country’s health and that of Nye himself are intwined from the start, as we open to the bed-ridden deputy leader of the Labour Party. It’s July 1960. We’re here, it’s increasingly clear, for the end of his life. Plunging us into Nye’s unconscious, Price gives us a dream-like portrait of his life. Sheen is predictably great at combining Nye’s burning sense of belief in welfare for all and his irascibility within a single scene. This play is a rallying cry for the power of empathy and bloody-minded humanitarianism.         

Emily Kam Kngwarray, an Anmatyerr artist from the Sandover region in the Northern Territory of Australia, didn’t start making art until she was 70. Her prolific and vibrant output during the ensuing decade paved the way for Aboriginal artists, women artists and Australian artists – and is the subject of this, her first major solo exhibition in Europe. Expect monumental canvases adorned with batik and acrylic patterns whose networks of dots and lines are almost immersive.

First-time playwright Shaan Sahota does a decent job of spinning an In The Thick of It-style yarn about Angad (Adeel Akhtar), a very junior British Sikh shadow minister who suddenly finds himself in play for the leadership of what is implicitly the Tory Party. The opening scenes thrum with an energy similar to a previous National Theatre triumph, James Graham’s This House, as it plunges us into an amusingly compromised world of sweary spads, cocky whips and malleable MPs. Helena Wilson is scene-stealingly entertaining as the apparently humble Angad’s shark-like head of comms Petra. It’s fun.

Another year, another spectacular line-up of classical music. In 2025, the orchestral extravaganza will feature 86 concerts across eight weeks, with over 3,000 artists taking to the stage, with the majority of the action taking place inside the grand surroundings of London’s Royal Albert Hall. This weekend, look out for a BBC Young Composer Workshops, which give those aged 15 to 18 the chance to meet leading composers; a rendition of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony from Nicholas Collon and the Aurora Orchestra; and a concert from French period-instrument outfit Le Concert Spiritue. 

Imagine indulging in all the dumplings, rolls, and buns you can handle, crafted by a Chinatown favourite with over a decade of culinary excellence. Savour Taiwanese pork buns, savoury pork and prawn soup dumplings, and luxurious crab meat xiao long bao. To top it off, enjoy a chilled glass of prosecco to elevate your feast. Cheers to a truly delightful dining experience at Leong’s Legend!

In Mansfield, the wedding of the year is about to take place. Local girl Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) is marrying Polish lad Marek (Julian Kostov). The ceremony plays out in real time at Beth Steel’s Till The Stars Come Down, now running in the West End after debuting at the National Theatre. Director Bijan Sheibani sucks you right into this world through fast-paced dialogue and artfully constructed tableaus. It is heady, hilarious and emotional; the wedding itself might be a car crash, but this imaginative production is anything but. 

Having premiered at the Old Vic in 2017 – and gone on to conquer the West End and Broadway – Girl From the North Country has lost none of its potency as it returns to the theatre where it all began — a dreamy, sepia-soaked production of character-driven vignettes and reimagined Bob Dylan songs. It’s 1934 in Duluth, Minnesota – Dylan’s actual birthplace – and the Great Depression is chewing through the soul of the town. At the centre is the Laine family, struggling to keep their guesthouse (and each other) from crumbling under debt, loss, and the weight of time. As we follow their story, we enter a world that feels like the inside of an old jukebox: full of half-remembered stories, crackling melancholy, and music that never quite stops playing.

The Arcola Theatre's alt-opera festival Grimeborn returns for its eighteenth year in 2025 and it’s as eclectic as ever, from a stripped back reworking of Wagner’s magnum opus Tristan und Isolde (Aug 13-16) to the first ever full staging of John Joubert’s final opera Jane Eyre (Aug 6-9)  and the return of last year’s bit of fun Sense & Senibility, The Musical (Aug 19-23) which is, you know, a bit more musical-y, and also last year’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which is, you know, bleak.

The balcony scene from Jamie Lloyd’s Evita is the biggest news to come out of the theatre world in years. People have been entranced by Rachel Zegler’s fame and the sheer ballsiness of Lloyd having her sing ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ for free to the good people of Argyll Street at 9pm each night from the London Palladium balcony. Opening the second half, the balcony sequence is a study in pure artifice. Clad in flowing white dress and an elegant blonde wig, Evita – now the First Lady – sings her great song of love and yearning for the country she’s cynically worked her way to the summit of.  But the Eva the outside audience sees is a lie: wig, dress and her sense of empathy are torn off before she returns to the stage. There is so much that is good about it – from Zegler, to the choreography, to the timely antifascist sentiment, to That Scene. It’s not just the London theatre event of the summer, but the London event of the summer full stop. 

London Palladium. Now until Sep 6. Buy tickets here. 

The Jamaican-born, London-raised photographer Dennis Morris is best known for his portraits of Bob Marley: a teenaged Morris, then a Hackney schoolkid, first photographed the reggae star in 1973. He went on to photograph the Sex Pistols and other reggae and punk icons, and there are plenty of stunning portraits of the likes of John Lydon and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry in this hugely satisfying first UK retrospective of Morris’s work. Morris’s musical portraits are thrilling, but it’s his 1970s documentary work capturing Black and Asian life in Hackney and Southall that steals the show. They’re valuable, essential moments in time, capturing the capital at a point when Black British and British Indian communities were becoming well-established in some neighbourhoods but were anything but integrated or widely accepted. 

Us humans can be pretty selfish, and that’s especially true when it comes to design. It’s probably not something you’ve really thought about much before now (see, selfish!) but the world of design has historically neglected the needs of the animals, plants and other living organisms with whom we share our planet, in favour of catering to the whims and demands of us homosapiens. But not anymore. Created in collaboration with Future Observatory – the Design Museum’s national research programme championing new design innovations around environmental issues – this groundbreaking exhibition brings together art, design, architecture and technology to explore the concept of ‘more-than-human’ design, which embraces the notion that human activities can only flourish alongside those of other species and eco-systems. 

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. 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, who creates not the faded grandeur of a seaside home here, but a wooden yard full of splintered timbers. Peter Corboy and Ruth Wilson as siblings Mike and Josie burst onto the stage and whack each other with dialogue, fed up with dad Phil’s drunkenness and slave-driving on their rock-infested farm. Frecknall turns the tilth on a half-buried play, and digs up something extraordinary.

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. This year’s pop-up will be looking more Instagrammable than ever before, thanks to designer and architect Yinka Ilori, who has created an eye-popping screen design. Head 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.