Things to do in London this week

Running 26.2 miles across our great city dressed as a rhino or Colin the Caterpillar is a feat that the majority of us Londoners will probably never be brave enough to attempt. But some courageous souls who aren’t averse to hours of gruelling training willingly put themselves in the crosshairs of shin splints and runner’s knee and, for that, they should be applauded. So, when 50,000 of them take part in the London Marathon in a few months, it’s your duty to cheer them on. The 2026 marathon will take place on Sunday April 26, and will follow the traditional route from Greenwich Park into central London, through a much-photographed stretch that takes in Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace.

Finally, just shy of a decade after it was first announced as part of the £1.1 billion development of Stratford’s East Bank cultural quarter, the long-awaited V&A East is due to open to the public on Saturday. The 7,000-square-metre museum will bring together exhibits that speak to both east London’s creative heritage and the voices that are shaping contemporary culture across the globe today. Early visitors will be able to check out its Why We Make Galleries, a permanent display spread across two of the museum’s five floors and featuring 500 objects from the V&A’s collection, arranged into ten key themes addressing the most pressing issues in contemporary society. And its inaugural temporary exhibition The Music is Black: A British Story. 

Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s subversive ’00s classic Avenue Q, has been revived by Jason Moore, and is a fun piece of naughty noughties nostalgia that raises a smile from the sight of its fluffy yellow stage curtain onwards. Princeton (Noah Harrison) is a wet-behind-the-ears young puppet who has just graduated from university and is now looking for a place to live on Avenue Q, a shabby but affordable neighbourhood in outer NYC and gets enmeshed in the general goings on of his neighbours. It’s all very well done: Anna Louizos’s sets and Rick Lyon’s puppets look superb. While the humour of Lopez and Marx’s songs stands up well, with their big, bright, primary coloured tunes. As a heritage musical, it remains a delightful one-off.

Six by Nico returns to Time Out with its latest tasting menu, heading straight to Seoul and drawing on a research trip that saw the team dive deep into the city’s food scene. Over three days, they moved through basement kitchens, chef-led tastings and cultural spaces that revealed just how layered and expressive Korean cooking can be.

That journey now shapes a six-course menu built around memory, technique and bold flavour. Expect dishes that pull from tradition but land with a modern edge, each one tied back to moments from the trip that stuck long after returning to London. It’s immersive, confident cooking that turns travel into a tasting experience.

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Polished Italian mega-trattoria Burro, is the next venture from little Highbury restaurant and perennial Time Out favourite Trullo. Taking the original Trullo concept (handmade pasta, charming service, salty snacky bits, actual tablecloths), Belfast-born founder Conor Gadd has super-scaled it for the West End masses. It’s not too flashy but not too basic, not too pricey but not too cheap, not too experimental but not too cautious. Burro is just right. A silky, pine-nut-heavy caponata is heaven. Ribbons of yellow fettuccine are intertwined with a rich duck and porcini ragu, and showered with Parmesan, and the crab ‘acqua pazza’, is a mix of chunky mussels, nutty chickpeas, handfuls of fresh parsley and crumbled crab meat in a deep, salty broth. 

This new immersive film is the latest show at Lightroom, and it’s a dive into his story that’s fully authorised by the David Bowie estate. Instead of narration, it’s told fully using voice clips from the man himself, as well as footage from the Bowie Archive in New York. It’ll be relaid in Lightroom’s signature style, which involves ultra high-powered projectors covering the walls, ceiling and floor with vivid imagery. It’s directed by Mark Grimmer, who led the design of the V&A’s David Bowie Is exhibition and went on to direct David Hockney: Bigger & Closer. Like all Lightroom shows, it’s designed to play on loop, and will be divided into themed sections including ‘theatricality, spirituality, songwriting and the transformative power of creativity’.

Irish director Lee Cronin breathes life – or death, more accurately – into another classic horror monster, with a spin on Egyptian mummies that's distinctly Raimi-esque in its goo and gore. Jack Reynor stars as Charlie Cannon, a rising star journalist on assignment in Egypt for several months with his two children and pregnant wife, Larissa. But when his young daughter, Katie is abducted from their garden, their lives are overturned. Cue some impressively horrible experiences for the largely blameless Cannons. Cronin punctuates some slow-burn scenes with regular visceral scares. The film’s final moments mix compassion and vengeance to create something genuinely surprising. 

How often does a night at the theatre begin with an actual full-on karaoke session? That’s the set-up at Heart Wall. As pre-shows go, it’s a high-concept way to kick things off. But that makes sense. Heart Wall, written by Kit Withington and directed by Katie Greenall, is full of equally big ideas. This is a lively, emotive piece of work, providing one of the most fun nights at the theatre we’ve had in a long time. It centres on 23-year-old Franky (Rowan Robinson), who’s returned home, to an undisclosed town in the north of England, to surprise her parents. The father-daughter chemistry between Franky and Dez is instantaneous, even if his London-swelling daughter might look down her nose at her hometown. It’s a play full of sharp dialogue and emotion that will leave you profoundly moved.

The annual Sony World Photography Awards exhibition is a calendar highlight for any shutterbug, featuring more than 300 gasp-worthy snaps encompassing sport, portraiture, landscape and fashion photography, shortlisted from over 430,000 submissions from more than 200 countries. Returning to Somerset House for its 19th edition, the exhibition will feature a special display celebrating the career of American street photographer Joel Meyerowitz, the recipient of the competition’s Outstanding Contribution to Photography award this year, and will be supplemented by a programme of talks, workshops and debates with leading photography practitioners and experts.

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A content creator, a disruptor, a beekeeper and a teacher walk into a bar. The punchline, as spun in Cédric Klapisch’s amiable time-leaping comedy, is that these four people are cousins. Their family tree has sent its branches shooting off in the maddest directions. Like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, we’re off time-travelling to a more colourful era in French history to understand their common dominator: a young Norman woman, Adèle Vermillard (Suzanne Lindon), who sets off to find her own mother in Belle Époque Paris and ends up intersecting with the Impressionist masters. Clever cuts between timelines lend a nice unpredictability to the yarn. It’s a great excuse to revisit this gilded age in French history.  

Saltburn and Gone Girl star Rosamund Pike plays Jess Parks, a pioneering feminist judge, in Suzie Miller's three-hand play that feels more like a 100-minute monologue. Like its companion legal drama Prima Facie, which was a massive hit starring Jodie Comer, Inter Alia is a spectacularly demanding showcase for a female star, and Pike delivers the goods with stadium-level charisma, intelligence and flair. Miller’s play is based on interviews with female judges who juggle demanding careers with caring responsibilities and social lives: ‘inter alia’ means ‘among other things’. Punchy, thought-provoking drama, it has brought Jess and real women like her into the limelight.

Tucked inside the Pan Pacific London hotel, Ginger Lily Bar & Lounge makes a very good case for slowing down over the weekend. Available on Fridays and Saturdays, the experience pairs elegant surroundings with half a bottle of Taittinger champagne, served as sunlight pours through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

On the table, expect freshly baked scones, delicate pastries and neat finger sandwiches prepared by the pastry team. A selection of Newby teas and tea-infused mocktails rounds things off nicely, creating an easy, indulgent way to spend an afternoon in the City.

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Anya Reiss’s new adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House smartly amplifies the debt-related anxieties that underpin the 1879 original into something extremely modern and extremely nerve-wracking. Nora (Romola Garai) is an anxious, impulsive woman, who we first meet in her bougie rental house surrounded by obscene amounts of Christmas shopping. Her workaholic husband Torvald (Tom Mothersdale) is taken aback by the sprawl of purchases, but Nora remains brittly giddy. They are on the cusp of being rich. However, it’s all built on a lie. Reiss is a former Royal Court prodigy and this is her first stage play in almost a decade. And it’s really good! The best thing she’s done in theatre. Reiss’s updates aren’t just a modish reskinning but an impressively incisive, white-knuckle engagement with contemporary anxieties. 

A landmark exhibition exploring how Black British music has shaped culture in Britain and beyond. Items on display will include Joan Armatrading’s childhood guitar, looks worn by Little Simz and newly acquired photography by Dennis Morris and Jennie Baptiste. The exhibition’s opening will also feature a sound experience by Sennheiser, and will mark the launch of a the inaugural edition of a new festival that will take place annually each spring, bringing together the East Bank’s neighbouring cultural institutions, which include the London College of Fashion, the BBC Music Studios, Sadler’s Wells East and UCL East.

Robert Icke’s take on Romeo & Juliet has Sliding Doors scenes, wherein we see pivotal moments play out differently to Shakespeare’s plot, before a blinding flash of light resets the scene and we see the story take its inexorable turn for the tragic. At best, they’re an effective way of countering the fact that the bleak end of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy is only arrived at by a series of mind-boggling coincidences and mishaps. Stranger Things star Sadie Sink’s gawky Juliet is very good, and when she and Noah Jupe’s puppyish Romeo set eyes on each other for the first time, it is electric. Toss in a gorgeous, drone-heavy electronic score from Giles Thomas, and you have something special. 

Serving up an eclectic mix of live music, visual arts, spoken word, podcasts and club nights, Roundhouse Three Sixty is a springtime festival at Chalk Farm’s famous circular arts venue. After its first edition last year, it's back for a second run that coincides with the 20th anniversary of Roundhouse's big relaunch as a youth-centric arts space. The month is headlined by some massive names. Imogen Heap will drop in for an evening of songs and conversations, Kae Tempest will introduce his new novel, and Amaarae's ‘Black Star Experience’ (Apr 23) is a live show based on her acclaimed latest album. But elsewhere on the line-up you'll find loads of opportunities for rising voices to make their mark. 

Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a classic play. Starting life in 1782 as an epistolary novel, Christopher Hampton’s 1985 stage adaptation was a sensation, adapted into a hit 1988 film and clearly responsible for the ‘90s teen remake Cruel Intentions. This is a pretty good production of it, as you’d expect from the great Marianne Elliott’s first show at the NT in over a decade, with a to die for cast headed by Lesley Manville and Aiden Turner. The duo play callous, capricious, above all very sexy French toffs Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil and Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont, ex-lovers whose relationship has degenerated into callous game playing. It’s a really good production with two sensational leads, of a play that has long stopped being a sexy novelty and now kind of sits as a guilty pleasure. 

Celebrate the Year of the Horse in Chinatown with a feast that keeps the good fortune flowing. Tucked in the heart of Chinatown, Leongs Legend is a long-running Taiwanese favourite offering 45 percent off its bottomless dim sum and prosecco brunch, with 90 minutes of unlimited handmade dumplings and a glass of fizz from a very enticing £24.95. Expect plent of baskets (over 40 dishes) of xiao long bao, and a lively, teahouse-style setting that makes it an obvious pick for ringing in the lunar celebrations with friends.

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With over 400 objects, including 100 ensembles and 50 artworks (by the likes of Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Man Ray), as well as accessories, jewellery, photographs, perfumes and an excellent collection of buttons, Schiaparelli presents a deep dive into the fantastical and surreal world of the fashion house. Founded on Paris’ Place Vendôme in 1927, the exhibition spans the 1920s to the present day, showing glorious garments from Creative Director Daniel Roseberry, who has been at the helm since 2019. The clothes truly are pieces of art and prove that haute couture could always do with a bit of humour. 

This is a big show of big paintings. Big, energetic, happy paintings which are just as enjoyable to stand in front of as one can imagine they were to make. Hurvin Anderson is the artist responsible, and the 80 paintings on show at Tate Britain amount to 30 years worth of work. Some date back to 1995 when he was an art student at the Royal College of Art; others were made this year (some he even finished off once they’d been hung). Looking at them feels like you’ve been carried somewhere else, if only briefly, sharing in that condition of being in one place while thinking about another.