Things to do in London today

Popping up each summer on the steps where the Regent’s Canal passes Granary Square, Everyman’s Screen on the Canal is one of the city’s best loved outdoor cinemas, thanks to its atmospheric setting, eclectic programming and the fact that it doesn’t cost viewers a penny. And this year’s pop-up will be looking more Instagrammable han ever before, thanks to designer and architect Yinka Ilori, who has created an eye-popping screen design echoing ‘the fantastical landscapes’ explored in Disney movies. Pop down on a sunny afternoon to catch live coverage from Wimbledon every day of the tournament, plus the usual mix of live sports, classic movies, family-friendly flicks and recent hits including Breakfast at Tiffany's, Grease, Parent Trap, Top Gun: Maverick, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Encanto. Best enjoyed with a couple of tinned cocktails and some picky bits from the nearby Waitrose, or classic cinema snacks from Everyman’s on-site bar.  Check out the full film schedule here.

The seemingly unstoppable David Attenborough has achieved more since hitting retirement age than most of us - let’s be honest, all of us - will achieve in our entire lifetimes. This new immersive film is his second major project since turning 99 in May, following his more traditional documentary Ocean. Produced by Open Planet Studios, Our Story sees the Jerwood Gallery at the Natural History Museum transformed into a smaller version of the Lightroom in King’s Cross (a sort of projection-based theatre). While ‘immersive’ is a word exhausted by overuse, ‘immersive documentary’ is emerging as a fairly distinct genre with clear hallmarks. As with the Lightroom’s shows, Our Story is based around powerful digital projectors beaming the film onto the four walls of the space, wrapping around the surfaces so there are different images whichever direction you look. You are indeed immersed. It’s still a narrative documentary film, in which Sir David tells us the story of the planet from fiery, lifeless rock to the advent of mankind to a possible future. Attenborough narrates, and appears at the start and end. There’s a fair smattering of expectedly dazzling wildlife footage. But Our Story isn’t really a nature doc in the style of Attenborough’s most famous works, and rather than painstakingly captured original footage of animals, it uses pre-existing stuff plus heavy use of CGI to supplement its storytelling. Occasionally this feels like a minor letdown: though they’re not trying to...

Edinburgh isn't the only place with a bursting, brilliant fringe, and indeed as the Scottish capital’s iconic annual event becomes ever more expensive, the once scrappy outsider Camden Fringe looks ever more like a serious alternative for the London-based. Returning for its nineteeth edition, it’s smaller than Edinburgh by a long shot, but still boasts hundreds of events all over Camden, taking in everything from the expected stand-up sets and experimental theatre to kids’ shows, dance, and even magic. Runs tend to be for a night or two rather than the entire month, and prices are bargain basement by London standards: many shows are less than a tenner, none are much more than that. Check out their website for all the details on the programme, as there’s far too much to gather here.

This King’s Cross Lightroom now has surely the weirdest repertoire of any venue in London, possibly the world. With an oeuvre based around massive megabit projection-based immersive films, its shows so far have been a David Hockney exhibition, a Tom Hanks-narrated film about the moon landings, a Vogue documentary and a visualiser for Coldplay’s upcoming album. It’s such a random collection of concepts that it’s hard to say there was or is anything ‘missing’ from the extremely esoteric selection of bases covered. But certainly, as the school summer holidays roll around it’s very welcome to see it add an overtly child-friendly show to its roster. Bar a short Coldplay break, Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs will play daily at Lightroom from now until at least the end of October half-term. It is, as you would imagine, a dinosaur documentary. And indeed, if the name rings a specific bell it’s because it’s culled from the David Attenborough-narrated Apple TV series of the same name. It’s quite the remix, though: Attenborough is out, and Damian Lewis is in, delivering a slightly melodramatic voiceover that lacks Sir David’s colossal gravitas but is, nonetheless, absolutely fine. Presumably Attenborough is absent because he’s very busy and very old, because while the film reuses several of the more spectacular setpieces from the TV series, it’s sufficiently different that repurposing the old narration would be a stretch. Any child with any degree of fondness for the...

‘Weather schmeather’ say the people behind Rooftop Film Club. Stratford and Peckham’s rooftop cinema institutions are firing up the projectors early this year – Peckham’s Bussey Building screen opens on April 10, and Roof East in Stratford from April 17 – and they’re employing a secret weapon against a bit of chilly night air this spring: snuggle power. Two-person ‘fireside loveseats’ come with a personal wood-fired heater and hot beverage (regular, snuggle-free seating is available). On the programme are recent hits like Wicked, Nosferatu, Anora and Moana 2, as well as evergreen classics (La La Land, Notting Hill, 10 Things I Hate About You, When Harry Met Sally…), and a Friends watch party. Tickets come in at £18 for adults and £8 for children, and there’s a 20 percent discount if you book before the end of March.

Helping replace Canary Wharf’s corporate image with something fun and family-friendly, Canada Square Park will be screening movies and sporting events up on its big screens this summer. There’s a packed programme of free movies, taking in everything from ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ (June 15), to ‘Invictus’ (September 23). There are two Bollywood movies on the bill, too – sci-fi action thriller ‘Ra.One’ (July 15) and life-affirming vacation film ‘Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’ (August 3). It’s very much a BYO set-up, so bring your own blankets and snacks – though there’s a Waitrose nearby for any last-minute picnic needs.

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...

Location in the walled gardens of Hertfordshire’s The Grove hotel, Everyman’s pop-up is a special occasion option – because you’ll need to splash out for a room for the night or dinner in one of the hotel restaurants to experience it. Still, if you're up for a luxe take on the al fresco cinema thing, then give it a whirl: a crowdpleasing line-up of movies spans Dirty Dancing, Pitch Perfect, When Harry Met Sally, and quite a few kids faves including Minions and Paddington in Peru. The beanbags and headphones are all top of the range. 

It’s up to every primary school parent to wrestle with their own conscience as to whether it’s appropriate to take their dinosaur-loving child to Jurassic World: Rebirth (rating 12A) this summer. But regardless of how much a wuss your kid is, a new installment in the franchise inevitably means a glut of family-friendly mesozoic-related shows. London is full of them this summer holidays, and foremost is the ‘official’ show Jurassic World: The Experience, which was last seen here three years ago at ExCel London (then called Jurassic World: The Exhibition), the last time a Jurassic World film came out.  God help me, I also saw it the last time around, and can report that the only significant change is the location: it’s now staged at NEON, a new venue just outside Battersea Power Station that will apparently be dedicated to similar immersive events. I don’t have a lot to say about NEON – it’s basically a big box – but the Power Station redevelopment is quite a fun place to take little ones to after the show, which is pretty brief.  It’s all good clean cretaceous fun The premise is the same as before. The experience is roughly 45 minutes long and begins with us boarding a ‘ferry’ to get out to Isla Nublar, home to Jurassic World. A handful of impressively gigantic animatronic herbivores greet us, along with some fun interactive bits, and then it’s on to the incubation lab where we can pet a ‘baby dinosaur’ (a puppet) and muck around with more displays. Next up we witness...

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Cocktails in the City, a pop-up festival unfolding over two weekends (July 10–12 and August 7–9). Every summer, cocktail-loving Londoners flock to Bloomsbury’s Bedford Square Gardens, which are taken over some of the city's very best bars, mixologists, and booze brands. Enjoy a complimentary welcome drink on arrival, then start exploring creative concoctions from a star-studded roster of top mixologists. Experimental Cocktail Club, Vesper Bar, Archive & Myth, and Viajante87 are just a handful of the celebrated London bars on the line-up, while guests will also be able to check out live music, street food, ice carvings, and masterclasses within the picturesque private gardens. 

  Having premiered at the Old Vic in 2017 – and gone on to conquer the West End and Broadway – Girl From the North Country has lost none of its potency as it returns to the theatre where it all began — a dreamy, sepia-soaked production of character-driven vignettes and reimagined Bob Dylan songs. It’s 1934 in Duluth, Minnesota – Dylan’s actual birthplace – and the Great Depression is chewing through the soul of the town. At the centre of this dustbowl drama is the Laine family, struggling to keep their guesthouse (and each other) from crumbling under debt, loss, and the weight of time. Nick Laine (Colin Connor) is a man burdened by a bubbling anger — the same kind that seems to course through the town — while his wife Elizabeth (Katie Brayben) floats between madness and sudden, unnerving clarity. Their adopted Black daughter Marianne (Justina Kehinde) is pregnant, unmarried, and navigating her place within the world. Their house is a revolving door of boarders: hustlers, dreamers, a smooth-talking preacher, and a boxer down on his luck (think 1930s sitcom). The 23-strong company moves fluidly between character, chorus, and live band. Simon Hale’s arrangements of 20 Dylan songs float in the spaces between joy and hardship. Stripped-back renditions of ‘Forever Young’ and ‘I Want You’ drift through wood-panelled walls and empty whisky bottles. Some numbers are so radically reimagined you’ll barely recognise them — like Brayben’s raw, ragged and impossibly controlled version...

In terms of pure column inches, the balcony scene from Jamie Lloyd’s Evita is surely the biggest news to come out of the theatre world in years. Hacks the planet over have been entranced by the potent cocktail of star Rachel Zegler’s fame and the sheer ballsiness of Lloyd having her sing ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ for free to the good people of Argyll Street at 9pm each night from the London Palladium balcony.  There has also been a fantastic amount of bollocks written about the sequence, both by journalists and on social media. First, a tranche of articles suggesting ticket holders were furious that Zegler wasn’t singing the song to them in the theatre. Second, well-meaning social media types decreeing Lloyd had intended it as some sort of earnest way to big up Argentine First Lady Eva Perón’s woman-of-the-people status.  The second party was not entirely wrong, but the scene – which is, to be clear, astonishingly good – can only really be contextually appreciated if you’ve seen the one before it, which very much takes place in the theatre. The first half of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s classic musical ends to the disorientating, super-amplified strains of ‘A New Argentina’. In it, Zegler’s Eva – a malevolent brunette hood rat in skimpy black leather with a howling, heavy metal delivery – eggs on her fascist beefcake husband Juan Perón (James Olivas) to take the Argentine presidency by any means necessary.  It’s remarkable that the Hollywood star has deigned to...

Secret Cinema are back! It’s been three years since the immersive London legends had a show on in the capital – with 2022’s Guardians of the Galaxy – but we’re promised we’ll get a production a year for the next three summers as they set up shop in their new temporary home of Battersea Park. The company’s trajectory has essentially seen it go from atmospheric screenings of vintage movies to monolithic articulations of massive blockbusters, in which audiences spend hours in an immersive theatre experience themed around the movie before actually watching it (this last bit was even optional in Guardians of the Galaxy).  Grease: The Immersive Movie Experience sounds like it’s going for something slightly different, being a two-and-a-half-hour show in which the film will play around you as you move through the show’s environment. Truly it’s hard to get one’s head around it without seeing it, but it basically sounds like the film and the tehatre elements will be fully integrated rather than a case of first one, then other. Grease is, of course, the immortal 1978 film musical starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John as star cross’d teens Danny and Sandy, who meet cute at high school in a pastiche of ’50s America. As ever you’re encouraged to dress up as an extra from the film. And if you worry you’re too young to pass as a pupil at Rydell High then don’t worry – that didn’t stop the film’s casting director.

Nicholas Hytner’s exuberant 2019 take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream was simply too much fun to leave to the history books: what a joy it is to have it back. To bring you up to speed, it’s a show in the same lineage as the Bridge’s recent Guys and Dolls: designed by Bunnie Christie, half the audience sit in the round, while the other half stand on the floor where the fairy-filled action of Shakespeare’s comedy unfurls on mobile platforms that rise and fall around them (I stood, only cowards sit).  It is joyously queer: pretty much everyone in it gets a crack at snogging everybody else. And Hytner’s key textual intervention is swapping the bulk of fairy monarchs Oberon and Titania’s lines, meaning that it’s JJ Feild’s Oberon – not Susannah Fielding’s Titania – who has it off with Emmanuel Akwafo’s exuberant Bottom. Has much changed since last time? It doesn’t feel vastly different conceptually, though new leads Feild and Fielding put a different spin on what are very explicitly the lead roles. As is tradition they also play the characters of Theseus and Hippolyta in the bookending Athens-set sections, but there is the strong suggestion that they in fact play the same characters throughout.  Feild is harder edged and more menacing than his predecessor Oliver Chris in the Athens sections; when playing Oberon there’s a softness and vulnerability there. It’s a performance sympathetic to the production’s suggestion that the bulk of the play is Theseus’s dream, in which his cruel...

Packed your fascinator? Rehearsed your most attractive crying face? Well, good; over in Mansfield – by way of the Theatre Royal Haymarket – the wedding of the year is about to take place. Local girl Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) is marrying Polish lad Marek (Julian Kostov), and the audience, some of whom are sat directly on the stage, are all invited.  The ceremony plays out in real time at Beth Steel’s Till The Stars Come Down, now running in the West End after debuting at the National Theatre early last year. Director Bijan Sheibani sucks you right into this world through fast-paced dialogue and artfully constructed tableaus. It is heady, hilarious and emotional; the wedding itself might be a car crash, but this imaginative production is anything but. As the lights come up on Samal Blak’s set, little of the grandeur associated with getting hitched is visible. There’s a huge disco ball hanging overhead, whizzing fragmented stars across the theatre, but this romantic image dissipates when it comes face to face with  the realities of the working class family wedding: the electric fan, the TK Maxx shopper, the extension cord. Here, the sublime and the mundane exist in constant opposition; some characters dream aloud about the enormity of space and the universe, while others discuss their greying pubes. Matthews’s Sylvia, our scratchy voiced bride, is getting ready for her big day. Buzzing with nervous energy, she is something of a supporting figure to her conversation-dominating...

This new play by American writer Doug Wright comes to the Barbican from Broadway heralded by a 2023 Tony Award for star Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) and is about someone you’ve likely never heard of. Oscar Levant was a pianist – best known for playing George Gershwin’s music – and a humourist, who popped up in a handful of films including An American in Paris.  This play re-imagines the events surrounding his chaotic appearance as a guest on The Tonight Show in 1958. He arrives at the NBC studio, whose boss is already jittery because of Levant’s erratic past behaviour, from a mental institution. His wife, June (Rosalie Craig), has secured a release under false pretences. Talk-show host Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport) wants to capitalise on his penchant for making controversial jokes live on air. His accompanying nurse, Alvin (Daniel Adeosun), is trying to stop him from popping pills. And Levant himself is hallucinating Gershwin.   Focused so tightly on the early days of American TV, this could potentially sound niche for a British audience. But in Wright’s assured hands, the collision of Levant’s private and public life down the barrel of a camera lens becomes a play about the beginning of so many things we now recognise as staples of celebrity culture. He’s famous for all the reasons he doesn’t want to be – as a performer of someone else’s music rather than a composer. He’s wheeled onto chat shows for controversy by people for whom his mental health is something to be exploited....

Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi recently wrote an article for a major British newspaper in which he waxed effusively about how his Broadway smash had been inspired by the band Led Zeppelin. I wonder if his lawyer was holding a gun to his head as he wrote it, because while the Zep may have been a tertiary influence, Stereophonic is very very very very very very very clearly about Fleetwood Mac. There are Fleetwood Mac fan conventions less about Fleetwood Mac. Hell, there are incarnations of Fleetwood Mac that have been less about Fleetwood Mac.  Specifically, it’s a lightly fictionalised account of the recording of the Anglo-American band’s mega-selling Rumours album, and while not every detail is the same, many are identical, from the cities it was recorded in (Sausalito then LA) to the gender, nationality and internal-relationship makeup of the band, to details like female members ‘Holly’ (aka Christine McVie) and ‘Diana’ (aka Stevie Nicks) moving out out the studio accommodation they were sharing with the band’s menfolk in favour of their own condominiums.  Which l hasten to say is all to the good, even if it frequently feels like a miracle that Stereophonic has stormed Broadway – becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time – without being derailed by legal issues (though there is a lawsuit against it from Rumours producer Ken Caillet, who has accused Adjmi of ripping off his memoir).  Of course, it is a great subject for a play. The story of how erstwhile...

The time is once again Nye, as Michael Sheen returns to the National Theatre to reprise firebrand politician and NHS founder, Aneurin Bevan, in Tim Price’s play, after Rufus Norris’s production originally debuted last year. The state of the country’s health and that of Nye himself are intwined from the start, as we open on a huge chest x-ray projected onto hospital-green curtains behind the bed-ridden deputy leader of the Labour Party. It’s July 1960. His anxious wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small) and childhood friend Archie Lush (Jason Hughes) are by his side and his doctor is concerned. We’re here, it’s increasingly clear, for the end of his life. Plunging us into Nye’s unconscious, Price gives us a dream-like portrait of his life, as Nye recalls its events in neuron-like bursts. There are parallels between the coal miner-turned-politician challenging schoolroom bullying in Tredegar, his working-class Welsh hometown, in the early 1900s, to upsetting the members’ club snobbery of Parliament as a new MP. Paule Constable’s ever-shifting lighting design melds beautifully with Steven Hoggett and Jess Williams playful choreography, snatching feather-light moments of humour from the darkness. The playful and somnambulant tone of Norris’s production perfectly suits the portrait of a man whose sometimes bulldozing lack of subtlety was one of his defining traits. Sheen is predictably great at combining Nye’s burning sense of belief in welfare for all and his irascibility within a...

Michael Shannon interview: ‘I think TV is garbage – I certainly don’t watch it’. It’s a trap, almost, to think of Eugene O’Neill’s final play A Moon for the Misbegotten as a sequel to his miserable masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Sure, they share the character of Jim Tyrone, a dissolute young actor in Long Day’s Journey and a dissolute older actor here. But you go in expecting despair and instead find something that’s more like an episode of Steptoe and Son.Maybe that’s down to director Rebecca Frecknall – now a master of whipping the lesser-revived plays of the American canon into shape – putting space between this and the old workhorse of Long Day’s Journey (which we’ve seen three times in London in the last 13 years): not the faded grandeur of a seaside home here, but a wooden yard full of splintered timbers pointing into the sky, messy and dusty.The production itself, though, is anything but dusty. From the first moment, every line is a punch or a jab or a dagger. Peter Corboy and Ruth Wilson as siblings Mike and Josie burst onto the stage and whack each other with dialogue, and their fists. Fed up with his dad Phil’s drunkenness and slave-driving on their rock-infested farm, Mike is leaving. All that’s left to Phil is daughter Josie, whose sleeping around has made her ‘the scandal of the neighbourhood’, and their landlord Jim Tyrone who may or may not sell the farm to them and who may or may not be in love with Josie.David Threlfall is a hoot as Phil,...

See our Inter Alia review here.  The last Lyttelton theatre show to be programmed by Rufus Norris prior to his departure looks like a good one: following the Jodie Comer-fuelled West End smash Prima Facie, writer Susie Miller and director Justin Martin join forces with a new star for for follow-up Inter Alia. Rosamund Pike has had a good few years with screen hits Saltburn and The Wheel of Time, and now she makes her National Theatre debut to star as Jessica Parks, a maverick high court judge who precariously balances her work and her home life. We don’t know a lot more about the Miriam Buether-designed show just yet, but the fact Pike will be joined by actors Jamie Glover and Jasper Talbot points to the fact that this won’t be a monologue in the vein of Miller’s last.

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.   

Reflecting on themes of memory, migration and the home, South Korean conceptual artist Do Ho Suh is internationally renowned for his vast fabric sculptures and meticulous architectural installations. This year, he’s finally presenting a major exhibition at Tate Modern, in the city he currently lives, showcasing three decades of his work including brand-new, site-specific pieces.  The exhibition begins with Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–2022), a full-scale rendering of Suh’s childhood hanok house in Korea, made of delicate off-white paper. Created through traditional rubbing techniques, the imprint of every surface, from the walls, floors, and fixtures, is captured in the material. This isn’t simply a house – it’s a lived experience, transposed onto graphite and fibre. The structure feels both solid and spectral, as if memory itself had drifted into the gallery and taken form.  As the exhibition progresses, Suh leans further into his exploration of the spaces we carry within us. In Nest/s (2025), visitors walk through a corridor of interconnected translucent ‘rooms’ in vivid colours, where every detail, from light switches to radiators, is precisely rendered. Suh allows the viewer to activate the work through their movement, transforming it into a shifting, porous membrane. This structure leads to Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), a life-size outline of Suh’s current home in the UK, filled with domestic fixtures from the...

A career-spanning exhibition of video and animation artist Ed Atkins, in which visitors will be able to explore paintings, writing, embroideries and drawings, alongside the acclaimed artist’s moving image works.

Regarded as one of the UK’s most influential contemporary artists, this new exhibition at Tate Britain surveys Ed Atkins’ career to date, showcasing 15 years of work spanning computer-generated videos, animations, sculpture, installation, sound, painting and drawing. At the heart of it is a series of 700 drawings on Post-It notes, each delicately stuck in place by its adhesive strip, arranged and framed in grids. The intimate sketches – sometimes in coloured biro, sometimes in graphite – range from messages of devotion (‘I love you x’) to surreal images, like a bird’s claw clutching a log, a giant match struck between two terrified faces and a human mouth revealing a sharp canine tooth. Created for his daughter during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, Atkins describes the on-going Post-It drawings as ‘the best things I’ve ever made’, and you can sense the deep affection and care that went into making them. These heart-warming works serve as emotional anchors, showing the deeply personal yet universal concerns that underlie Atkins’ broader exploration of technology and identity.  Throughout the exhibition, Atkins’ voice is unmistakable. He even writes the wall labels in the first person. In many of his video works, Atkins is represented by digital avatars in life-like renders, as visitors are guided through a landscape of CGI projections, installations of moving bed sheets, corridors of period costumes hanging on clothing racks and a muted 24-hour television broadcast of Sky...

Born in London in 1905, the British artist Edward Burra suffered from acute rheumatoid arthritis and pernicious anemia from a young age. He travelled regularly, with a special fondness for Paris and New York. In photographs, though, he appears dour, studious and sickly. Most of the paintings that line the walls of his latest retrospective at the Tate couldn’t be further from this image. In its first room, paintings on paper depict bars, cafés, weddings and cabaret shows, replete with voluptuous and lively characters. Though relatively small in scale, each sheet contains multiple scenes that unfold at once. Burra collapses our sense of perspective, stacking his subjects vertically to fit as much action as he can into each image. Each shape is impossibly smooth and rendered so precisely as to look airbrushed. In these works, painted during visits to France early in Burra’s career, everything is voluminous. It’s not just biceps, breasts and bottoms that bulge; at Burra’s hand, pillars, plant pots, light fittings and fruits become equally taut, fleshy affairs. A dainty champagne coup sits in the foreground of Le Bal (1928), dwarfed by the monuments that surround it – from the tubular streamers that hang from the ceiling to the room’s many animated revellers. In their curvaceousness and volume, Burra’s subjects convey a playful sense of abundance that borders on kitsch. In today’s context, where distorted figuration is the order of the day, it’s a style that feels a little...

Sculptor Giuseppe Penone – famously part of the Italian movement Arte Povera, a group Inspired by the politics of 1960s and who used everyday materials in their work – has been fascinated with the relationship between man and nature since the late 60s, when he began his interventions with the natural world. This Serpentine exhibition is the most comprehensive presentation of Penone’s work in the UK and will extend beyond the gallery with his famous tree sculptures extending into the Royal Parks.

In the 19th Century, Utagawa Hiroshige produced thousands of prints capturing the landscape, nature and daily life in Japan during the Edo period. He became one of Japan’s most famous and prolific artists, and continues to influence art today. Now there’s a rare chance to see many of his never-before-seen works on display at the British Museum, with several pieces believed to be the only surviving examples of their kind in the world. Hiroshige: artist of the open road will be the first exhibition of his work in London for a quarter of a century, giving an insight into Japan during a time of rapid change presaging the end of samurai rule. It will span Hiroshige’s 40-year career through prints, paintings, books and sketches.  

Ithell Colquhoun didn’t sit still, visually or spiritually. This exhibition attempts to make sense of a sprawling oeuvre that engages with an incredibly wide gamut of spiritual, religious and formal ideas. Though not always coherent, it reveals her to be an artist of immense talent and invention. Across her engagements with the occult, Hindu Tantra, Christian mysticism and the Jewish Kabbalah, Colquhoun’s eye for composition remains a constant, and might be the best part of a sometimes confusing show. Born in 1906 in India, where her father worked in the British colonial administration, Colquhoun moved to Cheltenham at a young age and went on to study art at the Slade, where she developed an interest in the esoteric. She was a card-carrying surrealist until 1940, when the group’s British leader E.L.T. Mesens declared that members shouldn’t join other societies. A practicing occultist, she took her cue to leave. Throughout the exhibition, various strains of surrealism and ways of understanding the world serve as a kind of tasting menu for Colquhoun. Here, in a relatively small-scale restaging of her broader exhibition at Tate St. Ives, the jumps between various artistic mediums and grand ideas can be jarring. Spanning painting, drawing and a number of more experimental techniques, the diversity of Colquhoun’s output seems to work against the constraints of the exhibition. What might be an expansive exploration often feels like a whistle-stop tour. Standout moments are...

José María Velasco is making big moves, even over 100 years since his death. The beloved Mexican artist is getting his first UK exhibition this year, in what is also the first display dedicated to a historical Latin-American artist at the National Gallery. In it, you’ll find Velasco’s sweeping portrayals of the Valley of Mexico and detailed panoramic views that bottle a moment in time for a country then moving towards industrialisation, while capturing the natural beauty that surrounded him in exquisite detail.

Fashion icon, model, club promoter, musician; Leigh Bowery was a multi-hyphenate before multi-hyphenate became a thing. But above all else, he was a muse, as the Tate Modern’s extensive new exhibition tracing the Melbourne native’s life and legacy does an excellent job of portraying.  Starting with his arrival onto London’s New Romantic scene in 1980, we’re whisked through Bowery’s many different eras in loose chronological order, from his early days as a club promoter for the short-lived but influential Taboo, through to his later practice as a performance artist, clothes designer and life model for Lucian Freud.  Re-invention was what Bowery stood for, and the Tate does a great attempt of categorising his many selves, from the walls (the first section is plastered in the Star Trek wallpaper from his home, the next his favoured polka-dot motif, and so on), to the clothes, video clips and portraits on display, which grow ever more out-there as Bowery gained confidence in his craft and voice with each year he lived in London. In the final room, beautiful blown-up fashion photographs show him literally shape-shifting, wrapping and warping his flesh like a sculptor working the wheel.  Photos show him literally shape-shifting, wrapping and warping his flesh like a sculptor In the curator’s tour, we’re told that this exhibition could have been called ‘Leigh Bowery and Friends’ and perhaps that would have been more appropriate: the Bowery on show here wouldn’t exist without...