Things to do in London today

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...

Each year, London Literature Festival aims to bring together readers of all ages to ‘celebrate the power of the written and spoken word’, with a big name celebrity curator leading the charge. And excitingly, the 2025 edition will have singer songwriter Rebecca Lucy Taylor (aka Self Esteem) in the hot seat, in a festival that runs from Tuesday October 21 - Sunday November 2. She'll be joined by Dolly Alderton for an event to launch her debut book, A Complicated Woman, followed by a night of music and poetry alongside multi-disciplinary artists Tom Rasmussen, Marged, Travis Alabanza, Seraphina Simone and Pam Ayres.  Elsewhere in the festival, there'll be appearances from massive literary and cultural figures including Sebastian Faulks, Jimi Famurewa, Zadie Smith, Adam Buxton, Malala Yousafzai, Claire-Louise Bennett and Reese Witherspoon & Harlan Coben. There'll also be a focus on international women's voices, with celebrations of new work from Sayaka Murata, Chris Kraus, Alexis Wright, Bora Chung and Olga Ravn. And the poetry line-up will Pfeature Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, Out-Spoken, Rachael Boast and the National Poetry Library open day. As ever, there'll be plenty of opportunities for kids to get involved too, with events with the children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce and a run of Mog the Forgetful Cat. Visit the Southbank Centre's official website for full details. 

Following a successful debut last year, the producers of Kew Gardens’ beloved Christmas trail are bringing back their Halloween trail through the iconic botanical gardens. It’s a light trail, basically, but a souped up one: we’re promised eerie illuminated trees, ghoulish installations, fire performers and more, with a troupe of actors on hand to stoke up our horrors (in a family friendly way, of course). There are three timeslots: Daylight sessions run during the daytime and are intended for younger audiences who want an absolute minimum of spookiness (or simply not be hoe too late); Twlight slots are between 6pm and 7.30pm and things are definitely getting a bit scarier (ie darker); finally the Moonlight slots run after 7.30pm when it should be fully dark. It’s worth stressing that the trail is suitable for all ages at all times, but certainly there are ways a means of managing the spook factor and fitting it around the bedtime of younger audiences. If none of that’s your bag, there will be a host of activities themed around beloved Julia Donaldson children’s book Zog-themed running at Kew until November 3. Halloween at Kew opening dates Halloween at Kew 2025 begins Friday October 17 and runs until Sunday November 2.  Tickets and pricing Tickets for Halloween at Kew cost £18.50 for adults during off-peak times, or £22 during peak times. Members’ tickets are discounted by £2. Children (aged 4-15) cost £13 off-peak, or £16 peak and under fours go free, but still have to...

Ghouls, skeletons and creepy critters will be lurking the grounds of Kenwood House this October half term. Winding through the brand new light trail, you’ll have to navigate your way through a spider tunnel, brave a slime web, wander down a warped laser garden and brace yourself for a fair few frights and eerie surprises. Hot toddies, hot chocolate and a banquet of street food options will be on sale to keep you warm and full. Spooky costumes are, of course, strongly encouraged.

London Month Of The Dead’s annual programme returns this spooky season to get you in the mood for Halloween with a programme of more than 60 fascinatingly macabre events investigating our city’s relationship with death. The line-up offers a plethora of ghostly tours that will take you around crypts, cemeteries, undertakers, execution sites and other eerie locations across the city, alongside talks  exploring everything from the study of human decomposition and the psychology of fear to the theme of murder in art and the criminal history of necrophilia. Highlights of this year’s programme also include a five hour immersive workshop where you can try your hand at some forensic anthropology, a screening of the original Nosferatu with live musical accompaniment, a magic show inside West Norwood Cemetery, an insect mounting workshop at the Kensal Green Cemetery and a circus-themed Halloween party at Soho’s Century Club. It doesn’t get more gothic than that! Check out the full programme here. 

Photography fans will want to train their lenses east this October. Annual month-long festival PhotoMonth is celebrating the printed image in venues from Mile End to Clerkenwell to Hackney to Deptford. An eclectic array of spaces will exhibit photography, including big institutions like Whitechapel Gallery, indie venues including Four Corners, and unusual locations such as shops, restaurants and cafes. The festival’s hub is at Art Pavilion in Mile End, which will display a group exhibition called ‘Longing’. There'll also be a new exhibition from Zed Nelson called ‘The Anthropocene Illusion’, which interrogates the troubled relationship between humans and the environment. There’ll also be around 50 pop-up exhibitions at locations across east London: download the fest’s interactive map to find them all. 

It feels a bit like Oktoberfest all year round at Munich Cricket Club, but it really takes the Bavarian joy up a notch as the season approaches. From mid September til the end of October, the spirit of the fest will take over its Canary Wharf, Tower Hill and Victoria locations. Expect foaming steins, platters of sausage and a live oompah band to get the vibes flying. Dancing on tabletops is encouraged – just be careful not to slip on any saus. The festivities also include the ceremonial tapping of the Oktober barrel, straight from Munich, plus games, silliness and surprises. There's also a bottomless cheese fondue brunch for anyone looking to test their digestive system to its very limits. 

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...

Devonshire Square’s Diwali Festival might not span as many hours as some other events in the city, but it packs in plenty of free cultural delights. This year – the seventh edition of the festival here – Akademi South Asian Dance UK will showcase a range of Indian folk, classical and contemporary dance, while award-winning artist Miguel Rajaguru will display his take on the traditional visual art of Rangoli. There’ll also be treats for the tastebuds, too, with a range of Indian sweets and special Diwali canapés on offer, all served up with the comforting-sounding ‘Aurora of Joy’ – a golden drink crafted by the mixologists at Cinnamon Kitchen. The event is free to attend but you must register in advance via Eventbrite. 

South London's much loved literary knees-up is back this October with a stellar 10-day line-up packed with events from over 100 speakers. Big names including Rupert Everett, Jung Chang, Irvine Welsh, Lemn Sissay, Jay Rayner, and Anthony Horowitz will make an appearance, ready to hobnob with their fans in intimate talks. There'll also be an emphasis on politics and misinformation this year, with experts including Tim Berners-Lee and Nick Clegg. Plus, a partnership with Lahore Literary Festival will showcase South Asian creatives, with speakers including broadcaster Reeta Chakrabarti, Women’s Prize shortlisted authors Nussaibah Younis and Sanam Mahloudji.

Nicola Walker is a brilliant TV actor: her sullen, sarcastic charisma brings an automatic edge to the sundry MOR terrestrial Brit dramas – we’re talking Spooks, Last Tango in Halifax, River, The Split, Annika – in which her career has flourished.   But even though she has done some great stuff on stage – notably her excellent turn in Ivo van Hove’s landmark production of A View from the Bridge – I’m not sure Nicola Walker has ever truly successfully brought her innate Nicola Walkerness to bear in a theatre role. Until now!  Nick Payne’s new Royal Court play The Unbelievers isn’t quite the home run his last one Constellations was. But its star gives a turn that is absolutely, magnificently, unfettered Nicola Walker. Her unique gift for proper nuanced acting via a deadpan grumpiness filter is harnessed to perfection as she plays a grieving mother whose sorrow and grief at the unexplained disappearance of her son has curdled into something much darker and more disturbing. The play is set in three timelines, albeit heavily jumbled up and somewhat blurred. There’s the immediate aftermath of Oscar’s disappearance, when Walker’s Miriam is terse and snappy but fundamentally reasonable in both her grief and her burning desire to make progress on the case. There’s one year on, where things are beginning to slip with her. The play opens with a scene from this timeline in which a somewhat out of it Miriam is tending to a wounded hand which has arisen from a complicated series of...

Although Aussie director Simon Stone has staged only a handful of shows in the UK, it has to be said that you can see a pattern developing. Take a classic play – previously Lorca’s Yerma and Seneca's Phaedra – rewrite the whole thing into aggressively modern English that revolves around long, light hearted stretches of posh people swearing amusingly, season with a bit of Berlin-indebted stage trickery, and finally change tack and wallop us with the tragedy, right in the guts.  The Lady from the Sea is based on Ibsen’s 1888 drama of the same name, and shares its basic plot beats while tinkering with much of the underlying characterisation and motives.  In a starry production. Edward (Andrew Lincoln) is a wealthy neurosurgeon married to his second wife Ellida (Alicia Vikander), a successful writer. They live with Edward’s two pathologically precocious daughters from his first marriage: Asa (Grace Oddie-Jones), who is at university, and Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike), who is at school. Tossed into the mix are Heath (Joe Alwyn), a hot but nerdy distant cousin who has come to Edward to get a diagnosis for a worrying neurological symptoms, and Lyle (John Macmillan), Edward and Ellida’s droll family friend, who is also hot but nerdy. On Lizzie Clachlan’s bougie white thrust set – suggestive of a fancy modern home, without spelling it out – The Lady from the Sea proceeds exactly as you’d expect a Simon Stone play to proceed. There is a lot of very posh banter, that’s very entertaining...

  At the National Theatre last Christmas, Max Webster’s vividly queer take on Oscar Wilde’s magnum opus felt quite a lot like The Ncuti Gatwa Show. Back on stage for the first time since he hit the big time, the Doctor Who actor’s stupendously arch take on dashing young protagonist Algernon Montcrieff had an ultra-knowing quality that defined the production. It’s very, very obvious that in Webster’s take, Algenon and his cousin-slash-BFF Jack are meant to be closeted gay men (it begins with a dragged up Algie writhing away at a grand piano, and doesn’t get noticiably straighter). But whereas Gatwa’s sardonically adult interpretation of Algernon seemed very aware of his own sexuality, that’s not necessarily the case in the West End cast. Gatwa’s replacement is fellow Russell T Davies alumnus Ollie Alexander, and he plays Algie with a waspish dandyishness that feels childish, not adult, a little boy roleplaying his whirlwind romance with Jessica Whitehurst’s bolshy Cicily. Likewise, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett‘s Jack is basically a gigantic overgrown puppy, wagging his tail in delight at the attentions of Kitty Hawthorn’s Gwendolyn, but with zero sexual intent.  All four ‘lovers’ go about their relationships with the breezy silliness of a group of primary schoolers playing mummies and daddies. Webster’s interpretation amps up Wilde’s wit by unburdening it of any need for us to believe in the romance. Indeed, the contrived plotting – Bunburying, the women only being into guys...

Joe Orton’s breakthrough play Entertaining Mr Sloane hasn’t been revived in London in almost 20 years, and on this showing you can kind of see why. His dark comedy about a middle aged brother and sister who both fall for a sexy lodger with a shady past caused outrage in its day. But in 2025 it’s unforgivably tame and unfunny.  Or at least it is in this production from incoming Young Vic artistic director Nadia Fall. Despite the hot-pink posters and the presence of Jordan ‘the guy out of Rizzle Kicks’ Stephens in the title role, Fall’s take feels both wilfully dated – very much a ’60s period piece – and pointedly unfunny, trading the menacing comedy associated with Orton (‘dark farce’ is the usual term) for drab naturalism.  Tamzin Outhwaite is the best thing here as horny-but-tragic Kath. Yes, she throws herself at Stephens’s Sloane in cartoonish fashion. But someone has to get the party started, frankly, and besides she does a great job of portraying how damaged and desolate Kath is – her every pass at Sloane feels like a twisted gesture of love directed at her dead son. In fact her performance comes as close as anything to justifying the naturalistic route of the production – a major criticism of Orton is that his works now play as misogynistic, and Outhwaite’s take does a pretty good job in thoughtfully engaging with the trope of the bored, middle-aged woman, while also still being funny. Elsewhere, though, and Daniel Cerqueira does such a convincing job of playing her...

Bryony Kimmings has one heck of a fanbase: some big comedy names have played the 1,000-seater Soho Theatre Walthamstow since it opened in May, but none of them have mounted a two-and-a-half week run, as Kimmings has with new show Bog Witch. Still, if you’re unfamiliar with her, it wouldn’t be a shock: she hasn’t done a stage show in seven years, and she is ultimately a performance artist (whose only full-on mainstream achievement to date is co-writing seasonal Britflick Last Christmas).  Press-night audiences aren’t representative, of course, but unless Bog Witch is dead the rest of the run, the fans are real. And deserved. Last decade she was an enchanting, amusing and provocative regular presence on our stages, with a run of funny, inventive, deeply personal and visually arresting shows beginning with her breakthrough Sex Idiot (about her efforts to trace which former partner gave her chlamydia) through to I’m a Phoenix, Bitch (a mini-musical about post-natal depression). Bog Witch is quintessential Kimmings, using funny songs, fun costumes and unfiltered, matey honesty to describe the latest chapter in her life: living off grid after falling for Will, an eco-warrior. That said, Bog Witch proves disarming in being more diaristic than narrowly focussed on the headline topic. As illustrated by Will Duke’s beautiful shadow puppet-like projections, it’s really about the turn of an eventful year in Kimmings’s life. Of course it’s heavily influenced by her circumstances:...

This review is from 2023. SplitLip’s delightful spoof WW2 musical has been heading inexorably for the West End for something like five years now. It’s a fringe theatre comet that’s gathered mass and momentum via seasons at the New Diorama, Southwark Playhouse and Riverside Studios, and has now made impact in Theatreland – wiping out a West End dinosaur to boot, as it displaces ‘The Woman in Black’ after over 30 years at the Fortune Theatre. And it’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company, which consists of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Robert. All bar Hagan perform in the show, with Claire Marie Hall and Jak Malone rounding out the cast. This is very much their triumph. And though it’s been redirected for the West End by Robert Hastie, ‘Operation Mincemeat’ is at heart the same show it always was. There are no added backing dancers or bombastic reorchestrations. It’s slicker and bigger in its way, but still feels endearingly shambolic where it counts. It’s a very larky account of the World War 2 Operation Mincemeat, a ploy from British intelligence to feed the German army disinformation via a briefcase of false war plans strapped to a corpse that they hoped to pass off as a downed British pilot (yes, there was a recent film with exactly the same name, about exactly the same thing, and yes they do make a joke about this). The story centres on Charles Cholmondeley (Cumming), the socially inept MI5 operative who dreams up the plan, and...

Is the era of the big celebrity Hamlet over? I mean, probably not: the play is 400 years old, and some seasonal variation is to be expected. Nonetheless, after a period where it felt like you couldn’t move for an Andrew Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Sheen, Maxine Peake, Tom Hiddleston, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu, Michelle Terry etcetera etcetera playing the Dane, we’ve reached the midpoint of the ‘20s with very few sleb takes at all ( really only one – Cush Jumbo – in London). Does this matter? Not necessarily, but maybe there’s a truth that we overdid it a bit last decade, and now there’s a cultural hangover. The ones we have got in the ’20s have tended to be smaller and weirder: witness the Globe’s intriguingly low key Hamlet-as-a-psychopath take a couple of years back; recall that weirdy Radiohead/Hamlet mashup from the RSC.  I’d say the National Theatre’s first production of the play since 2010 – Rufus Norris was the first artistic director to simply not stage it – falls reasonably squarely into the ‘indie Hamlet’ box.  Hiran Abeysekera begins Robert Hastie’s production as a sardonic, melancholy prince who feels adrift in life after the sudden death of his dad and the even more sudden remarriage of his mum Gertrude to his uncle Claudius. He’s funny: some of Hamlet’s early wisecracks usually feel like forced ‘theatre humour’, but here, for instance, the line about the leftover funeral nibbles being reused at the wedding feels in keeping with a man who seems...

This review is from 2017. See official website for the current cast. Okay, let’s just get this out of the way. ‘Hamilton’ is stupendously good. Yes, it’s kind of a drag that there’s so much hype around it. But there was a lot of hype around penicillin. And that worked out pretty well. If anything – and I’m truly sorry to say this – Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the US Treasury, is actually better than the hype suggests. That’s because lost in some of the more waffly discourse around its diverse casting and sociological import is the fact that ‘Hamilton’ is, first and foremost, a ferociously enjoyable show. You probably already know that it’s a hip hop musical, something that’s been tried before with limited success. Here it works brilliantly, because Miranda – who wrote everything – understands what mainstream audiences like about hip hop, what mainstream audiences like about musical theatre, and how to craft a brilliant hybrid. Put simply, it’s big emotions and big melodies from the former, and thrilling, funny, technically virtuosic storytelling from the latter. ‘Alexander Hamilton’, the opening tune, exemplifies everything that’s great about the show. It’s got a relentlessly catchy build and momentum, a crackling, edge-of-seat sense of drama, and is absolutely chockablock with information, as the key players stride on to bring us up to speed with the eventful life that Hamilton – the ‘bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a...

Arguably the entire point of the first play to be programmed at the National Theatre by its new boss Indhu Rubasingham comes around five minutes from the end – after the actual plt has wrapped up – when Ukweli Roach’s Dionysus adds the mantle of ‘god of theatre’ to his celestial portfolio and dedicates the NT’s Olivier theatre to us. And if the hour and 40 minutes that precede this moment are messy, I’d say they are entertainingly messy.  Bacchae is of course based on Euripides’s classic Greek tragedy nasty of the same name, and is the debut play from Nima Taleghani. He’s hitherto been better known as an actor, and while his biggest gig is Heartstopper, I knew him from Jamie Lloyd’s gorgeously rhythmic-but-serious Cyrano de Bergerac of a few years back. I’d wondered if his hip-hoppy take on Euripides might be similarly solemn. In fact it’s nothing of the sort: colourful, irreverent and frequently goofy, its sillier moments reminded me of those hip hop Shakespeare plays that sometimes pop up at the Edinburgh Fringe (The Bomb-itty of Errors and such). It begins with the redoubtable Clare Perkins introducing us to her all-female posse of dysfunctional Dionysus worshippers, aka the Bacchae. ‘Not even Zeus can steal my thunder, fam’ she declares. It’s fun to spend time with them, as they swear and argue and rage, but there’s the nagging sense that it’s not clear where their story is going. Frankly it also seems a bit unexpected that a male writer would be out to reclaim Bacchae...

Ella Hickson’s family friendly but somewhat radical reworking of JM Barrie’s Peter Pan was a festive hit for the RSC over a decade ago, and has had several other productions beyond the original. It’s never made it to London though, or hadn’t until now, when director Jonathan Munby’s OG production leaps to the Barbican in a slot that misses Christmas by the best part of a month but does nick half-term. To be fair, it’s not technically a Christmas story in any formal sense, and the timing is worth it for an impressive cast that includes Toby Stephens as Captain Hook/Mr Darling (his first stage role in an age) and a rare return to the stage for Lolita Chakrabarti (now better known as a playwright) as Mrs Darling. Hickson’s story focusses on Wendy, as she heads off on a quest to find her lost brother Tom.

The Anmatyerr artist Emily Kam Kngwarray only took up painting during the last decade of her life. Making up for lost time, she produced thousands of paintings in the years leading up to her death in 1996. She worked frenetically, changing her style multiple times. This, her first major European solo exhibition, presents just a sliver of her oeuvre. It’s an impressive introduction to a visionary artist and, to those unfamiliar with Aboriginal art, a new way of understanding art. Naturally, this show needs more exposition than most. It requires European audiences to let go of their art-historical baggage. For example, the colourful works on show here aren’t straightforwardly representational but it would be wrong to call them abstract. Rather than leave us to experience Kngwarray’s work on the familiar-but-inaccurate terms that define western art, the exhibition takes two rooms to provide a potted education on Aboriginal art and life and the artist’s place within it. Dreaming, for example, is an important religio-cultural term that pervades the exhibition, connecting Aboriginal Peoples with their ancestors through the land. This show needs more exposition than most The exhibition finds confident form in its third room, where more than a dozen large-scale acrylic paintings, all replete with coloured dots, surround a procession of batik prints on silk that hang from the ceiling. Interconnectedness is less a feature of these works than an underpinning of them. In each of the...

Kerry James Marshall is an artist with a singular vision. He has become arguably the most important living American painter over the past few decades, with an ultra-distinctive body of work that celebrates the Black figure in an otherwise very ‘Western’ painting tradition. This big, ambitious show will be a joyful celebration of his lush, colourful approach to painting.

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...

House of Music, the latest solo exhibition by Peter Doig, marks new territory for the artist who is increasingly known for being Europe’s most expensive painter, thanks to his works repeatedly selling for record-breaking, eye-watering sums on the secondary market. The show is Doig’s first foray into integrating sound into his work, through the inclusion of two sets of restored, cinema-standard analogue speakers which take centre stage in the Serpentine South Gallery, surrounded by a series of new and old paintings which relate to the artist’s love of music. The aim appears to be to transform the gallery into a listening space, something akin to the many hi-fi listening bars which have been popping up in spades around the UK in recent years, or Devon Turnbull’s excellent and hugely popular Hi-Fi Listening Room at Lisson Gallery the year before last. A smattering of plush recliners and chic tables and chairs are dotted around the various rooms, inviting art lovers to sit and enjoy the sounds of Doig’s personal vinyl collection as you take in the sights of his mesmerising, large scale paintings inspired by his time spent living in Trinidad, observing the country’s sound system culture which seemingly had a profound effect on the Scottish painter.  The only problem is, despite going to great lengths to acquire these mammoth speakers - they were ‘harvested from derelict cinemas’ by Doig’s collaborator Laurence Passera - you can’t actually hear the music very well. A private...

If you thought the National Gallery answered every question that could possibly be asked about what came after the impressionists in their huge blockbuster ‘After Impressionism’ show in 2023, you thought wrong. Because they’re coming back for another go with ‘Radical Harmony’, which will feature the work of the neo-impressionists, including pointilist masters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. It’s enough to drive you dotty.

If you thought the National Gallery answered every question that could possibly be asked about what came after the impressionists in their huge blockbuster ‘After Impressionism’ show in 2023, you thought wrong. Because they’re coming back for another go with ‘Radical Harmony’, which will feature the work of the neo-impressionists, including pointilist masters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. It’s enough to drive you dotty.

‘Wherever conflict erupts, sexual violence is present.’ So it’s surprising that until 2025, the UK has never had a major exhibition on sexual violence in conflict. This year the Imperial War Museum is hoping to shed light on the topic that remains widely under-discussed.  Through first-person testimonies, objects, artwork, propoganda posters and papers, Unsilenced will investigate the different ways in which sexual violence in conflict can manifest. It will span the untold stories of child evacuees, victims of trafficking, prisoners of war, and survivors from the First World War to present-day conflicts, and highlight the ongoing efforts of those fighting for justice and working to prevent conflict-related sexual violence. It’s expected to be a sobering, ground-breaking exhibition.  NB: This exhibition includes cases of rape, sexual humiliation, torture and child abuse in conflict. IWM advises that this exhibition is only suitable for those aged 16 or over.   

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.   

Video games are the medium for Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. The young artist uses them to ‘imaginatively archive and empower Black Trans stories’ - this isn’t just point-and-shoot, slack-jawed gaming for the sake of it, this is one of contemporary society’s most important cultural forms being used to give voice to marginalised identities.