Things to do in London today

This review is from 2019, when Timothy Sheader’s Open Air Theatre production transferred to the Barbican. In summer 2026 it will be restaged at the London Palladium with pop star Sam Ryder in the title role, Tyron Huntley as Judas Iscariot, and the role of King Herod shared by Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Jun 20–Jul 11), Simon Russell Beale (Jul 13-25), Richard Armitage (Jul 27-Aug 1), Boy George (Aug 3-15) and Layton Williams (Aug 17–29) and Julian Clary (Aug 31-Sep 5). Following a break it will transfer to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, with Ryder confirmed to stay on. First seen in 2016 at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, Timothy Sheader’s bombastic revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera arrives at the Barbican with superstar ratings, even if it’s lost some of its, well, superstar turns. It looks incredible: Tom Scutt’s set of rusty girders and a cross-shaped catwalk is moodily, then gloriously, lit by Lee Curran, especially a final, ascending beam of light behind the crucifixion. But the real touchstone is the show’s concert origins: characters swagger around the stage clutching microphones, or moon over acoustic guitars; later, electrical cords are the things they’re bound and hung by. But this staging also allows for rock-god excess, and it’s showered in gold and glitter. Herod is high-camp in a gold cape; Judas’s hands are dipped in silver for all to see, branded guilty by gilt.Drew McOnie’s edgy choreography turns the cast into a mob, whether united in juddering,...

The Truth opens with a classic farce set-up: a rumpled bed from which the rumpled head of Stephen Mangan's Michel emerges, looking roguishly pleased with itself, next to the equally rumpled but less satisfied head of Alice (Sarah Hadland) who is, we soon discover, Michel's best friend's wife. Over the course of 90 tightly-plotted minutes, it becomes enjoyably clear that neither Michel, Alice nor their cuckolded spouses Paul and Laurence, would know what the truth was if it came and bit them on the bottom.  There is plenty to laugh at and to like about Lindsay Posner's production, which was a hit in 2016 at the Menier Chocolate Factory and is now revived, with extra star power, for the West End. It's a concise evening of polished, satisfyingly light entertainment, with a strong cast, an early finish time, and fairly reasonable ticket prices. Mangan fans won't be disappointed, his performance is more than worth the entry fee. He is fantastically enjoyable as Michel, bringing irresistible hangdog charm and ageing himbo vibes to the character who believes he is successfully deceiving everyone around him. His epic tantrum on discovering that he is the more deceived is hilarious: utterly hypocritical, and heartfelt. Michel's arc is the driving force of the story and when Mangan commits to his outrage, it lifts the comedy to the next level and really makes it grip. A comic ensemble often finds a deeper groove during a show's run. On opening night, it stopped just short of being...

Sandra Oh makes a very decent UK stage debut as Alice, the misanthrope in question in Martin Crimp’s new adaptation of the classic Molière comedy. Avant-garde playwright and translator supreme Crimp has taken a few passes at The Misanthrope over the years, delivering versions in 1996, 2009, and now 2026. And it’s easy to see why. If the title character hates the modern world, then the modern world is always changing; there are always new things to get misanthropic about. A playwright in previous Crimp versions (and a jaded courtier in Molière), here Oh’s Alice is a revered novelist who grumpily shuns most of the fripperies of the modern world. ‘Misanthrope’ actually seems quite strong to describe Oh’s gruff but essentially likeable Alice, who is warm to her friends but whose interest in the bullshit that glues society together is close to zero.  As the play opens she’s berating her playwright BFF John (Paul Chahidi: bumbling, likeable) for having offered an enthusiastic greeting to a woman they passed on the stairs who it turns out he didn’t actually know; as the play progresses it becomes apparent that Alice’s dream is to live off grid and away from humanity with her troubled actor boyfriend Stefan (Tom Mison: fey, distracted). In a promising early development, Alice is approached by Esmee (Imogen Elliott: very funny), a posh girl feminist book influencer who insists on making Alice read the extremely bad first draft of her novel. Alice mercilessly dissects it, much to...

There is evidence to suggest that giving the hero of Edmond Rostan’s French classic a big prosthetic nose is increasingly considered passé. Certainly the last major London revival – a brooding, rap-battling affair directed by Jamie Lloyd – was a case in point. James McAvoy starred as Cyrano, the brilliant wordsmith with an obtrusively big schnozz. But he did it sans stuck-on snout – it worked by suggesting Cyrano’s inability to directly woo his love Roxane was down to a crippling case of low self-esteem, amounting to body dysmorphia.  Lloyd’s take was a modern-dress masterpiece. So when posters appeared of this RSC transfer – with Adrian Lester in period clobber and sporting a spectacularly fake conker – it looked kinda stuffy by comparison. But not a bit of it! Yes, co-adaptors Simon Evans (who also directs) and Debris Stevenson restore the work to 1640 France – a time when the country was stuck in the Thirty Years’ War – and yes, it comes with all the trimmings of that era (pocket swords! Mournful violin players!). It’s very much the romantic tragicomedy Rostand wrote, but despite its period setting, it feels wholly current.  Lester’s Cyrano appears as a man of swaggering confidence – a soldier as adept with a sword as with a quill. Though there’s no mistake his nose has held him back in life – it seems to prompt a Tourettes-like response from those who meet him – he takes it on the chin, keeping his insecurities stoically bottled up. Rarely does limerence sound as...

Although Sophie Swithinbank’s slippery thriller has nothing to do with that latter day lutenist, Sting and the Police would actually be a pretty apt name for her play. Starting as a kind of office odd couple comedy, Sting quickly brings in whispers of witchcraft, but then becomes a story of bent coppers in an inadequate justice system. Swirling all those elements together in her cauldron, Swithinbank creates a masterful, destabilising examination of domestic abuse that plays out like if A24 got their hands on an episode of Line of Duty.She sets out exactly what the play is going to be about right from the beginning: Adelle Leonce’s Ash arrives – maybe still drunk from a heavy night out – at her new job in an archive dedicated to women killed as witches. Her archivist boss Lily helpfully explains the signs that would have got women accused: death of livestock, sexual activity, death of infants, seizures; she tells us that she is appalled by the similarities between a justice system built on misogyny then, and its echoes now.And all of that is exactly what we get, especially when we meet Ash’s policeman partner Dom: a contemporary story of an abusive relationship, comparing now against then, and threaded through with those witchy signs and symbols. Like if A24 got their hands on an episode of Line of Duty. Adelle Leonce steals this with an unpindownable performance as Ash, full of oddness, her mood and intonation veering wildly from line to line, manic laughter one moment...

This latest entry in London’s unending stream of Midsummer Night’s Dreams has plenty of ideas. But does Atri Banerjee’s production have a single coherent central idea? If it does, I couldn’t see it. And not for the trees. Naomi Dawson’s set isn’t a bucolic forest but a sort of unadorned wooden copy of the steps on which the audience sits, which later opens up to reveal a dressing area with a marginally more foresty look. The quote ‘this green plot’ is ironically printed at the top. The minor fairies also hang out there: they are styled as a hippie-ish band who play the new agey ballads specially written for this production by rising theatre polymath Maimuna Memon. Add to this a fairly standard quartet of runaway lovers, a largely timid group of Mechanicals dominated – for better or worse – by Nadeem Islam’s cacophonously exuberant Bottom, and the main fairies, who leave little impression beyond Oliver Huband’s adorably hangdog Oberon, who seems to be dressed for a night of disco dancing.  There are so many concepts flitting around that it can be hard to focus on what’s actually going on. The design recalls Jamie Lloyd’s MDF period, but Lloyd really committed to the bit in his stark, pared-back productions. Banerjee has disco fairy kings and songs that get in the way of all that: at one point it takes Jenny Rainford’s Titania about five minutes to go to sleep because there’s an entire number about it. It’s just a bit disjointed, and less of a laugh than it should be....

See our review of Sinara the Musical HERE. This glossy Frank Sinatra bio-musical may have had its original try out run in Birmingham last year, but Sinatra the Musical follows the increasingly common path of a big new American show working its kinks through in the more forgiving UK before chancing Broadway. Directed and choregraphed by Broadway big name Kathleen Marshall, and with a book by Broadway big name Joe DiPietro (best known for the smash hit Memphis), it of course concerns arguably the most iconic American singer of the twentieth century: Ol’ Blue Eyes himself. As is the way with a lot of modern bio-musicals (Tina, MJ) it shows Sinatra not at a moment of triumph, but vulnerability and adversity. It’s set in 1942, and follows a 27-year-old Frank as his career seems to be on the rocks. Having left the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra where he made his name, his initial solo releases have flopped and his affair with rising Hollywood starlet Ava Gardner has tarnished his name. But a New Year’s Eve gig at the Paramount Theatre in New York is an opportunity to not only make a comeback, but to turn himself into the biggest name in showbiz. Joel Harper-Jackson will play Frank Sinatra, with Ana Villafañe as Ava Gardner and Phoebe Panaretos as Nancy Sinatra (Frank’s first wife).  Despite being set years before Sinatra’s biggest hits occurred, you can rest assured that they’re basically all included.

At first glance, Ben Ockrent’s family drama Relics has it all. There’s the starry cast (Sally Phillips! Charly Clive!), and big name director Michael Longhurst. Even Joanna Scotcher’s richly layered set, slowly revealed as a screen lifts to show off the deep wood panels and sentimental knick knacks of a beloved home where secrets lie, offers a sense of intricately selected prestige. Yet before the action even kicks off, a more accurate indicator of what’s to come sits in plain sight. Said screen is embellished with giant pieces of packing tape, bearing the not-so-delicate message: ‘FRAGILE’. You see, for a play about four adult siblings coming together to divvy up their late mother’s possessions beneath a cloud of grief (which later attempts to reckon with huge philosophical ideas around profiting from evil of the past), Relics is remarkably low on subtlety. At times, the show is pure farce. There are Mr Bean-esque physical comedy set pieces, and some of them, particularly early in the play, are tightly choreographed and slick. But as the bigger ideas are introduced, a tonal mishmash emerges that leaves the cast struggling to mine comedy or tragedy successfully. The former becomes sloppy, and those loudly proclaimed deeper moments fail to find the nuance clearly being aimed for. To their credit, the cast of four try their best with the material. You can feel the effort being put in from all four leads. Yet from their movements to their clothes, the siblings are broad...

The last few years have seen some of the most celebrated theatrical blockbusters of the ’00s return to our stages with a whimper. That’s not to say that recent revivals of the likes of Art, God of Carnage or Copenhagen were bad – but they did not become raved-about, years-running theatrical phenomena a second time. Current productions of The Producers and Avenue Q are doing well enough in the West End, but neither embodies the zeitgeist the way they did 20 or so years ago. So here’s the National Theatre bringing back 2007’s blockbuster War Horse, a show that closed on the West End in 2016 but has lived on via endless tours and a Stephen Spielberg-directed screen adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s source text. Surely its moment in the spotlight was a combination of the novelty of its many, many puppets and Britain’s endless obsession with the First World War? Surely it’s dated? Actually it turns out War Horse is still incredible.  Number one, the puppets are astonishing. Made by the South African company Handspring, it’s not just that individual puppets are good, but that there are so damn many of them, from horses to birds to a tank. Their warm wooden frames look wonderful, and the standard of the puppetry and puppet direction (originally by Handspring’s Adrian Kohler, now by Matthew Forbes) is second to none. On this watch I was quietly blown away by a scene in which main horse Joey was just munching away on a nosebag in the background while the human characters were having...

This review is from 2022 and the original, Ralph Spall-starring London run for Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation. The production returns in 2026 with a new cast headed by Richard Coyle as Atticus Finch. Meet Atticus Finch: centrist dad. Aaron Sorkin’s smash Broadway stage version of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ makes a fair few tweaks to Harper Lee’s 1960 literary masterpiece.  Most predictably, there’s the ‘West Wing’ mastermind’s trademark sparkling dialogue. Yes, he remains faithful to the idea that we’re in ’30s Alabama, but his polished wit is very much present and correct, most especially in the goofily pinging three-way narration provided by his child characters: plucky Scout (Gwyneth Keyworth), chippy Jem (Harry Redding) and dorky Dill (David Moorst). The narrative structure has been tinkered with: the climactic trial scene is now parcelled up into chunks throughout the play rather than included as a single sweeping sequence.  The plot, however, is essentially unchanged. By far Sorkin’s most significant intervention via Bartlett Sher’s production is to pointedly reimagine the play’s white lawyer hero Atticus Finch. Rafe Spall’s interpretation of the role steers well clear of Gregory Peck’s immortal screen version and, to a large extent, the book. Peck’s Finch was famously sonorous-voiced and saintly. In both book and film, Finch was explicitly seen through the adoring eyes of his daughter Scout. Here, with his chipmunk Alabama twang, Spall simply *sounds* less like a wise...

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). ‘Ball Watching’ hangs by the door, next to the entrance. Painted at art school, it captures a moment in Anderson’s youth living in Birmingham, the city in which he was born and raised after his parents emigrated from Jamaica. He and his friends would play football in Handsworth Park, often kicking the football into the lake – here, as the title suggests, they stand watching it. Compared with the sun-bleached, paint-dripped, tree-filled tropicana that fill the later rooms, the palette is darker, the figures less defined, the sky, rendered in broad brushstrokes, feels as though a foaming sponge has been dragged across a car windscreen. The paintings do something similar for the viewer as they do for Anderson: they hold you between places What it establishes, however, is what has kept Hurvin Anderson returning to the studio for three decades: the urge to paint his experience as a Black man of Caribbean heritage, born and raised in the UK. That sense of inbetweenness – belonging to two places, either side of the Atlantic – plays out through...

For Brits of a certain age, James McNeill Whistler will always conjure memories of that scene in the Mr Bean film. But while Rowan Atkinson’s 1997 opus was a memorable introduction to the American Gilded Age painter, Tate Britain’s grand new retrospective will properly acquaint you with his work – minus any snot-related hijinks – through his paintings, prints, and a litany of personal effects.  Using decoration from his Chelsea studio, the opening room establishes Whistler as a bohemian and fashionable man, but the contextual statement also foreshadows his fall from social grace later in his career (thanks to a lawsuit that left him penniless – more on that later). Thus, a unique, non-linear curatorial narrative is introduced. After arriving from New England in Paris in 1855, Whistler prolifically produced moody etchings that express the stoic dinginess of the French capital with dense and dynamic shadows. His first attempts at oil painting also happened here. The medium became an even bigger preoccupation when he moved to an equally morose city: London. Whether it’s choked by smog or cluttered with cargo, the Thames is his muse during his early years in the Big Smoke. The chaotic figuration of ships floating past in Wapping and the spectral abstraction of a frozen river in Chelsea in Ice represent two extremes of how Whistler turns urban ugliness into visual harmony. Conducting tone, colour, and blankness with orchestral balance, he’s acutely aware of the musicality...

A stroll through Tracey Emin: A Second Life is an evocative experience. Positioned as a 40-year retrospective through the pioneering artist’s vast and varied repertoire, the show lays bare Emin’s life through her distinct and often unsettling art, from career highs – such as the iconic, Turner Prize-nominated ‘My Bed’, which is every bit as shocking and moving today as it was in 1998 – to stark personal lows in work depicting her experiences with sexual violence, abortion and recent life-threatening illness. As you can imagine, with such subject matter, it is not always a comfortable experience for the artist and the viewer alike. However, Emin’s flair for dark comedy adds moments of levity throughout. The second room of the exhibition features a large-scale projection of a work on video entitled ‘Why I Never Became A Dancer’. It begins with the artist recalling an incident in her youth when she entered a local dance competition only to run off stage mid-performance when a group of men with whom she’d previously had sexual encounters chanted ‘slag’ at her until she could no longer even hear the music. The film ends with a sequence of Emin dancing, totally uninhibited, to the disco classic ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ by Sylvester, and the work is dedicated to each of her aggressors, calling them out by name. It is the perfect encapsulation of both Emin’s defiant approach to life and her ability to turn traumatic experiences into mesmerising art. Longform video is an...

This renowned annual photography exhibition returns to the Natural History Museum for its 61st edition, showcasing the very best entries of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. On display are images of the most extraordinary species on the planet captured by professional and amateur photographers. This year’s entries are TBA right now, but the winners are reliably spectacular – pictured is last year’s champion Shane Gross, whose mesmirising underwater shot of western toad tadpoles involved snorkelled for hours in a lake on Vancouver Island, making sure not to disturb fine layers of silt and algae at the bottom. Don’t miss what is always a highlight in the NHM’s calendar.

If you find a London greengrocer selling lemons and oranges as plump, waxy, and gorgeous as the ones in Francisco de Zurbarán’s still lifes on view at the National Gallery, do let me know. The Baroque master trained as a painter in Seville, the land of citrus, so he was well placed to get his eye in, but even so, this first UK exhibition makes a persuasive case that Zurbarán’s brush turned them into something approaching the divine. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he painted so few of them; only 10 still lifes are known today, and most of the examples in this exhibition are attributed to his son Juan.  Maybe he simply didn’t have the time. It was the beginning of the 17th century; gold was flowing into Seville from the Americas, the Catholic revival was in full swing, and Seville’s religious orders were trying to outdo one another with ever grander, more extravagantly decorated churches. Zurbarán’s earliest dated work, The Crucifixion (1627), promptly sent him shooting up the Baroque algorithm, and commissions soon came flooding in. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble The Spanish artist and writer Antonio Palomino once wrote that ‘everyone who sees it, and does not know it, believes it to be a sculpture.’ It’s the first painting you encounter in the exhibition, and 399 years on, you understand what Palomino meant. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble against the pitch-black background, while the white cloth around his waist...

The chances are, at some point, you have probably come across a print by Collier Campbell, the London-based textile studio founded in the 1960s by Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell. For 50 years, the sister design duo created bold, colourful, and brash hand-painted textile prints featuring everything from vivid still lifes to tropical scenes, pretty flowers, and folk figures. They collaborated with the likes of Terrance Conran, John Lewis, Marks and Spencer, and fashion houses Yves Saint Laurent, Jaeger and Liberty. They designed the carpet in the North Terminal at Gatwick Airport. To celebrate the work of these legendary British textile designers, the Fashion and Textile Museum has staged a small but dense exhibition dedicated to the printmaking sisters. Spanning the 60s to the present day, Paint! Pattern! Print! documents the exuberant creations of Sarah and Susan, from their early works, to employment at Liberty, to the forming of their own company. Original paintings of prints and fabric swatches are displayed alongside clothes, homeware and artefacts that inspired the designers, like a dainty Victorian blouse with incredible striped ribbon details.  If you’re someone who has mastered the art of dopamine dressing, this will be right up your alley Many of the fabrics look like the kind of thing your eccentric, arty auntie would wear. And I mean that as a compliment. These are not your grandmother's curtains, but textiles that deserve to be as well known as the William...

The Wellcome Collection’s big spring exhibition is a deep dive into perceptions of ageing. Expect the Euston Road institution’s typical blend of art, science and pop culture in the 120+ artworks and objects on display, which range from16th century woodcuts made by German printmaker Sebald Beham to Deborah Roberts’ contemporary collages exploring Black childhood. There’ll also be a spotlight on the Wellcome Trust-funded health research project Age of Wonder – one of the largest studies of adoloscence in the world – and an exploration of how societies can adapt to improve everyone’s experience of ageing.

Three emerging US artists – Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison and Jasmine Gregory – explore ideas of class, inheritance and assumed values, framed by their experiences of coming of age in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Through different mediums – moving image, photography and painting and assemblage – each artist examines what it means to enter adulthood in an era of financial collapse, incorporating themes of wealth inequity, art as an asset class, and what commodity culture looks like today.   

Donald Locke shows don’t come around often. But like proverbial buses, you wait for ages, and then three arrive at once, in the form of this touring exhibition moving from Birmingham to Bristol and now Camden Art Centre in London.  It’s not the first time the late Guyanese-British artist has shown here, though you’d be forgiven for missing it. Back in 1970, Locke exhibited ceramics under the pseudonym Issorosano Ite. He arrived in the UK from Guyana in his mid-twenties to study ceramics in Bath and Edinburgh, even though painting was his initial obsession. ‘With the arrogance of youth, I was going to be the greatest painter in the world,’ he said of his early ambition. Well, he did both, yet what he made doesn’t sit neatly within a single camp. Rather, his practices – spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics – would morph into one another. While the forms may appear a little abstract, the thinking behind them is not Take ‘Trophies of Empire’ (1972–74), one of his most iconic works and included in Resistant Forms. An open cabinet of 27 pigeonholes houses dark, cylindrical ceramic forms (bullets, we come to understand) cradled within trophy cups, spurs, and leather cuffs, sourced by Locke from Portobello Market. It’s not the last you’ll see of them. Look at the large, wild, black paintings next door, made a decade or two later while he was living in Phoenix and Atlanta. You’ll spot Queen Victoria, the Warhol-like revolver—now look again: those ‘trophies’ reappear...

Portraits are tricky things: can you ever really sift the individual from the image? And it gets even harder when the subject is one of the most recognisable faces of all time – a woman who was seemingly born to appear on camera. Since she died in 1962 – aged just 36, and already perhaps the most famous person on the planet – Marilyn Monroe has transcended mere stardom to become an icon: the image of glamour, sex, tragedy and celebrity itself. Marking what would have been her 100th birthday, the National Portrait Gallery grapples with that iconic status in a show that’s both beautiful and troubling. ‘Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait’ sets out its stall early, emphasising Monroe’s agency in shaping her image: not an artist’s muse, but an active collaborator. Exploited by Hollywood, coerced and abused by her husbands, at least Monroe could claw back some control over the way she was portrayed. She spent hours poring over contact sheets, and forbade some images from being published. (In one photo here, an out-take print from her very last photoshoot, the actor has scratched out her face with a hairpin.) Marilyn Monroe has transcended mere stardom to become an icon: the image of glamour, sex, tragedy and celebrity itself Deliberately light on biography, the show goes big on the star’s work with individual photographers: big names like Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Henri Cartier-Bresson, but also friends (Milton H Greene, Eve Arnold), lovers (André de Dienes) and collaborators...