Andrzej Lukowski

September 2026: There's a brand new Number 1, with the frankly exceptional Impala in Soho taking the top spot as our favourite new restaurant in London. Other fresh additions include Kid in Soho, Kismet in Borough Market, Cloudstreet in Stoke Newington, Cafe Clement by the Thames in Temple, Hon's BBQ in Hackney Wick, Cue Point in Notting Hill, Vesper in Clerkenwell and Kinz in Notting Hill. Hungry yet? Every week, a frankly silly amount of brilliant new restaurants, cafés and street food joints arrive in London. Which makes whittling down a shortlist of the best newbies a serious challenge. But here it is. The 20 very best new restaurants in the capital, ranked in order of greatness and deliciousness. All of them have opened over the past 12 months and been visited by our hungry critics. So go forth and take inspo from this list, which is updated regularly. Check in often to find out what we really rate on the London restaurant scene. And look here for all the info about the best new openings in September 2026. London's best new restaurants at a glance: 🥩 Central: Impala, Soho 🍷 North: Cloudstreet, Stoke Newington 🦐 South: The Victory, East Dulwich 🍝 East: Hon's BBQ, Hackney Wick 🥗 West: Maai by Nikita, Fulham Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines. RECOMMENDED: The 50 best restaurants in London. The hottest new openings, the tastiest tips, the spiciest reviews: we’re serving it all on our L

September 2026: Sunday roast season has finally returned to London. A boozey, end-of-the-weekend lunch is what we're all about in this city, and as well as more unique takes on the roast from the likes of the Macbeth in Hoxton, Buster Mantis in Deptford and Rice Paddy in Peckham, we're all about celebrating the classic meat-spuds-and-gravy variety of Sunday lunch. Enjoy masterful takes on the roast at The Golden Tooth on Green Lanes, The Duke Organic in Islington, and The Camberwell Arms in south London. And watch out for later in the month, when two of our favourite roasts return to London; the all-vegan slap-up roast at LD's Kitchen at the Imperial Palace of Big Red in Camden and Ling Ling's Chinese-inspired roast at Godet in Islington.  London’s best Sunday roasts at a glance: 🥩 Central: Quality Chop House, Clerkenwell 😇 North: The Golden Tooth, Newington Green ⛪ South: Old Nun’s Head, Nunhead 🌈 East: The Nelson’s, Hackney 🍻 West: The Mall Tavern, Notting Hill Sunday lunch. There’s nothing quite like it. An elemental meal, one that Londoners take incredibly seriously. Debates about what constitutes the ‘perfect’ Sunday roast have been known to last for hours. There is no shortage of top roasts and Sunday lunch options in London. We’ve rounded up the city’s best Sunday meals from a host of pubs, restaurants and breweries all around town. What makes a good roast? For us, it’s simple; a welcoming room is a good start, maybe in a pub with an open fire during the winter

This rolling list is constantly updated to share the best of what’s coming up and currently booking: these choices aren’t the be-all and end-all of great London theatre in 2026, but they are, as a rule, the biggest and splashiest shows coming up, alongside intriguing looking smaller projects.   London's best shows to book for at a glance: Best musical: The Greatest Showman, Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Best Shakespeare play: Lear, Yard Theatre. Best celebrity show: The Lives of Others, Adelphi Theatre. Best revival of a modern classic: August: Osage County, Noël Coward Theatre. Best for something different: Hamlet Hail to the Thief, Barbican Centre. London’s theatre scene is the most exciting in the world: perfectly balanced between the glossy musical theatre of Broadway and the experimentalism of Europe, it’s flavoured by the British preference for new writing and love of William Shakespeare, but there really is something for everyone. It’s also beweilderingly big: between the showtune-centric West End and the constant pipeline of new writing from the subsidised sector – plus the Wild West of the fringe – there’s well over 100 theatres and over venues playing host to everything from classic revivals to cutting-edge immersive work. This is my attempt to make sense of all that for you. These are shows worth booking for, pronto, both to avoid sellouts but to get the cheaper tickets that initially go on sale for most shows but tend to be snapped up months before they actually op

Whether you’re in one of the UK’s diverse, underrated cities, our picture-perfect seaside towns or anywhere in between, there’s always a museum to educate, explain, enlighten. Far from just places to hide from grim weather, Britain’s greatest museums tell stories, explore histories and get you fascinated by stuff you’d never previously spared a thought for. Here at Time Out, we are, obviously, huge museum nerds. You’ll find countless of the cultural institutions peppered throughout our UK city guides, whether that’s a mighty, storeyed national behemoth or an adorably niche local exhibition space. Even better, plenty of those museums are totally free to visit (and they remain so, despite suggestions of change). But which British museums are most essential to visit this year? Which ones are having a moment, basking in a refurb, putting on the most tantalising exhibitions? We’ve rounded up the most unmissable, all chosen by Time Out UK editors who’ve recently visited them. Before we get stuck in, a quick note. The vast majority of the list below is outside London, and that’s intentional. If you’re looking for stuff in the capital, we have an excellent guide to the city’s museums here. We’ve also steered clear of conventional art galleries – you can find our favourite art spaces here. RECOMMENDED: 📍 The UK’s top places to visit in 2026.🎵 The best music festivals in the UK.🥾 The greatest walks and hikes in the UK. At Time Out, all of our travel guides are written by writers who

From Arts and Crafts and the pre-Raphaelites through to pop art and the YBAs, the UK has borne several of the planet’s most important visual movements. Fitting, therefore, that we’ve also got a world-leading roster of galleries. But these institutions don’t just show off British art: between them they boast a truly formidable collection of global art. You name a major artist – yep, any artist – it’s pretty much a dead cert that a UK gallery exhibits their work. Better yet, the UK’s finest art galleries are diverse in purpose and spread evenly across the land. You’ll find all sorts of exhibition spaces in major cities, sure, but there are also arty gems in smaller towns, alongside attractions ranging from blustery seaside enclaves in Scotland to dazzling sculpture gardens in Cornwall. To top it all off, plenty are free to visit.  When putting together Time Out’s guide to the best art galleries in the UK, we didn’t just take into account which places have the biggest names. We also wanted to spotlight the boldest programming and our favourite curators, as well as pick out galleries that feel like a spectacle. After all, art is even more special when you’re viewing it within another piece of art. Art-ception, if you like.  The vast majority of the list below features art galleries outside London (for the capital’s top art destinations, see this list). And if you’re looking for non-art attractions, you can find Time Out’s guide to the best museums in the UK here. RECOMMENDED: 📍

We’re firmly past 2026’s halfway point and it’s already been a stacked year for excellent new music. The race for song of the summer is a packed field, big-name pop titans – Olivia Rodrigo, Madonna – have delivered lauded albums and there’s been a formidable number of breakout bands. 2026’s end-of-year round-ups are already looking like contentious business indeed.  Looking to inject something new into your mid-year listening habits? Time Out’s music geeks have got together to put together a list of the albums we’ve loved so far in 2026. Raving dance-pop, grotty death metal, stratospheric jazz-funk, paranoid techno, the year’s biggest pop records… whatever’s your jam, you’ll find it here.  Read on for the best albums of 2026 as of July, according to Time Out editors and contributors (they’re in alphabetical order – you’ll have to wait until the end of the year for the definitive ranking). RECOMMENDED: The 10 songs of the summer for 2026.

The great thing about having kids at Christmas is that you can vicariously relive the joy that comes with believing in Santa Claus. You may be a boring grown-up now, but it’s just as magical to watch your own little ones’ eyes light up as they see big man IRL. From a traditional Victorian hut to a gingerbread-themed alcove and the city’s only immersive black Santa experience at Noir Kringle, London has an assortment of grottos suited to every family. With help from Santa’s elves, each leaves kids with a special gift and a photo with the main man. Many also boast bonus Christmas activities from crafts and wintry trails, to film screenings and story time sessions. Be organised, though. Santa is a popular guy and often there isn’t enough of him to go round aren’t enough to meet the demand, particularly at peak times on weekends. So you’ll need to act fast to secure your slot and avoid tears and tantrums. Here are some great grottos in London to try for a holly jolly good time this year.  RECOMMENDED: Find more festive fun with our guide to Christmas in London.

Yes, trick-or-treating is a no brainer in terms of Halloween fun for kids. But there’s more to the second-most fun holiday of the year (after Christmas, of course) than trying to extract bucketfuls of sweets from your long-suffering neighbours.  Halloween typically coincides with the school half-term holidays (it does this year) and typically most major London attractions have a half term theme that will run for at least the length of the holidays, if not longer. meaning you and the family can really make the most of the city’s spooky, child-friendly events on either side of October 31. While our half-term list does include some of the bigger Halloween events, much of what’s on it has no bearing on the spooky season – this one, however, is strictly haunted events only. From pumpkin picking to scary movies, there are loads of wicked things to do on and around October 31 2026. Happy Halloween! RECOMMENDED: Our complete guide to Halloween in London for everyone.

Hello, and welcome to the Time Out theatre reviews round up. From huge star vehicles and massive West End musical to hip fringe shows and more, this is a compliation of all the latest London reviews from the Time Out theatre team, which is me plus our team of freelance critics. December is the busiest time of year for London theatre – expect plenty of pantomime reviews and other seasonal fun but also a slew of major openings from across London’s many venues as the industry works itself to a frenzy before shutting down for Christmas. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2026. A-Z of West End shows.

The epic slog of the summer holidays is over but look! Here comes a new challenger as the October half term comes barrelling into view. And even though we’re just a few weeks away from the hottest summer on record, plummetting termperatures and shorter days will mean you have to find more to do than ‘go to the park’. Fortunately: this is London, there’s always loads to do, with Halloween giving the darkening evenings a spooky shot in the arm. My name is Andrzej and I’m Time Out’s lead kids’ writer and also parent to two London-based children. As ever, the idea with this list is to highlight the best new, returning or last chance to see shows; London also has plenty of evergreen fun for children of all ages, quite a lot of which you can find in out list of the 50 best things to do with kids in London. When is October half-term this year?  This year, London’s May half-term officially falls between Monday October 26 and Friday October 30 (ie children will be off continuously between Saturday October 24 and Sunday November 1). For whatever reason, certain boroughs (including mine) inflict a double half-term upon their students, in which case your holiday will run Monday October 19 to Friday October 30 (or in total Saturday October 17 to Sunday November 1). Here’s our roundup of all the best things to do with your children this October half-term.

Hello parents and guardians! I’m Time Out’s children’s editor, and as a parent of two childen I can confirm that London is an amazing city raise kids in. You have to put in a bit of commuter time to take full advantage, but there’s a virtually endless stream of stuff for children to do, from playgrounds and parks to incredible kids’ theatres, free museums to slightly more expensive zoos and aquariums, and all sorts of stuff inbetween. London's best things to do with kids at a glance: 🦖 Best for dinosaur lovers: Natural History Museum and Crystal Palace Park 🦍 Best for animal lovers: London Zoo and Battersea Park Childen’s Zoo 🚣🏻‍♀️ Best for outdoor action: Lee Valley White Water Water Centre 👾 Best for videogame lovers: Power Up (Science Museum)  🪨 Best hidden gem: Chiselhurst Caves This is a sort of ever-evolving checklist of what we think the 50 best things to do in the city with kids are. Some of it is incredibly obvious: you’re probably aware that London has a Natural History Museum. But it’s worth stressing that it’s a really, really great Natural History Museum, and whether you’re just visiting or have lived here all your life, a visit is a terrific day out. Alongside that, we’ve got 49 other ideas for things to do with childen in London – the focus is loosely speaking on younger children of nursery and primary school age, but we aim to cater for all here, from tots to teens. That’s all ages, all budgets and all times of the year – as well as adding new London

Oh yes it is! London panto season is back for 2026, and here’s Time Out’s complete rundown of every major pantomime in the city. London's best pantomimes at a glance: Best ‘classic’ panto: Jack and the Beanstalk, Hackney Empire Hippest panto: Cinderella, Lyric Hammersmith Best celebrity panto: Cinderella, London Palladium Christmas panto you can see on Christmas Day: Dick Whittingberg Gets Into a Pickle, JW3  Best adults only panto: see our adult panto list For some Londoners the only time of year they'll visit a theatre, panto season is a bizarre, joyful, quintessentially British time to come together and watch some light-hearted spoof fairytales that revolve around men dressing up as women and/or farm animals. Within that, though, there’s huge variation, from the megascale London Palladium show with its filthy figurehead Julian Clary, to Clive Rowe’s brilliant panto purism at the Hackney Empire and JW3’s amusing Jewish spin that runs on Christmas Day itself. I’m Andrzej Łukowski, Time Out’s theatre editor, and while this page is simply intended as a round-up of London pantomimes, then it’s an *informed* round up – I have seen approximately four billion pantos over the last 15 years or so, and know what they’re all like, plus we’ll update this page with star ratings when our reviews of this year’s crop start rolling in in late November. London is a city that takes pantomime seriously, and even if the idea of seasonal frivolity fills you with dread, there’s a panto out the

This revival of Jay Presson Allen’s 1989 Truman Capote monologue was initially staged in the stunning House of the Redeemer in New York, the sort of opulent old Manhattan building of your wildest dreams. How would a London transfer work? Well, as the saying goes: if you can’t bring the mountain to Mohammed, then bring Mohammed to a lavishly detailed copy of the mountain. A huge part of the joy of the London Tru is how designer Paul Farnsworth has transformed the entire Menier space into what I’m going to call a faithful recreation of Capote’s New York apartment. Sure, if you look too hard at the panelled ceilings or the tapestry covered walls you’ll realise they’re just printouts on fabric. But one, well, yes, obviously; and two, it still looks incredible. While presumably Capote’s lounge didn’t look exactly like this (I’m sure it had less seating capacity for starters), the level of detail is astounding, from vintage rugs and sofas to shelves groaning with knickknacks, books and even handwritten letters. The actual play can’t really live up to the magnificence of the setting. That’s not the fault of performer Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who offers a funny, often very poignant channeling of the Alabama-raised author and socialite. That distinctive voice could so easily fall into parody – it was half a parody already. But Ferguson brings Capote to life, aided by the fact that the play is set at a very painful time in his life. It’s 1975, and he has recently published a chapter of hi

The Great Christmas Feast is returning in November 2026. This review is from 2024. There are many things to enjoy about immersive theatre company The Lost Estate’s dinner theatre Dickens adaptation The Great Christmas Feast. There’s also quite a bit to fault – to a large extent logistical problems that may or may not be ironed out later in the run. At its core this is a one man plus musicans take on A Christmas Carol that pays homage to Dickens’s own famed solo performances: stiffed by the feeble Victorian copyright laws, he devoted much of his later years – and health – to spectacularly entertaining one-man readings of his work. The Taylor Swift of his day, maybe.  In The Great Christmas Feast we’re cast as a specially invited audience, who Dickens (Alex Phelps) has brought over to his gaff for dinner and his solo performance of A Christmas Carol. Phelps’s full pelt, unselfconscious performance is good fun, and is occasionally nudged into something really quite sublime by the accompanying violinists and percussionists.  Stefan Rees’s music brings an elegant, sonorous majesty to proceedings that easily compensates for the lack of the usual phantasmagorical special effects. Sat at restaurant-style tables that circle the small raised central performance space, everyone had a good view and there’s a genuine sense of intimacy between audience and performer. The problems come with the food service – the modern British-styled cuisine is pleasant, but it takes a very long time to be

This review is from 2025. Wundrful World of Christmas will retrun for 2026 at a new location. Although it sounds like the core experience will be the same, it will now feature ‘a brand-new sparkling village - the Elves’ Playground, filled with twinkling light installations, gentle fairground rides, festive food and drink, Christmas market stalls and more.’ Long gone are the days when a British grotto meant a quick sit on the knee of a boozy-smelling man with an obviously fake beard in the backroom of a mid-tier department store. In the age of immersive theatre, London’s grottos have spun off into all sorts of esoteric forms that now typically involve a lengthy ‘adventure’ prior to finally meeting Old Saint Nick, whose knee you are very definitely not allowed to sit on because of woke. The oddly named Wundrful World of Christmas is billed as an immersive experience rather than a grotto, and indeed in its native Australia that may be fair enough – do they even have grottos in the land of beach Christmas? But here it is basically a posh grotto, and probably London’s biggest this year, with an expensive marketing campaign and fancy location in Borough Yards. It begins with us ‘boarding’ what my notes say is a flying lift, which – as conveyed via computer generated vista we see out of its ‘windows’ – is piloted by a slightly fractious group of elves all the way to the North Pole. There we encounter… more elves, who are hanging out in a cluster of rooms so Christmassy they almost p

A Catholic upbringing has left me both terrible at lying and capable of looking guilty about more or less anything. As such I was morbidly convinced that I would get the tap on the shoulder designating me a traitor in this live recreation (you could call it immersive theatre if you wanted) of the smash BBC game show. This proved to be entirely correct and long story short I lasted four rounds until I was rumbled (though it was a close thing and involved me being inexplicably betrayed by my fellow traitor). And speaking as somebody who has barely watched the show: I had a blast. If you can swallow the cost (a little under £50 in the evening, but cheaper by day) and go in prepared to be eliminated early then The Traitors Live Experience is extremely good fun. As much as anything, this adaptation from Immersive Everywhere is extremely well organised. Clearly you can’t make a note-perfect recreation of a show that involves 25 contestants staying at a remote Scottish castle for three weeks. But what they’ve done captures a sense of it very nicely. In this much shorter format, a large number of participants book in for a given time slot and are then divided into groups of around 12. Each is spirited away to their own round table, which comes complete with its own Claudia Winkleman-substitute host. Ours was a chipper young man who did a great job of geeing things along with help from a pre-recorded Winkleman (wisely she’s only used sparingly). It’s such a rock-solid conceit that it

Thelma & Louise songwriter Neko Case interviewed: ‘the way we deal with sexual violence has gotten much worse’ This musical version of Thelma & Louise has many things going for it, notably some thrilling songs from alt-country legend Neko Case, a great cast led by Amy Lennox and Rachel Turner, and some sparking dialogue from Callie Khouri, screenwriter of the classic 1991 Ridley Scott feminist road movie.  It doesn’t quite work though, in large part because it doesn’t make a convincing argument for why this story needs this treatment. Not to say there shouldn’t be a Thelma & Louise musical. But I think Khouri and co could have done more with the medium than offer up the exact plot of Thelma & Louise (the film) with songs bolted on. It’s still decent and on the whole the more we’re left alone with just the leads, the better it is: Tucker is very good as the sensible one with the traumatic past (Louise); Amy Lennox is borderline sensational as the married one who loosens up, hits the bottle and gets laid on the road (Louise). And it gets extra good during the wilder, more concert-like sections at the start of each half, when it threatens to break into something quite formally different. But for the most part we get the film’s linear road-movie plot, slowed down and gummed up by the deployment of the ensemble in every scene. That and the frequent need to cut away to the relatively superfluous figure of Hal (Trevor Dion), the kind-hearted homicide detective who comes on board whe

Almost a century on and I think we can be adult about the fact that 20th century American playwright Clifford Odets was never in the same league as the older Eugene O’Neill, or the younger Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller (who both clearly owed him a debt). Golden Boy, from 1937, is a fine play but clunkier than any of those writers at their best, with rougher-drawn characters and a somewhat on-the-nose consideration of art versus violence as embodied by protagonist Joe Bonaparte, a sensitive Italian-American violinist who throws himself into the world of boxing, with ultimately tragic results.  But it’s boring to quibble about the flaws of a worthwhile revival: not every US play from the middle of the last century can be A View from the Bridge. Though elements of Sam Yates’ stylish take will doubtless prove to be divisive, I thought it was great, a crack cast meeting a bold vision that seeks to do more than just squeeze Golden Boy into standard naturalist tragedy shapes. The story opens with Tom, a down-on-his-luck boxer manager in ‘30s New York. He’s played by Daniel Mays with a not entirely dissimilar note to his Nathan Detroit in the Bridge Theatre's recent Guys & Dolls: all comic bluster and goggling eyes. Like Nathan, he even has a girlfriend he won’t marry, although Hayley Squires' Lorna is a more intense character, and the chief impediment to their wedded bliss is that Tom already has a wife.  Business is bad, but then step into the ring – first metaphorically, th

This review is from the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. A version of Hamlet called HAM in which Hamlet is vegan and sad about the death of a pig as opposed to his father is the sort of show concept that gives people cold sweats about seeing theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe. But performance art duo Hotter Project is really onto something here with a show that casually sends up cringey activist theatre, while also being brilliantly accomplished, both in terms of the deft, funny way Mary Higgins and Ell Potter make use of Shakespeare’s own words (there is a big laugh for ‘oh that this too too solid flesh would melt’) but also in the way I haven’t wanted to eat any meat since I saw it. The loose idea is that Higgins and Potter have been driven to write a preposterous show because they think they can get funding for it. They do not seem convinced by the project and spend their whole time bickering away: Higgins is the precious, uptight vegan; Potter, by her own admission, was given the nickname ‘sausage queen’ after she ate 18 in a go once.  The duo’s fractious odd-couple absurdity and the fact that they treat the entire project as if they know it’s a stupid idea – they are also naked quite a lot, FYI – is nicely offset by how accomplished it actually all is: as well as some dazzling linguistic bits, there’s great stuff like the play within the play being reimagined as an S&M session between Higgins and a hapless member of the audience. Does it preach? Well maybe kind of, a bit, bu

This review is from the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. As this new one-woman-show reminds us in more ways than one, success can be a double-edged sword.  Written and performed by relatively unknown Australian comic Hannah Reilly, Roleplay had sold out its Fringe run before the festival began and there’s an obvious reason why: its producer, Francesca Moody, has been responsible for a series of solo shows that have in recent years almost single handedly resurrected the festival’s reputation as the place to spot the stage and screen stars of tomorrow. Fleabag and Baby Reindeer are the biggies and 2024’s Weather Girl may well join the list when its A24-produced adaptation debuts on Netflix. So you can see why a new Moody-produced solo show staged in perpetually hip Summerhall is an easy sell, and has featured in just about every preview theatre list for the festival. Does it pile on too much pressure, though?  Roleplay does not hide its light under a bushel, beginning as it does with Reilly strutting into the room in a bra and panties, before whipping off the former and grinding away topless to thunderous strippercore beats. She’s Danni, the host of a little-listened to podcast that seems to exist to both celebrate and satirise sex positivity: ‘hey slut’, is how she greets her callers. That might have been the sum of her career, but a series of shady behind-the-scenes events leads to her being offered serious money by a big American corporation to make the show a mainstay of the

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the offer o

Heavyweight director John Caird - most famous for the original production of Les Mis - has been trying and in many ways succeeding in getting his musical version of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre off the ground for something like 30 years now. Jane Eye: A Musical has had numerous productions over the years, including a six-month stint on Broadway from 2000-2001. But Caird has been pretty clear that it’s never been the hit he’d hoped, and the West End remains elusive. So here it is, making its London debut in a relatively intimate fringe production that ditches fancy sets – instead we get lots of dry ice and misty projections – in order to free up some budget for a chunky 13-strong ensemble and more black lace than a 1984 episode of Top of the Pops.  Co-directed by Caird and Megan McGinnis, it’s a slick, melodious production that rapidly reveals the essential ‘problem’ with the whole endeavour. Jane Eyre is one of the greatest books ever written. Jane Eyre: A Musical is an elegant, tuneful but essentially bang-average affair that boils the source material’s unsettling gothic vision into a boilerplate period love story between Charlie Burn’s straitlaced Jane and Ashley Gilmour’s overly kooky Rochester. The story slips down too easily, with Paul Gordon’s warm, stately music far too pretty and uplifting. And while the ensemble is nominally colourblind, the decision to have a white actor playing the first Mrs Rochester feels utterly bizarre – surely not a naïve blunder but rather an

TOWIE meets Blasted by way of the Iliad in this breezily provocative fourth play from rising star playwright Ava Pickett. Bloodsport is both fresh but also pleasingly of a piece with Pickett’s other work, insofar as like her previous plays – even breakthrough Tudor smash 1536 – it’s set in Essex. In fact it’s not even her first play set in a slightly vulgar Essex living room (although the decor here is a lot whiter than in her very funny adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma). Bloodsport takes place in the aftermath of a Trojan War of sorts, although there’s no Greece or Troy but rather some kind of civil unrest that’s gripped the UK. Smartly, Pickett never defines precisely what this is or exactly what has happened: it may have been a gang war, it may have been closer to the recent nationalist protests (it’s clear the Trojan equivalents were deemed to be ‘foreign’ on some level), it may have been a full-scale civil war. When Gerard Monaco’s terrifyingly toxic Agamemnon-proxy Mario comes back into the home he shares with his wife Cee (Laura Aikman), he talks about ‘New England’, as if the country has been remade wholesale. He’s joined by his malleable younger brother Marcus (Jay Taylor, in the Menelaus role) and a traumatised, blood-spattered Helen (Michelle Dockery), shivering in her nightwear, who everyone seems to be trying to ignore.  After an awkward homecoming defined by Mario’s triumphal belligerence, all signs - including the intro from Ethan Moorhouse’s poetic Essex-bloke

Kimberly Akimbo has the sort of outlandish premise that makes you wonder if it’s going to be another entry in the annals of ‘mad things that only Americans are interested in’. But any  musical that wins five Tony awards and tempts the legendary Maria Friedman out of unofficial retirement is probably going to be alright, isn’t it? Well yes. In David Lindsay-Abaire’s adaptation of his own, more obscure 2001 play, Friedman stars as Kimberly LeVaco, a 15-year-old New Jersey schoolgirl who suffers from an unnamed condition which makes her age at four times the usual speed. This is obviously not a real thing that could really happen (or not in such a neat way). But this inverted suburban Benjamin Button allows itself the one wild metaphysical flourish and plays it with a beautifully straight bat. And of course, it’s a metaphor. Kimberly laconically notes early on that not many kids with the condition live beyond the age of 16. It could have been a musical about a teen with cancer or other more tangible terminal condition. But making it weird stops it feeling like a mawkish weepie about a dying girl and opens it up – Kimberly’s condition feels as much a metaphor for the transience of childhood and the fleetingness of life in general than a story to view literally. It’s also a rare gift of a role to a sixtysomething actor and – like Victoria Clark, who won a Tony for the Broadway production - Friedman absolutely seizes it in Michael Longhurst’s UK premiere. She is sensational as Kimb

The glut of big celebrity openings in September has left October a shade quieter than usual. It’s still one of the year’s busiest months however, and there’s still some pretty enormous plays: most notably Keira Knightley’s first stage role in over 15 years, in the latest from Britain’s hippest director. Elsewhere we have two members of the Stranger Things cast making their UK stage debuts in two very different shows, and a month that runs the gamut from the first ever UK production of (oh yes) High School Musical, to a massive-scale Japanese language adaptation of one of Haruki Murakami’s most out-there early novels.  The best new London theatre shows in October 2026 Photo: Sonia Friedman ProductionsStephen Dillane, Keira Knightley and Luke Thompson 1. The Lives of Others We should always be excited when Brit auteur Robert Icke returns to the stage to direct a play and what a treat it is that we get two this year. Following on from March’s boldly conceptual take on Romeo & Juliet, The Lives of Others is his first stage adaptation of an arthouse film – something the European directors he’s influenced by are massively into, but has never really caught on in the same way in British auteur circles. The Lives of Others is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning 2006 German film about a Stasi agent and the relationship he develops with the couple he spies upon. You can always trust Icke to get a superlative cast, and the big draw here is Keira Knightley in her first stag

★★★ Describing the plays of James Graham as ‘history podcast theatre’ would be mean and inaccurate but also a bit true. To be clear, Graham has produced many wonderful works of drama. But even when he’s not at his absolute best dramatically you’ll still come out of one of his historical dramas having learned a lot. The Standard of Living isn’t quite Graham at his best dramatically, because where his finest works have tended to be hyper-fixated on small, manageable periods of history. Here he almost has too much to say about his subject: the great economist John Maynard Keynes. Photo: Manuel HarlanNatalia Osipova and the ensemble Did he want to write a drama about Keynes’ membership of the Bloomsbury Group and the tensions that crept in between the gay economist and his bohemian artist pals when he went to work for the government, and when he later dumbfounded them by bringing home a woman, the blunt Russian ballet star Lydia Lopokova (Natalia Osipova)?  Did he want to write a play about Keynes’ rivalry with the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston)? Here the two are depicted as genuinely fond of each other, but so aghast at the other’s economic visions that they can’t help but becomes enemies. Or is The Standard of Living about… the standard of living, and Keynes’ belief in not only spending out of a recession, but that an infusion of art – be that the Degas paintings he snaps up for a song at the beginning, or Arts Council England which he founds at the end

New Young Vic artistic director Nadia Fall made a strong impression earlier this year when she announced her second season in charge of the iconic venue, with particular praise for a return to the European work that had been a characteristic of the venue during the 18-year golden age of David Lan’s tenure. Now she’s announced the rest of her second season – taking us up to summer 2027 – plus one sure-to-be-controversial work that will be arriving in just a few weeks. That would be The Pelicot Trial (Nov 30), a very rare chance to see a UK performance of a show by the provocative Swiss auteur Milo Rau. The four-hour piece of documentary theatre is indeed a harrowing recreation of the trial of the 51 men who raped Gisèle Pelicot over a period of years, including her own husband Dominique who drugged her and facilitated the assaults. Staged by the Young Vic in a one-off performance at County Hall (each country the show has toured gets just one performance) it promises to be a powerful and horrifying insight into the banality of evil. We already knew there would be a new play called dissent (Mar 5-Apr 24 2027) by the legendary (and legendarily capital letter-phobic) debbie tucker green. We still don’t really know what the play is about, but we do now know that it will star Lashana Lynch, in the Brit screen star’s first stage role in over a decade – a real coup for the Vic. There will be a run for blackout theatre company Darkfield’s short, disorientating hotel-set show Eulogy (M

It’s time to go down the rabbit hole: London’s steady stream of large-scale immersive shows continues apace with the imminent arrival of Alice Immersive Wonderland at Canada Water’s Dock X space. While the last few years have seen Dock X and the similar ImmerseLDN space play host to a string of spectacular history-based shows – Dock X’s last show was about the Vikings, and before that there was a big one about the Titanic – it does seem possible that we’ve now depleted the reserves of big pre-existing factual shows that had been touring Europe. Photo: Cités ImmersivesAlice Immersive Wonderland Hence ImmerseLDN is currently playing host to the decidedly non-factual, insta-friendly House of Dreamers. And you can expect a not dissimilar vibe – extravagantly photo-friendly, great fun for kids of all ages – from the slightly oddly titled Alice Immersive Wonderland, a two-hour immersive extravaganza which sees audiences journey through 10 spectacular rooms themed around Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. A French show (in English), it’ll offer a mix of high-tech flashiness while live actors will bring you face to face with the various denizens of Wonderland, and you’ll be able to indulge in such activities as a round of flamingolf or a ponder on the nature of existence in the Den of the Caterpillar.  After a rousing 90 minutes down the rabbit hole you’re invited to make your trip a little fancier by paying a visit to the immersive tea room, which sounds quite a lot

Autumn in London theatre is a time loosely delineated by the end of the rush of early to mid September shows that we’re currently experiencing (hey it’s still astronomical summer) and the encroachment of panto season, which feels like it gets earlier every year but for my purposes here ‘no Christmas shows’ is a hard and fast rule. There will be well over 100 theatre shows opening in London during this period and if you’re looking for more of a breakdown of the biggest things coming our way this season then do check out our overview of what’s best to book for in London at the moment, or our individual monthly top ten guides. This list, then, is purely and simply the five shows I’m personally most looking forward to seeing this autumn. 7 London theatre shows we’re most excited about in autumn 2026 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I wanted to start by recommending Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? @sohoplace (Sep 21-Dec 19, pictured top), but fair warning: it looks like everyone else had got the message already – it’s sold out. At the moment it’s returns only, but yes, Gillian Anderson is absurdly great casting as acidic professor’s wife Martha in this latest outing for Edward Albee’s all-time classic. The Standard of Living Opening in the same week as Virginia Woolf and also looking really great (and with tickets available) is The Standard of Living by James Graham (Theatre Royal Haymarket, Sep 21-Dec 12, buy tickets here). And when I say it looks great: it should hopefully follo

Now aged 88, Britain’s greatest living playwright Caryl Churchill remains our most enigmatic: her plays are dazzlingly other, dizzyingly surreal feats of linguistics and politics, and she has almost never given an interview. You might have reasonably concluded she’d retired: there hasn’t been a new play since 2021’s What If If Only. Churchill has certainly earned the right to retire, but that never really seemed to be her vibe, and given her habit of completely bypassing the usual commissioning system by spontaneously dropping off finished works with trusted associates, you’d never write her off. And now she’s back. Triumph is a 15-minute play that will run for 10 performances only next month. If a 15-minute play sounds like a silly thing to get excited about then one, you’re wrong. Two, a Caryl Churchill play typically has the linguistic density of a supernova and doesn’t need to be very long. And three, if you absolutely need more persuading Triumph features a superlative cast of Matthew Beard and, most notably, Kate O’Flynn, the Brit stage star who has gone on to bigger things on TV via her Emmy-winning turn in Widow’s Bay. What’s the play about? The only description we have is the following: ‘Excellent work, the emperor’s happy. That makes me happy.But Press Secretary Iris is falling for a reporter. Will everyone stay happy?’ Presumably it’s a fairly political number but who really needs to know the details: it’s Caryl frickin’ Churchill. Directed by her regular collabor

★★★ Sting’s musical The Last Ship has had a fairly rough sailing of it so far: in the 13 years since it launched in the States it’s been through three iterations with three different writers and three different directors. The one great constant is Gordon Sumner himself: as well as writing the songs, he’s expended a lot of time and money on the project, including a stint performing in the 2014 Broadway incarnation (where he replaced his old pal Jimmy Nail in an effort to bolster flagging ticket sales) and this globally touring version in which he’s just gone ‘fuck it’ and fully embraced the role of grizzled shipyard foreman Jackie White. There are a lot of maddeningly avoidable problems with The Last Ship, but for the first 10 minutes or so they’re essentially irrelevant because it has a truly awesome start. The hulking full-sized ship’s hull of 59 Studios’ semi-projected set is a stunning sight to behold, and the opener ‘Island of Souls’ is a rare classic Sting song, given a real shot in the arm by clanking industrial shipyard sounds and a fiery vocal from the man himself. It’s a decent first half in general, charting the beginning of the end of the Wallsend shipyards – where Sting’s father Ernest worked – though the eyes of its workers and the local community, plus Gideon (Declan Bennett), who has returned to town after 17 years’ absence to come to terms with his late father’s death. Several characters from the previous versions have been dropped for Leo Warner’s production.

★★★★ Last summer I was at an arts festival in Poland and so was Tilda Swinton, performing a show of her own devising called Embodying Pasolini. Performance art rather than theatre, it was definitely interesting, and very much in keeping with a post-fame live career that has seen her eschew conventional stage acting: in the ‘90s she famously slept in a glass box for a week at the Serpentine gallery, a signature piece she revived a couple of decades later in New York. Which is very cool and very Tilda Swinton but also kind of a shame because Swinton by all accounts tore up the stage in her twenties before settling on film as her medium. You don’t begrudge Derek Jarman for luring her away to the world of arthouse celluloid. But it would be nice if she still did normal plays! What’s shocking about Man to Man, the wholesale rival of the Swinton-starring 1987 version of German playwright Manfred Karge’s monologue, is that it is a normal play. Maybe not a conventional one. But as the curtain lifts to reveal Swinton leering away at us in whiteface, house coat, Y-fronts and a shock of punky blonde hair – a sort of incongruously elegant hybrid of Johnny Rotten and Rab C Nesbitt – there’s something reassuringly actorly about the sarf London growl she adopts, so far from her own fluting tones. Obviously we’re all here to see Tilda Swinton the icon. But this isn’t one of her arch performance projects, it’s a proper play, in which she loses herself in a proper character. It’s a show that p

King’s Cross’s swanky immersive film theatre the Lightroom launched in 2023 with a splashy exhibition entitled David Hockney: Bigger & Closer. Although the show has remained in the repertoire over the last few years, Lightroom has proven to be much more than just a glorified version of one of those iffy projected art pop-ups. It has steered clear of further shows based on the works of major visual artists, with a pleasingly wayward repertoire of original immersive films (which are projected on the floor and walls of the space at massive scale) that have run the gamut from Tom Hanks to dinosaurs to Coldplay to Wallace and Gromit. After four years, though, Lightroom has earned the right to do another big art show, and it’s a really big one. While Bigger & Closer was a collaboration with Hockney prior to his passing, Matisse: Joy is of course a film based around the works of the great Henri Matisse. For it, the Bigger & Closer team have regrouped to take us on a journey through his dazzling – and, yes, joyous – 60-year career, running from such paintings as ‘Joy of Life’ and ‘The Dance’ to his iconic cut-outs, to the Matisse Chapel in Vence.   Photo: LightroomHenri Matisse at home in Vence, 1948 (b/w photo) It can be a little unclear what you’re literally getting with a Lightroom show until you actually see it but in a nutshell it looks like the vibe is a wide-ranging array of Matisse’s works, blown up to gigantic size on the Lightroom’s huge digital projectors, accompanied by

Shedinburgh is a shed that is also a performance venue that was devised by Francesca Moody, the Edinburgh Fringe producer with the golden touch, who has masterminded the success of such notable recent festival triumphs as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer, and last year’s Weather Girl. The original idea was that in the summer of 2020, live performances were streamed from the shed in lieu of the cancelled Fringe. That work out well: so well that last year Moody brought it to Edinburgh as an actual place you could visit and see shows in (it’s a pretty big shed now). And this year it came back back with a greatly expanded line-up that had a full run at the Fringe and now it hits London’s Young Vic. The line-up is a pretty damn awesome who’s who of leftfield British performing talent. Although the Young Vic line-up is a little slimmed down from the Edinburgh one, there is, frankly, so much on that it’s difficult to really pull out highlights, but let’s just say there’s a lot happening, from the revival of classic Fringe hits of yore like Bryony Kimmings’ hilarious breakthrough show Sex Idiot, to big name comics like Jordan Brookes and Rosie Jones, to first look new shows from Time Out faves like RashDash (pictured top) and Sh!t Theatre.  Here then, as an exclusive, is the complete line up for Shedinburgh’s Young Vic dates. There are 100 seats per performance, some for each show sold on a pay-what-you-can basis. Photograph: Matt CrossickShedinburgh LON

The Natural History Museum has pledged to open a new gallery a year, every year until its 150th birthday in 2031, and while in most cases this will involve refreshes of spaces that were already open – eg next year the old Creepy Crawlies gallery will become a new children’s gallery – the process kicks off with the unsealing of a gallery that’s been closed to the public for 83 years. A little history: back in the day the room was used to display animal skeletons (an osteology gallery if you’re being technical), which the Victorians were big fans of. After the NHM’s old herbarium (that’s collection of dried plant specimens to you) was damaged by a bomb during World War II, the room was repurposed in 1943 as the new herbarium. And now it’s making its return as a public space, entitled the Nature and Us gallery, ‘where visitors can explore our evolving relationship with the natural world through 50 remarkable objects.’ Photo: David ParryThe gallery First impressions: it’s a very atmospheric space, largely because its walls are lined with row upon row of wooden filing cabinets, which are empty now, but once contained pressed, dried plants (a wooden filing cabinet is apparently not a great way of preserving pressed, dried plants). It’s a nice flourish, a peek into the NHM as a working building and a sense that we are indeed in an obscure corner of the gargantuan museum’s innards. Tucked high up on the second floor near the cross section of giant sequoia tree, it’s not a particula

It’s been 16 years since the mega success of the stage musical adaptation of Legally Blonde in London, which won three Olivier awards and was a massive step in the stage career of a young Sheridan Smith. It ran for almost three years – significantly longer than it played on Broadway, where it originated. And it’s clear London is a city that loves the story of ditsy pink-loving wannabe lawyer Elle Woods, who follows her snobby WASP boyfriend to Harvard and ends up cracking a major case: we also had a big revival in 2022 at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. And now it’s time for a third production! This latest iteration of Legally Blonde is a touring edition that originated at Leicester’s musical powerhouse the Curve Theatre, and is coming to London for the first time. It’s directed by the Curve’s boss Nikolai Foster, who seems to have been more or less handed the keys to the gigantic London Coliseum: his production of Legally Blonde will play a two-month stint there in the spring, right before his new production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory debuts there in the summer.  Actor, Love Island winner and Strictly Come Dancing 2025 runner-up Amber Davies will play Elle, returning to the theatre where she starred a year ago in the hit Great Gatsby musical. London Coliseum, Mar 22-May 22 2027. Our theatre editor picks the seven shows he’s most looking forward to this autumn. The best musicals in London, A-Z. Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke – from news and revi