Things to do in London this week

There’s no slow build in British filmmaker Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, an artistically exciting and deeply uncomfortable portrait of a marriage and mind in free fall. The film is an adaptation of a France-set, Spanish-language novel by Ariana Harwicz, and Ramsay (We Need to Talk about Kevin) moves its story to rural Montana, where young married couple, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), have moved from New York City to take over his dead uncle’s spacious but decrepit house and be nearer his parents. Loud and frenetic, it crunches up and down through various gears, all of them intense and rattling and never abandoning a punkish sense of anarchy and abandon while keeping a compassionate eye firmly on the woman at its core. It’s a deeply raw and honest film. It’s bleak, but it also has a musical, black-comic, big-hearted spirit that pulls you through the despair.

In US theaters Nov 7. In UK and Ireland cinemas Nov 14.

Escape the Oxford Street crowds with a detour into pretty Carnaby Street, which puts on memorable Christmas light displays each year. Last year's sustainability-led installation ‘Into the Light’ was a bit controversial, with viewers reckoning that the eco glowing cuboid shapes didn't have the wow factor of previous efforts. It looks like the same display will be repeated this year, but there'll be a welcome splash of neon colour added to bring some jollity to Carnaby's skies.

Named after the Old English word for kitchen – opened in 2022 inside the Blue Mountain School, a spurious but well-intentioned Shoreditch arts space, this repurposed Georgian townhouse is a beautiful space where each guest is immediately greeted by congenial head chef Taz Sarhane, a cook who loves to get a little bit weird. At a long pine bar he’ll proffer you a ‘picnic’ of blush-pink house-cured meats, a fluffy hillock of virgin butter, a platter of runny, mouth-coating chicken fat, a mini muffin, dense seeded bread, and a beefy beaker of collagen soup that is, in the best possible way, like licking the inside of a cow. We’re then led upstairs to the kitchen, for more snacks served at the pass; charcoal-seared wagyu chunks and an insanely juicy tartlet of bone marrow, foraged mushrooms, confit egg yolk and caviar. We end in a candle-lit dining room with just six tables. It could be a Romantic-era time portal Cycene might not be the most affordable restaurant in east London, but it is by far the most magical. 

As anyone who has seen her everyday figures lining Whitechapel’s Elizabeth Line platform will know, Chantal Joffe pays attention. Though her paintings are cartoonish and sometimes distorted, she faithfully renders the intricacies of expression. A sidelong glance, a furrowed brow, the specific placement of a hand: it’s in these easy-to-miss details that her sensitive portraits come to life. This exhibition at Victoria Miro will focus on a new body of paintings of friends and fellow artists, made in London and Venice. 

This big-hearted new musical is rooted in a brilliant episode of real life. In 1985, three female mechanics, Ros Wall, Annette Williams and Roz Woollen, set up a car repair shop in Sheffield to create work in short supply in their male-dominated industry. Named in honour of trailblazing racing car driver Gwenda Stewart, the garage became a hub for women’s rights and protest in Thatcherite 1980s. Sheffield-based theatre company Out of the Archive have crafted their own story and characters out of interviews with surviving Gwenda’s Garage member Ros and its customers. You can strongly feel the DNA of Northern comedies like Brassed Off or The Full Monty and queer films like Pride in Nicky Hallet and Val Regan’s book and lyrics. The show’s joyful punch-in-the-air defiance of bigotry and its pride in the story it’s telling is uplifting. And that feels important right now.

Every year, thousands of professional and amateur photographers around the world submit their best portraits to The Taylor Wessing Photo Prize – a contest that has helped launch the careers of many top photographers. Around 60 finalists are selected and put on display at the National Portrait Gallery, giving an insight into the lives of friends and family of those behind the lens, or capturing a moment in time with stars in the spotlight. One image will take home the big prize, while the annual ‘In Focus’ display will feature a new work by an established photographer.

There aren’t many actors who command the attention as fiercely as Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Bean – and if you’d gladly spend two hours watching them have an act-off in a wood cabin, Anemone is for you. Playing estranged brothers, their performances are riveting in a film that’s also bold, challenging and puzzling. It’s the 1980s, and Jem Stoker (Bean) arrives in a remote English forest to confront his hermit brother, Ray (Day-Lewis). It’s been 20 years since he’s seen Ray, who’s become an angry recluse. Over the ensuing days, Jem attempts to get through to his brother. The details of their shared past in the British military emerge, along with the reason for a visit that no-one seems to really want. There’s no denying the magic on screen when these performers come together. This family endeavour is an acting masterclass, and we should be grateful that it’s lured Day-Lewis back into acting after eight years in the metaphorical woods.

Though it would be pushing it to say Tom Morris directs Othello as a comedy, he certainly wrings more laughs than usual out of Shakespeare’s great tragedy. The title role is played by David Harewood, who returns to the part 28 years after he was the first Black actor to star as the doomed Moorish general at the National Theatre. His new Othello is a precise, confident, seemingly unflappable man who shows little sign of jealousy or doubt for a long time. But his extreme rationalism proves his downfall: once Toby Jones’s Iago presents ‘proof’ of Othello’s wife Desdemona (Caitlin FitzGerald) being unfaithful, her husband simply accepts it, something that speaks as much of misogyny as insecurity or insanity. It’s a solid commercial show. 

Born in a fishing village in Denmark in 1859, Anna Ancher painted and memorialised life on the coast, cementing herself as a Danish household name. Now Dulwich Picture Gallery brings Ancher’s work to a UK audience in her first ever British exhibition, which will showcase over 40 of her luminous paintings, many of which are reminiscent of the coastal community where she grew up. Also featuring in the exhibition will be four of Ancher’s contemporaries: Marie Luplau, Emilie Mundt, Marie Sandholdt, and Louise Bonfils. 

Every winter the Southbank Centre turns the banks of the Thames into a frosty wonderland, full of little wooden Alpine-style cabins selling gifts, warming drinks, and snacks. You’ll find huts serving up truffle burgers, duck wraps, mulled wine, Dutch pancakes, churros and many more tasty morsels to nibble on while you look through gifts, jewellery and decorations made by independent craft traders. Or, once you’re done browsing, snuggle up at pop-up king Jimmy Garcia’s riverside venue Fire And Fromage, where you can snaffle all you can eat raclette, sip on seriously decadent hot chocolates, and even toast your own marshmallows round a cosy fire pit. 

Director Michael Grandage and playwright Jack Holden’s stage adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s seminal novel of the ‘80s does a tremendous job of cutting Hollinghurst’s period odyssey into a gripping, flab-free two-and-a-half hours of theatre. It is, above all, a great piece of storytelling. If you’re not familiar, The Line of Beauty concerns Nick Guest (Jasper Talbot), a young gay man who in 1983 moves into the ultra fancy home of his uni mate Toby Fedden’s parents as a lodger. The story charts his journey through the decade: adjacent to the ruling classes but not a member of them, he is further removed from the mainstream by his sexuality, which he is open about, but also othered by. It’s a fine, sensitive articulation of the novel. 

Returning for a fourth winter season in 2025, this ice-skating pop-up in the shadow of the rejuvenated Battersea Power Station is one of London’s most aesthetic. Returning to its usual spot right next to the Thames, it offers magnificent views over the riverside, a twinkling 30ft Christmas tree that forms the perfect backdrop for your on-ice selfies, and all the fun of the fair courtesy of an adjacent vintage fairground. It’s the perfect date night spot, Christmas party location or a well-earned reward after a hectic day of gift shopping. 

Anna Ziegler’s play The Wanderers makes its UK debut at the Marylebone Theatre after becoming an off-Broadway hit in 2023, starring Katie Holmes. Tracking the lives and loves of two Jewish couples from different generations in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, it is a crafty, gradually intensifying drama that examines the values we embrace and reject. Directed here by Igor Golyak, it’s staged on two sides of a translucent screen, with the tensions from the separate eras overlapping and reverberating across time.

If you’ve seen a ballet at the Royal Opera House, there’s a high chance you will be familiar with the work of Wayne McGregor. The ROH’s resident choreographer since 2006, the dance polymath brought a sleeker, more minimal and modern style of ballet, rooted in contemporary, to the Covent Garden stage. He has worked with numerous companies, including his own Studio Wayne McGregor, and even choreographed ABBA Voyage. Now Somerset House is staging a huge exhibition dedicated to McGregor’s three-decade-long repertoire, which includes ballets inspired by Virginia Woolf, Margaret Attwood, and 1980s sci-fi. Through a series of multi-sensory choreographic installations, performances and experiments, Infinite Bodies will explore how technology is used in dance choreography, music, and lighting, with works that incorporate motion capture, machine learning, AI interactivity, and digital imaging, alongside hybrid realities and robotics. 

Nick Payne’s new Royal Court play The Unbelievers isn’t the instant classic his last one (2012’s Constellations) was. But its star gives a turn that is absolutely, magnificently, unfettered Nicola Walker. Her unique gift for proper, nuanced acting filtered via an unshakeable deadpan grumpiness is harnessed to perfection as she plays a grieving mother whose sorrow and grief at the unexplained disappearance of her son has curdled into something darker and more disturbing. The play is set in three timelines, albeit heavily jumbled up and somewhat blurred. There’s the immediate aftermath of Oscar’s disappearance, a year on, and seven years on where Miram’s grief has metastasised into something truly monstrous. It is a remarkable performance from Walker, affecting, upsetting and often savagely hilarious, it grabs you instantly and paints a haunting but disarmingly funny portrait of grief turning into something else. 

Looking for a wholesome, creative night out that doesn’t involve a hangover (unless you BYOB)? Token Studio in Tower Bridge offers relaxed, hands-on ceramics classes where you can spin, shape and decorate your own pottery piece. Whether you fancy throwing a pot on the wheel (£32) or painting a pre-made mug or plate (£23), it’s the perfect mix of fun, mindful and surprisingly therapeutic. And to top it all off, you can sip while you sculpt as it’s BYOB and super chill.

Buy a Token Studio session from just £23, only through Time Out Offers. 

Things tend to look different in the glow of candlelight, whether that’s the curious faces of people or stony sculptures sitting spectre-like in the shadows. It’s a phenomenon that Joseph Wright of Derby interrogates in the pieces displayed here – the first major exhibition dedicated to his candlelight paintings –questioning what we see and the act of looking itself. Submerging his work in darkness, he explores themes like death, morality and scepticism in a way that challenges more typical views of his output as a painter.

Hidden somewhere between a theme park, an escape room and a real-life video game, Phantom Peak isn’t just your average day out. This open-world adventure based in Canada Water invites you to explore a fictional steampunk town at your own pace, chatting to quirky characters, uncovering mysteries and slowly piecing together your own story.

With 11 unique trails, a rotating calendar of seasonal storylines, and a cast of live actors guiding your experience, no two visits are ever the same.

Get discounted adult tickets exclusively through Time Out Offers

If you fancy switching things up a bit and find yourself near Borough, why not roll up your sleeves at Comptoir Bakery's London Bridge workshop space? Choose from sessions where you’ll learn to craft buttery croissants and pain au chocolat, the cult-favourite Brionuts, or delicate tartelettes. Expert bakers—trained under culinary legends—will guide you through every step, from mixing the dough to perfecting the fillings. You’ll also nab a slick £20 apron to keep and plenty of fresh pastries to take home. Starting at just £69 per person or £118 for two, with over 30% off, it’s a delicious way to spend a few hours.

Get discounted workshop sessions, only through Time Out Offers