Things to do in London today

Did you know that the samurai believed gender and sexuality were fluid, and that they practically invented the concept of being non-binary? Because I certainly didn’t. This progressive view was one of many riveting – and surprising – things I learned at the blockbuster Samurai exhibition at the British Museum.  You don’t have to be a history buff to find Samurai intriguing – I’m not a medieval period obsessive, but like a lot of Zillenials I am a big fan of all things Japanese. This exhibition of treasures from Nihon, therefore, understandably appealed to me, and I suspect this will be the case for anyone who has spent hours trawling the internet for the perfect santoku knife or vintage Comme des Garçons jacket. There’s a lot crammed into the exhibition, which outlines the past 1,000 years through 280 objects and pieces of digital media, following the rise of the samurai from fierce mercenaries in the 1100s, through to their reign as an aristocratic social class from the 1600s to the 1800s. Examining the enduring legacy of the Japanese warriors in the present day, Samurai illustrates how the image of the noble fighter has been mythologised, altered and co-opted over the years, sometimes for nefarious means (as seen in a chilling Nazi pamphlet promoting the relations between Japan and Germany).  an incredible selection of ornate helmets resemble sculptures more than headgear Many of the artefacts on display are stunning – from intricately decorated partition screens, to...

The Princess of Wales Conservatory at Kew Gardens is taking a voyage to China this February, courtesy of the latest annual mind-bending orchid display that takes over the iconic glasshouse each year. As ever, the exotic display will celebrate the natural beauty and biodiversity of its subject country: China is home to thousands of varieties of orchid, plus vast amounts of other flora and fauna besides.   Look out for sculptures of dragons and Chinese lanterns, as well as intricately woven plant installations. There’ll also be  ticketed after-hours events with live Chinese music, food, cocktails and dance performances.  Entry to the display is included in general entry to Kew Gardens.

A new free photography exhibition illustrates the beauty and fragility of the Pantanal – the world’s largest wetland that sprawls across Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. Over 60 images, captured by two of Brazil’s leading documentary photographers, will be displayed. Visitors will discover the Pantanal’s wonderful biodiversity – which includes jaguars, howler monkeys, caiman and marsh deer – alongside the ravages of wildfires and deforestation. 

Yes, nobody – apart from possibly children – looks forward to the February half-term, but at least it’s invariably blessed with the Southbank Centre’s Imagine festival, a mix of family-oriented shows and workshops, play experiences and exhibitions, music, art and literature that’ll keep youngsters diverted February 11-21. There are events for kids of all ages (from babies to pre-teens) with many of them free, ranging from communal singalong sessions to dance workshops.  Highlights of the 2026 edition include the self-explanatory An Evening with Jaqueline Wilson and Rachael Dean (Feb 15) where the legendary childen’s author and her illustrator will discuss their works; Quentin Blake’s Mrs Armitage on Wheels (Feb 18-21) is a new puppet-based musical based on Blake’s book; the Unicorn’s fun The Princess and the Pea (pictured) will be calling in Feb 14-20; The Show for Young Men (Feb 13-15) is a funny, heartfelt physical theatre show for older children about contemporary masculinity; and for young ’uns there’s a day of musical performances from CBeebies stalwarts Andy and the Odd Socks (Feb 15). There’s plenty more besides including a significant number of free shows – check the Southbank Centre website for full listings.

Britain and Hawaii have a complicated history marked by surprisingly cordial relations in the face of considerable adversity.  Captain Cook famously met his end in a skirmish on Hawaiʻi Island in 1779. Then, almost 50 years later in 1824, King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu – monarchs of the now united archipelago – came to London on a diplomatic mission to shore up support from the Empire. Tragically, they both died of measles while waiting for an audience with George IV. But the visit went well diplomatically. After a rogue British captain seized control of the islands for five months in 1843, the Royal Navy booted him out and restored sovereignty (though Queen Victoria sort of shrugged helplessly when asked for help following Hawaii’s annexation by the Americans in 1893). This is all by way of say that Britain had as close a relationship with the Kingdom of Hawaii as anyone during its 98-year existence, and this led to a relatively large amount of cool Hawaiian stuff being acquired by the British Museum and Royal Collection over the years: some of it, inevitably, under shady circumstances, but for the most part accumulated by trade or as lavish royal gifts. And it also means there’s a good story: new exhibition Hawaiʻi: a Kingdom Crossing Oceans does offer some background on the archipelago’s pre-monarchical past and American future, but it largely focuses on relations between our two kingdoms and the ill-fated royal visit.  There’s plenty of fascinating stuff here,...

Opening in time for Spooky Season and running through to May 2026, ‘Dark Secrets’ is a massive new exhibition of esoteric artefacts in Waterloo’s appropriately dingy Vaults – and a cracking day out for anyone into the occult, macabre or bizarre. A sprawling labyrinth of 27 rooms, ‘Dark Secrets’ is fundamentally an exhibition of stuff: more than 1,000 individual artefacts, many of them (apparently) displayed for the first time outside of private collections. Ritual masks, cursed dolls, leather-bound Renaissance books on witchcraft, a fragment of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema temple… if your idea of fun is gawping at weird and creepy shit (and mine certainly is), there’s a lot of it here – and it’s a refreshing change from the wave of immersive ‘exhibitions’ which often don’t amount to much more than a blank room with some projectors in. There is a vaguely chronological structure, running from Celtic druids through to the influence of the esoteric on Hollywood and comics. Horror-movie fans, look out for the original screenplay of Suspiria signed by Dario Argento. Along the way there are rooms dedicated to folkloric creatures, shamanism, voodoo, zombies, satanism, spiritualism, witch trials, Freemasonry, curses, miracles, divination, astrology, tarot… it’s like an occult bookshop brought to life. My favourite item in the show was an (ostensibly genuine) Victorian vampire-hunting kit. But I was also fascinated by a room about the collision of technology and science with the...

There is literally nothing else on this planet as bombastic as a volcanic eruption. And yet somehow, this immersive exhibition dedicated to the destruction of the Roman town of Pompeii by the fury of Mount Vesuvius does endeavour to be ‘a bit much’.  The Last Days of Pompeii: The Immersive Exhibition is the third show to hit London this year from the Spanish company Madrid Artes Digitales (aka MAD), who also made The Legend of the Titanic (which I didn’t see) and Tutankhamun (which I did). The first thing you notice here is the thunderously loud and doomy soundtrack, which permeates every room. Later on you’ll discover that it’s the accompanying music to an immersive film that forms the centrepiece of the show.  But you won’t get to it for at least half an hour, and there’s something very silly about the nominally sober first area – an introduction to the Roman town of Pompeii and its pre-eruption history – being soundtracked by apocalyptic strings and eruption noises. Similarly, the second room contains casts of inhabitants of Pompeii in their final poses before they were entombed in ash. I’m not saying we need to be massively respectful to 2,000-year old dead Romans, but the figures are actually very moving – and would be even more so if you could turn off the overwrought score. Undoubtedly pretty sick if you’re 10, which is surely the point While the rooms at the start are intended to be sensible, this all flies out of the window by the time we start with the immersive...

What is Bubble Planet? Having opened at the tail end of 2023, Bubble Planet is another manifestation of the popular phenomenon that I’m calling Instagrammable immersive family experiences. This one is a particularly close kin to the now defunct Balloon Museum. Where is Bubble Planet? Located in the increasingly culturally vibrant Wembley Park, I’m about 75 percent certain it’s in the same building the last Secret Cinema show was in, just a few minutes walk from the station. What happens at Bubble Planet? The theme is nominally bubbles, though this is interpreted extremely freely, from a balloon room and a ball pool, to a computer generated ocean and a VR experience, both of which do technically feature bubbles. There is a lot of descriptive text on the wall, but it’s mostly waffle rather than anything you need to pay attention to. Is it any good? God help me, I have been to a lot of these things with my children and maybe I’m developing Stockholm Syndrome but I’d say Bubble Planet is the best example in London of This Sort Of Thing: I have literally seen some of these rooms (or something very close to them) before, but not in a combination that so conspicuously maximises the fun. Unburdened by the weird artistic pretensions of the Balloon Museum or the penchant for padding out the attraction with rubbishy little rooms where not much happens a la most of the other experiences, Bubble Planet all killer no filler, if by ‘killer’ you mean ‘room full of giant balloons that keep...

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 review is from 2023. Power Up prices have gone up slightly and the games are changed occasionally. There's been a gaping chasm, an unfillable abyss, in London's recreational heart ever since the Trocadero finally closed its doors in 2011. It has left the city crying out for an arcade experience, somewhere to go and lose yourself in gaming. And now, Power Up is here to answer all of your RPG prayers. Admittedly, it doesn't have a rocket-shaped escalator or countless dark corners for snogging, but what it does have is bank after bank of classic videogames.They've made an attempt at education with a wall of consoles from throughout history, from the Amiga to the Xbox, but you can ignore all that if you want and just concentrate on turning your eyes square. Everything here is grouped by theme. There's a Mario section and a Sonic section, a rhythm action game bit and a VR gaming bit, there's 16-player Halo and solo Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. There are PC games and handheld consoles, Gamecubes and Megadrives. Want to save Lemmings? Race Micromachines? Fight the Empire? It's all here.If it seems a bit familiar, it should be: Power Up isn't new. The Science Museum did a version of this for Easter half-term every year for a while, but this new version of Power Up is permanent and costs just £10 to access for unlimited, all-day gaming. But even better than that, you can get an annual pass for £15. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than having to invest in a new Playstation, plus you...

Arcadia is just another play you can stage in the same way that the sun is just another thing floating in the sky. Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece is a work of burning, ravenous intelligence, and while almost universally acknowledged as his best work, I get why it’s not staged very often.  I think part of the reason is that the late, great Stoppard probably gatekeepered it from half-baked revivals. But it does definitely involve a lot of people talking about maths, and as much as anything else you really need to be able to pull together a cast who can make discussions about the statistical implications of a country estate’s 200 year-old gamekeeping logs really sing. It’s obviously not a play about gamekeeping logs. It’s a play about the unpredictability of humanity, how we’re defined by our transience, our sex drives, and our desire to understand. Carrie Cracknell’s revival is not an attempt to radically reconfigure Arcadia and I doubt anyone would be so foolish as to try – it’s an incredibly specific play. She and her team - notably designer Alex Eales - have however leaned nicely into the Old Vic’s current in-the-round configuration. A bit of furniture aside, they've forgone any attempt to make it look like the country estate on which the play is set, which we visit in the early 19th century and again in the present. Instead we’ve got a revolving circular stage and lights that look like a mobile of the stars – a specific allusion to some lines in the text but also a neat...

  Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho is very specifically a satire on late ’80s Manhattan yuppie culture. And yet the book’s murderous banker protagonist Patrick Bateman is transcendent of the decade he was written into. He’s timeless, a folk figure, shorthand for empathy-free consumer capitalist narcissism. If you describe somebody as ’a real Patrick Bateman’, you probably don’t mean they’re bang into Huey Lewis and the News. There are a few period chuckles at the start of Duncan Sheik and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s musical, which returns to the Almeida as Rupert Goold’s final production as artistic director, having been his first back in 2013. Arty Froushan’s Bateman is very proud of his anachronistic gadgets, notably his Sony Walkman and his 30-inch Toshiba TV. The score is unabashedly ‘80s, mixing retro electro pop original songs with a smattering of classic covers (New Order, Tears for Fears, etc). But even so, before long it starts to feel alarmingly current. It’s fascinating how different Froushan’s Bateman is to Matt Smith’s deadpan, dead-eyed take from 2013. They’re very different actors, for sure. But it’s more than that. Put simply, this Bateman is kind of sympathetic. A bit. Less vile than the book version, less an out-and-out whack job than Christian Bale in the film, more of an inner life than Smith’s take. Really, he’s a young man trying desperately to fit into a ghastly world of meaningless jobs, meaningless status symbols (the infamous business...

Kip Williams is not a massive name in British theatre (yet), but the Aussie writer-director is starting to make some serious waves over her. His dizzyingly high tech, Sarah Snook-starring one woman Dorian Gray was a big West End hit last year, this autumn he directs a version of Jean Genet’s The Maids at the Donmar. It seems questionable as to whether we’ll get part two of his one woman Victorian horror trilogy over here – a version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde received mixed notices Down Under – but part three is coming our way in the new year as his take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula lands on our shores. In her first full London stage role since her career making turn turn in The Color Purple over a decade ago, Cynthia Erivo will return home to (hopefully) triumphantly take on 23 different roles in a tech enhanced solo romp through Dracula that plays clever visual homage to the early years of horror cinema.

I wouldn’t really say Miriam Battye’s comedy The Virgins reminded me of my own teenage years, although to be fair this is probably because I was never a teenage girl. However, it did make me laugh a lot. Rosie Elnile’s set is divided into two rooms of the same unremarkable house, with a corridor in the middle. In the lounge, Joel (Ragevan Vasan) is silently playing on a console with his random mate Mel (Alec Boaden). In the kitchen, his teenage sister Chloe (Anushka Chakravarti) and her friends Jess (Alla Bruccoleri) and Phoebe (Molly Hewitt-Richards) are getting ready for a big night out.  The boys are not the focus here. The girls – clever, wordy, neurotic, virgins – are painstakingly crafting a plan to go out and get… snogged. They are smart and irrational, sweet and maddening as they try to naively micromanage their journey to adulthood. They’re treating kissing boys – and maybe more than kissing if it comes to it – as a sort of military operation to be planned, accomplished and ticked off. Deploy troops, storm the building, bring them home. But in part that’s their brains denying their actual horniness – for starters Jess is certainly incapable of vocalising the fact she obviously has a crush on Joel.  It’s hard not to see The Inbetweeners as casting a bit of a shadow here: I’m not saying Battye has even seen or been directly influenced by the C4 sitcom about a similarly aged, similarly neurotic group of boys, but at the least it’s a pretty good reference point for...

I wonder if the reason John le Carré never allowed his novels to be adapted for the stage was the fear they'd get turned into the sort of trashy touring potboilers that crisscross the country in numbers but never make it to the scrutiny of the West End. It was presumably his death in 2020 that allowed a stage version of his breakthrough The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to finally go ahead. But I’d say his estate was right to give the nod: the story is in safe hands with playwright David Eldridge and director Jeremy Herrin, whose adaptation settles in at the West End after scoring good notices in Chichester. This is a slick and yes, maybe slightly MOR adaptation of Le Carre’s taut, brutal espionage yarn. But it’s a very good one, and Eldridge deftly crafts an intensely interior world, with us seeing the action unfold as much from within jaded spy protagonist Alec Leamas’s head as without. Herrin’s production goes heavy on the noir, and with good reason. Rory Keenan is magnificently grumpy and rumpled as Leamas, a hardbitten British spy in Cold War Berlin who ‘comes in from the cold’ – that is to say, is brought home – after his last informer is executed by Hans-Dieter Mundt, a ruthless counterintelligence agent who has systematically dismantled the British spy apparatus in East Germany. (It is slightly disconcerting that Keenan speaks in his natural Dublin accent, although you soon get used to it). But there is a long game at work: returning to The Circus (a fictionalised...

The Bridge Theatre has an incredibly consistent track record with musicals. Admittedly that’s because it’s only previously staged one musical. But it was a really good one, the visionary immersive production of Guys & Dolls that wrapped up a two-year-run in January. And great news: rising star Jordan Fein’s sumptuous revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods makes it two for two. After the slightly stodgy tribute revue Old Friends and the weird semi-finished ‘final musical’ Here We Are, this is the first actual proper major Sondheim revival to be staged in this country since the great man’s passing. And the main thing worth saying about 1986’s Into the Woods is that it’s the work of a genius at the peak of his powers: a clever send up of fairytales that pushes familiar stories into absurd, existential, eventually very moving territory. It’s both playful and profound, mischievous and sincere, cleverly meta but also a ripping yarn. While Sondheim is the marquee name, the book is by James Lapine (who also did the honours for Sunday in the Park with George and Passion), who does a tremendous job twisting the convoluted narrative into droll, accessible shape. But every second is filled with Sondheim’s presence: his lush, motif-saturated score of baroque nursery rhymes feels as vividly alive as the forest itself; his lyrics are sometimes hilariously bathetic, sometimes formally audacious, sometimes devastatingly poignant, often all three in a single song.  So that’s a big...

Luke Norris’s first play in an age quite doesn’t have an M Night Shyamalan-level twist, but it does take a few pretty shocking turns from quite early on, and for that reason I’m going to talk about the plot in maddeningly general terms, so sorry for that.  As Guess How Much I Love You? begins, we meet Him (Robert Aramyo) and Her (Rosie Sheehy), a thirtysomething married couple who have come to hospital for what is presumably their 20-week scan. They are, for want of a better word, bantering: the sonographer has left the room and they’re idling away the time chatting shit about baby names and whether or not he’s into porn. She’s fiery and intense, he’s garrulous and philosophical. They’re a good couple. There is a nagging worry, however: the two are debating over why the sonographer has been away so long and whether or not she looked worried when she left. To say how this resolves itself would be to give too much away. But what I will say is that as a certified two-time parent, I found Guess How Much I Love You? – which does indeed take its name from the classic picturebook – to be a painfully acute portrait of the stress early parenthood can put on a relationship. Not in some sort of weird self-pitying way, but just that it’s very good and clear and unsentimental on how parenthood not only puts you through the emotional wringer, but how it totally recontexualises your relationship to your partner, as you have to almost start anew in a situation of maximum stress.  Of...

The far right on the streets, an agenda-filled press and a nation caught in a cost-of-living crisis being encouraged to blame immigrants for its woes. It’s not hard to see why this new musical – set in the lead-up to and aftermath of the real-life 1936 stand against the march of Oswald Mosley’s black-shirt fascists by the residents of Cable Street in London’s East End – resonates so powerfully now. Written by Alex Kanefsky, with music and lyrics by Tim Gilvin and directed by Adam Lenson, it’s at Marylebone Theatre following two runs at Southwark Playhouse in 2024. Told in flashback via a present-day tour of Cable Street, it follows the fatefully linked lives of Irish Mairead (Lizzy-Rose Esin-Kelly), who dreams of being a poet while supporting her family, Jewish ex-boxer Sammy (Isaac Gryn), for whom faith isn’t enough in the face of bigotry, and Northerner Ron (Barney Wilkinson), whose desperation at the lack of work is manipulated into racism and violence.  Esin-Kelly’s Mairead is a charismatic, no-nonsense presence, while Gryn shades her would-be love interest Sammy with a bruising anger. Wilkinson plays Ron as someone lost and dangerously confounded by harsh reality. There’s some excellent work from the rest of the ensemble cast, who bring to life their families, neighbours, Mosley’s sneering thugs and the ineffectual police. Lenson ensures that these characters are impactful threads in the social tapestry.      There are shades of Les Misérables when this social...

Due to a weird fluke of theatre availability, Rufus Norris’s final Dorman season at the NT ran on for a few months longer than his final season at the Olivier and Lyttelton theatres. So while Indhu Rubasingham’s tenure started in October at the two larger venues, Man and Boy is the moment she finally takes over the Dorfman. It’s also unusual insofar as the NT’s smallest venue has almost exclusively staged new writing for decades now. This, however, is Anthony Lau’s revival of a semi-obscure Terence Rattigan play. Set during the Great Depression, Man and Boy follows amoral financier Gregor Antonescu as he holes up in the New York City apartment of his estranged son Basil in an effort to regroup and plan anew following the ravages of the stock market collapse.  Last seen in London in 2005 in a West End production starring David Suchet, it’s never been viewed as a stone cold Rattigan classic but it’ll be interesting to see it restaged in the age of Trump. And needless to say an intimate National Theatre production sounds like a proper treat, with Lau directing a cast of Ben Daniels as Gregor and Laurie Kynaston as Basil.

I have in the past been guilty of suggesting all Cirque du Soleil shows are the same, but the return of the insect-themed extravaganza OVO does in fact demonstrate the Quebecois circus giants are capable of change.  Specifically, the excruciating unreconstructed clown sections – wherein male flies rubbed their faces up against the boobs of a female.. ladybird? – have been significantly toned down and de-misogynised. Which is good! Aside from being outdated ’70s-style humour, it was a really weird thing to put in a show with a substantial family audience.  Anyway: OVO 2.0 isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly an improvement.  I mean, it’s basically the same as every other Cirque du Soleil show that comes to the Royal Albert Hall: about two hours long, with a visually arresting but not exactly vigorously realised theme (insects). You get about a third slightly ‘meh’ clowning, a third elegant but not really pulse-quickening acrobatics set to wibbly new age musicl, and about a third face-meltingly impressive, borderline superhuman feats of physics-defying extraordinariness. If I was put in charge of a Cirque du Soleil show I would pitch doing one that’s entirely the latter category, but hey ho. The best bits of this Deborah Colker production remain very good: at the tamer end, a glow-in-the-dark diabolo section is a lot more haunting and elegant than it sounds. At the more ‘scrape your jaw off the floor’ end, the first half finale – in which teams of acrobats fling each other...

If you’re a non-disabled person, you may never have given any proper thought to the many ways in which the world is designed without regard for the needs of disabled members of our society.  Described as ‘both a celebration and a call to action’, this V&A exhibition seeks to rectify that, exploring the social history of design and disability from the 1940s to the present. Opening in summer 2025, it promises to highlight the contributions made by disabled, Deaf, and neurodiverse communities to art, design, fashion, photography and architecture, as well as outlining how design can be made more inclusive and accessible in the future.   

Pictorialism îs known as the first international art photography movement and this exhibition will take curious minds inside the scene, exploring how it developed around the world between the 1880s and 1960s.

Every year, Tate Modern teams up with Hyundai for the Hyundai Commission – a chance for one artist to share an exciting new work in the museum’s iconic Turbine Hall. The chosen masterpiece that will be on display in 2025 will be announced in the coming months, but previous selections for the coveted spot include Mire Lee, Anicka Yi, El Anatsui, Superflex, Abraham Cruzvillegas, among others.

F Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. The novelist might have changed his tune if he’d happened across a young model called Lee Miller back in the New York of the late 1920s.Even back then, in her pixie-cropped fashionista era, the New Yorker must have exuded an unquenchable thirst for discovery and reinvention. Fast forward 30 or so years and she’d been a muse for Man Ray and the Surrealist movement, starred in films, become a famous photographer, decamped to Paris, Cairo and London, traversed war-torn Europe as a daredevil journalist and finally, haunted by the conflict, holed in a cosy corner of Sussex to host arty parties and pioneer avant garde recipes like ‘onion upside down cake’ and ‘marshmallow Coca-Cola ice cream’. She died fêted as a celebrity chef. Second act? She had a folio’s worth.  All of those eras are up on the Tate Britain’s walls for the duration of the gallery’s blockbuster exhibition. Dividing Miller’s extraordinary career chronologically, it’s a time-travelling experience as well as a showcase of her technical and compositional skills. ‘Before the Camera’, shows her as a beautiful young model in NYC in 1926, the daughter of a keen amateur photographer. Walk through a dozen or so rooms and there she is, in Hitler’s bathtub, world-famous and hollowed out, returning to self-portraiture to capture a shattered continent in one image.   If the shimmery black-and-white portraits she took – from a playful Charlie...

‘Fun’ is a quality which seems to be all too frequently forgotten by curatorial teams. But it certainly takes pride of place at the Saatchi Gallery’s The Long Now, an expansive, nine- room retrospective which aims to both celebrate its past and reiterate its commitment to championing innovation in the present and future. The show is curated by Philippa Adams, who previously served as the gallery’s Senior Director for over 20 years, and is divided into spaces dedicated to key themes which have underpinned its exhibitions over the last four decades. Abstraction, landscapes, AI and technology, and climate change are all given their own rooms. They’re populated with works, old and new, by artists with whom the gallery shares a long-running history, as well as commissions from emerging artists.A reinvention of the wheel, conceptually speaking, it may not be, but it’s a bona fide feast for the eyes. Across two floors, each room has been curated and installed with care to ensure every piece in the room can shine - no space feels overstuffed. Adams has clearly given careful consideration to how the works will complement each other, both in terms of colour and scale, which enhances the viewing experience and makes you want to linger in every room. It’s a rarity that you find yourself at an exhibition where you genuinely don’t know where to look. However, starting from the very first room, dedicated to mark making and boasting Rannva Kunoy’s marvellous, luminescent,...

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...

You could say that Marie Antoinette was the original celebrity. The last Queen of France worked with personal stylists, had her barnet done by celebrity hairdressers, and set the agenda for the fashion of the day. She had her own personal brand – an elegant ‘MA’ monogram – which she plastered all over her jewellery, furniture, belongings, and even most intimate toiletries. Like many celebs today, the queen’s dodgy reputation, founded on obscene rumours of debauchery, promiscuity and gorging on cake, was created by tabloid sensationalism. So it’s only fitting that a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the style of the world’s most fashionable and infamous monarch should be just as fabulous, bold, sparkly and, at times, salacious. Featuring 250 objects, including loans from Versailles that have never been exhibited outside of France before now, Marie Antoinette Style takes visitors on a journey through the ill-fated queen’s forward-thinking wardrobe, dizzyingly elaborate jewellery, lavish interiors, huge hairstyles and enduring influence on fashion and art today. Alongside the myriad guffaw-inducing riches on display (a replica of the most expensive necklace ever made in France is particularly astonishing), mysteries surrounding the queen are confidently dispelled. Did she really say, ‘Let them eat cake’? (No.) Was the coupette glass actually modelled on her breast? (No, but a very realistic porcelain ‘breast bowl’ commissioned by Antoinette is on display.) What appears...

‘Nigerian Modernism’ celebrates the achievements of Nigerian artists working on either side of a decade of independence from British colonial rule in 1960. As well as traversing networks in the country’s locales of Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos and Enugu, it also looks further afield to London, Munich and Paris, exploring how artistic collectives fused Nigerian, African and European techniques and traditions in their multidimensional works.

The radical work of Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee – known for her fantastical and overtly sexual sculptures made from woven fibres – is at the centre of the upcoming RA exhibtion that spans a century of South Asian art. Telling the story of Indian Modernism, more than 100 works comprising sculpture, painting, drawing, textiles, ceramics and printmaking, from a constellation of avant-garde artists, many whom were Mukherjee’s mentors, friends and family, will be on display. 

Celebrating the centenary of one of Picasso’s most iconic artworks, The Three Dancers, this exhibition explores the Spanish artist’s fascination with performers – including dancers, bullfighters, musicians, acrobats and other entertainers – via more than 45 works ranging from paintings and sculpture to textile and works on paper, some of which are being exhibited in the UK for the first time. They’ll be exhibited in an appropriately theatrical environment too, courtesy of courtesy of contemporary artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang and author and curator Enrique Fuenteblanca, who will transform the Tate Modern’s exhibition rooms into a theatre space that will host a variety of dance and performance pieces throughout the exhibition, including an excerpt from Carmen presented by interdisciplinary arts collective Moved by the Motion, and a site-specific work by flamenco artist Yinka Esi Graves.  Picasso exhibitions might be ten a penny in London these days, but this one sounds like it might stand out.