London events in October

When the days are a-darkenin’, we’ve started walking face-first into spider webs again and the shops are expecting an imminent order of pumpkin-related merchandise, it can only mean one thing: Halloween, Thursday October 31 2020, is almost upon us. Dust off your witch’s hat, rinse those vampire fangs and start honing your prosthetic-application skills. Nothing can possibly be scarier than the past eight months, but we’re willing to try... 

Great news: the Southbank Centre is reopening! Less great news: you can’t go in! Instead, the shows in its Inside Out season of music and literature will broadcast the Royal Festival Hall to the wider world, with most viewable by purchasing a ticket to watch a live stream. This month book tickets to hear Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, Claudia Rankine, Dr Nicola Rollock, Kae Tempest, Dawn French, Arundhati Roy and the London Philharmonic Orchestra in your living room. 

With London’s best watering holes facing their most challenging year, London Cocktail Week is hoping to throw them something of a lifeline – by extending the LCW celebrations so they last for a whole month. Think of it as Eat Out to Help Out, but for bars.  

If anyone really has managed to dance themselves right out the womb, it’s probably Michael Clark. This show is a comprehensive sweep through the maverick dancer and choreographer’s career, which he spent mashing up post-punk with classical ballet. See Clark’s original style through film, photography, paintings and sculptures, alongside his legendary collaborations with cult icons like Leigh Bowery, Sarah Lucas, The Fall and Wolfgang Tillmans. 

Bit late for the Summer Exhibition, isn’t it? Yes, but calling the Royal Academy’s annual open-submission mega-show the ‘Autumn Exhibition’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it. So it’s the same thing we get every summer – floor-to-ceiling art by greats and unknowns alike, plus all those little stickers on the walls – only a few months later thanks to the year that is 2020. This year it’s coordinated by artistic duo Jane and Louise Wilson RA and includes new works by Tracey Emin, Rebecca Horn, Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, Gillian Wearing and Ai Weiwei.

By now, we’re so starved of cinematic sustenance that we’d even pay to watch ‘Hocus Pocus’ on the big screen instead of the usual order of Halloween business: snoozing while it plays on BBC Two for the billionth time. You’ll find it screening at Forbidden Forest Cinema, an ‘eerie woodland’ installation from Pop-Up Screens next to Peckham’s Bussey Building. If you can’t face another trip to Salem, Massachusetts, it’s also screening ‘The Lost Boys’, ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ and that terrifying Halloween classic… ‘Moana’!?

Wigmore Hall is currently operating at 10 percent capacity but that hasn’t stopped it from programming more than a hundred concerts. Performances include operatic showcases, evenings with string-quartets, pianists, and even lutists!

Nick Hytner’s shiny theatre next to Tower Bridge is emerging from lockdown with an equally shiny selection of star-studded monologues. Directed by Hytner and written by David Hare, ‘Beat the Devil’ has none other than Ralph Fiennes playing the celebrated playwright. Hare contracted Covid-19 early on in the pandemic; this show is a deep dive into his experience of the illness. Hare previously described the government’s response to the pandemic as worse than the handling of the Suez crisis or the Iraq war, so the tone of this soliloquy isn’t hard to imagine.

Gigs are not easy in the era of social distancing – you can’t exactly pogo shirtless in some sweaty basement with a hundred other drunks when there’s a bloody pandemic – but that doesn’t mean that there’s no live music. St Martin-in-the-Fields is hosting a series of socially distanced classical music concerts. There’ll be solo and orchestral performances taking place throughout the month. 

One of Bruce Nauman’s works is called ‘Clown Torture’. That’s all you need to know about the pivotal, ultra-influential American artist, who’s finally got a seriously big Tate show. Go to see neons, installations, films and the aforementioned clown torture.

Not to be confused with the manicured Walthamstow Wetlands, this outdoor art exhibition is taking place in the reedbeds of the London Wetlands Centre in Barnes. The one with the otters. To mark its twentieth anniversary, the centre is carefully placing sculptures and sound installations among the watery habitat that you can view from a distance. Look out for Alec Stevens’s ‘That Sinking Feeling’, little houses that protrude from the lagoon, reminding us of rising water levels, while the ducks swim around them without a care in the world. 

Ah: live music, my old friend! Most London gig venues are not in any way suited to distancing, and things like touring are extravagantly impractical at present. ‘Lockdown Town’ is a theatrical gig experience that manages to work around these problems offering five bands in five rooms, each of whom plays a three-ish song set to the multiple small audiences each playing tunes in line with the retro-Americana concept of the show. It’s basically the central London equivalent of staggering around the fringier tents at Wilderness for two hours, and if that sounds fun, and you dig retro Americana, you’ll have a blast. 

Clear all the images of a naked Sting from your mind, because the British Museum’s new exhibition is all about uncovering the truth behind the beautiful, esoteric Eastern philosophical movement. Expect centuries’ worth of stunning objects, prints and paintings.