Things to do in London this weekend

Taco fever has well and truly taken over London, we just can’t get enough of the bite-size tortillas. Good job then that the latest installment of the Tacover is back in London to satisfy our cravings. Signature Brew is hosting a whopping taco festival with 10 sizzling vendors from across the UK offering up three different tacos each (including vegan options) which are all capped at £4. Los Gordos, Proper Tacos, Birria Taco, Mex Club and Pako Tacos are all on the line-up. In between snacks there’ll be beer, DJ sets, competitions (from tortilla slaps to speed eating), raffles and a specialist margarita bar. 

The Natural History Museum’s big exhibition for 2024 is this massive new celebration of our avian pals. As you can doubtless glean from the title, ‘Birds: Brilliant & Bizarre’ focuses on the weirder end of the feathered spectrum, from strange-looking birds to exploring the links between pigeons and T-rex to daring you to sniff a stinky seabird egg. 

For decades now, Elton John has been building a world class collection of photography with his partner David Furnish. It’s been shown all over the world, and now it’s the V&A’s turn. The exhibition is rammed full of iconic images by some of the most important names in photography: Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Juergen Teller, William Egglestone and on and on. Like you’d expect from a megastar, it’s pretty dazzling. This show spills out a story about style, fashion, the crippling excesses of success, the endless, head spinning allure of sexuality. It’s because it’s Elton John’s collection that this exhibition works. 

Aussie director Benedict Andrews’s UK reputation is heavily based on his extraordinary 2012 production of Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’, which turned the melancholy masterpiece into a wild fin de siècle romp. Andrews has done it again with another all-time take. Clearly there is something about Chekhov’s large ensembles, bittersweet humour and tales of fading aristocrats that draw out the best in him. The play builds to a queasily brilliant climax, but it’s the journey that’s the joy. You wish it would last forever.

Crystal Palace Beer Festival returns to Holmesdale stand in Selhurst Park stadium to enjoy that ultimate pairing: football and alcohol. This year, to celebrate 100 years of the beautiful game at the venue over 100 beers, ales and ciders will be on offer as the FA Cup Final is screened live around the concourse, as well as live performances from bands and DJs throughout the day. Tickets include two half-pint drink vouchers and a beer glass. Drinks tokens are £3.50. 

Oma is the latest opening from David Carter, the brawny Bajan chef and restaurateur who launched forerunner Smokestak and the show-stopping Manteca. Oma is Greek in the same way that Manteca is Italian, which is to say that traditionalists would baulk at what Carter and Jorge Paredes (ex-exec chef of Sabor) are doing here, while everyone else would tell them to hush up and enjoy the tsalafouti. Greek food is the jumping-off point for a menu that begins on the Ionian islands before skipping off to the Levant by way of the Balkans, with a south American stop-off. There’s also a whole menu of crudo and another dedicated to skewers cooked over a large grill. Oma is doing something exceptional. 

The British Library’s food season is packed full of events inspired by cookbooks and culinary manuscripts. Some of the sumptuous events planned include a live recording of Jessie and Lennie Ware’s award-winning Table Manners podcast, a celebration of the legendary recently-closed Le Gavroche, and a talk disclosing how rice travels around the world. There’s plenty to sink your teeth into.

Italian neorealism is one of the most prevalent post-war cinematic movements, and this season is centred around the re-release of Robert Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) which is considered the very first example. As with any great film fest, there’ll be insight from some experts, guest speakers will explore the impact various women have had on the movement, in front of and behind the camera, and the entire second half of the season will focus on work from the early ‘50s, with films such as Miracle in Milan and Stromboli. 

Is there anyone more committed to sharing their love of cinema than Martin Scorsese? Made In England might not be directed by Scorsese, its narrator, but it’s his lifelong love of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s films that anchors David Hinton’s passionate, wide-ranging doc. The film delivers a loving, access-all-areas tour of the duo’s work that takes in behind-the-scenes pics, stills and archive interviews. And of course, those stunning clips. It all makes for a grand introduction to some of their unforgettable images. Even a ten second clip of Black Narcissus or The Red Shoes holds more punch than most other films. 

In UK cinemas May 10.

It wasn’t unusual for women to paint in the seventeenth century, it was just unusual for them to live off it. But the Tate’s had enough of that bogus, patronising attitude and are hellbent on showing that anything men could do – even really ugly paintings – women could do too. Across these walls here is 400 years of women artists going toe to toe with the men. Society portraiture, allegorical painting, you name it, they could do it. This is art existing on its own terms, art of privacy, independence and innovation, finally able to peek out from the long shadows cast by men.

Owen Horsley’s lengthy production of ‘Twelfth Night’ finds might not reveal any incredible new depths in Shakespeare’s greatest comedy. But it is, nonetheless, lovely stuff. The conceit here is that all the action takes place inside a hulking seaside nightclub named Olivia’s and there’s a pleasing sitcom-like quality to the character’s various scrapes. With added songs it runs to three hours, which is a lot for a comedy. But this return to the Bard is about as quintessential as it gets. Play on!

Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer-winning play is a meaty watch, a pungent, spikey mix of laughs, tears and doomed defiance that centres on a multiracial group of misfits headed by Danny Sapani’s retired NYPD officer Walter. Boozing away his enforced retirement in a palatial but semi-dilapidated apartment in Manhattan, Walter’s career was ended six years ago when a young white officer mistakenly pumped him full of lead; he has spent the intervening years campaigning for heads to roll. What the play ultimately boils down to is a conundrum that’s been sloshing around in drama since at least ‘Antigone’. Walter has been seriously wronged and wants justice. But is it realistic to believe that he’s going to get it? It’s a timeless dilemma that’s been deftly retooled by Guirgis to ask questions about life in contemporary America. It’s a pleasure to spend time amongst Guirgis’s crew of misfits.

Turns out, not only does Harmony Korine make difficult obtuse films, he makes difficult obtuse paintings too. His show at Hauser & Wirth is full of psychedelic, violent, eye-searing paintings of scenes from his latest film, ‘Aggro Dr1ft’. The movie (starring Travis Scott and Jordi Molla) takes you on a dizzying, weird, fully infrared trip into the world of a masked assassin, patrolling deep undergrowth and lavish villas on a mission to kill a demonic crime lord. The paintings are full of that same tropical violence, 8-bit menace and throbbing, silent aggression.

Hayao Miyazaki’s animated masterpiece ‘Spirited Away’ is about a young girl, Chihiro, who enters a fantastical realm entirely populated with wild spirit beings, from an emo dragon-boy to a colossal overgrown baby. Bringing it to the stage is a huge ask technically. If the main challenge facing ‘Spirited Away’ is that a true transposition of the film would have to take your breath away constantly, then for three hours it at least does it frequently. 

Head to Token Studio, where you’ll be treated to a relaxing, fun 90-minute session that will involve throwing a potter’s wheel, making finger-sized miniature pottery, learning hand-building techniques. Or if you prefer to focus on design, opt for the pottery painting class, where you can pick a ready-made piece to be your canvas, be it a mug, plate or bowl. The best bit? You can bring your own beer! 

Book your BYOB Pottery Experience at Token Studio for £32 only through Time Out offers. 

Chelsea’s annual floral art show is back, bringing luscious colour to King’s Road, Sloane Street and other iconic locations.  As ever, the streets and squares and more than 120 businesses of SW10 will be transformed with wonderful floral displays created by retailers in the borough, and you can even vote for your favourites from 5 pm on Monday May 20. This year’s theme is ‘Floral Feasts’, so expect high-class horticulture inspired by The Very Hungry Caterpillar (by the team at All For Love London), Willy Wonka (by Maison de Fleurs) along with The Lady and The Tramp on Sloane Street and a take on Winnie The Pooh on the Kings Road.

Italian auteur, Luca Guadagino, delivers the equivalent of two terrific movies in one here. The first, a sports movie that will satisfy tennis fans in a way that, say, Wimbledon didn’t, examines the pressures of life as an elite athlete. The second, the one that draws you in deepest, is a satisfyingly murky relationship drama where viciousness and homoerotism bubble away beneath a stylish surface. On opposite sides of the net are Josh O’Connor’s Patrick Zweig and Mike Faist’s Art Donaldson. Watching on is Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, a former wunderkind forced to retire by a knee injury. It amps up the stakes perfectly in a film that will leave you almost as breathless as its players.

There are many things to like about the Spanish-ish bistro Lita. First, there’s the location; tucked onto a pleasant side street in Marylebone. Second, is the warm, inviting room. Third is the brazenly open kitchen. More interesting than all that though, is the man on the pans, Luke Ahearne. A dynamo of a chef, he has finally been granted a room of his own after toiling at a run of impressive restaurants; The Clove Club, Luca, and Corrigan’s Mayfair. Lita itself brands itself as a ‘southern Mediterranean’ restaurant, which means lots of fish, citrus, olive oil and ruddy, moist meats.

Grab your Stetson hat and ride on out to visit Phantom Peak, a fully immersive town to explore at your leisure, with quests to complete and people to meet. In this open-world adventure, there are intricate details and hidden secrets to be discovered. Interact with technology, immersive sets, and live actors as you discover the story of Phantom Peak through trails - unique quests to complete during your visit.

Get exclusive £10 off tickets to Phantom Peak, only through Time Out offers. 

For one unforgettable weekend in June (8 and 9), London’s hidden green spaces will open up to punters, giving them an inside look at City rooftops, historic formal garden squares, community gardens and allotments all weekend long. You’ll get exclusive access to unique places that are generally not open to the public, adding to the excitement of it all. See gorgeous florals, learn more about London’s green infrastructure and help to support places that are in decline or under threat of development. 

Get 2 for 1 tickets to the London Open Gardens Weekend for £19 only through Time Out offers.

There was a lot of love in the last years of Michelangelo Buonarotti’s life. Already hugely successful, the Renaissance master dedicated his final decades to loving his god, his family, his friends, and serving his pope. The proof of that love is all over the walls of this intimate little visual biography of the final years of his life, filled with his drawings and letters and paintings by his followers. We’ve had a lot of Michelangelo drawing shows in recent years, but the drawings in the last room of this show are incredible. They were never meant to be seen, they're frail, weak things, but they’re also an amazing vision of one of history’s greatest painters. 

Obsessive, repetitive, maximal: Nnena Kalu’s art is like an act of physical, aesthetic meditation. She takes textiles, plastic, unspooled VHS tapes, netting and rubbish and binds and rebinds it over and over. In the process, she creates hanging bundled forms of countless colours and textures. They hover like disembowelled organs, hearts and guts constructed out of detritus. They look tense, dangerous, ready to burst.

Take your tastebuds on a journey to Latin America with Chayote. With a picturesque view of Tower Bridge and St Katherine Docks, this restaurant offers the essence of Mexico, Peru, and Spain with high-end ingredients in every dish to provide an uncompromised culinary experience! Enjoy tortillas made using only Mexican imported corn, topped with only certified prime cuts of meats for delicate textures paired with indigenous to South American chillies in the salsas, mole, and sauces.

Get three courses and a margarita at Chayote for £23, only through Time Out Offers.

At Between The Bridges every Sunday this summer, SoLo Craft Fair will host the South Bank Summer Market, with over 60 traders selling a huge variety of bits and bobs from art, jewellery and fashion to kids’ products and more. Everything will have been created by independent designers from across the capital and if you want to try your hand at making something, there’ll be free workshops on site.

Never ending baskets of delicious dim sum. Need we say more? That means tucking into as many dumplings, rolls and buns as you can scoff down, all expertly put together by a Chinatown restaurant celebrating more than ten years of business. Taiwanese pork buns? Check. Pork and prawn soup dumplings? You betcha. ‘Supreme’ crab meat xiao long bao? Of course! And just to make sure you’re all set, Leong’s Legend is further furnishing your palate with a chilled glass of prosecco. Lovely bubbly.

Get 51% off bottomless dim sum at Leong's Legend only through Time Out Offers

Outdoor spaces are big business come London summertime, and this seasonal pop-up between Waterloo and Westminster bridges is one of the biggest in London. Boasting lovely views over the river Thames and an eclectic programme of drag shows, DJs, live performances and themed club nights, it’s packed with surprises. Look out for the Dock Disco, a regular Friday night of classic house, disco anthems and dance pop bangers, Sunday party We Are The Sunset, drag brunches and a seven-hour-long Swiftageddon club night. 

In Richard Jones’s staggering revival of Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionist classic, our first glimpse of Rosie Sheehy’s Young Woman is the sight of her freaking out in a press of black-clad ’20s New Yorkers. Jones’s production is an infernal anxiety machine, each hallucinatory scene immaculately crafted with its own distinct mood. Hyemi Shin’s retina-searing set is unforgettable, Benjamin Grant’s sound design skin-crawling unnerving, and Sheehy is astonishing. The whole thing is an observation that capitalism is a machine that crushes the little guy. It’s a tale of one woman standing up to the system turned into a pulverising rapture.

Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined through cutting-edge technology. Marble Arch’s high-tech Frameless gallery houses four unique exhibition spaces with hypnotic visuals reimaging work from the likes of Bosch, Dalí and more, all with an atmospheric score. Now get 90 minutes of eye-popping gallery time for just £20 through Time Out offers.

£20 tickets to Frameless immersive art experience only through Time Out offers 

Peckham Fringe returns for its third year with over 20 productions created by local artists and performers. The programme promises inventive, enthralling storytelling. Look out for ‘Time Fly’s’, a time-travelling adventure back to the south-east London of old and ‘Last Goal Wins’, an award-winning piece about five men trying out for the Nigerian national football team.

The cycle of 13 songs PJ Harvey has written for the National Theatre’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ‘Our Mutual Friend’ slot seamlessly into her body of work and elevate this adaptation of Dickens’s final finished novel. The show is billed as a play with songs: the tune count is a bit low for actual musical status, but nonetheless, Harvey’s songs are integral to the darkly satirical thriller that pivots on the disappearance of John Harmon, who disappeared on the day he returned to collect his inheritance following the death of his wealthy father. This story from the city is something special: Dickens’s late class drama turned into a work both elemental and righteous.

Can art save the world? Can it lead to world peace? Nah, probably not, but Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) believed it could. In the 1980s, the giant of post-war American art launched ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, pronounced ‘Rocky’ like his pet turtle), an initiative that saw him travel to countries gripped by war and oppression in an ambitious act of cultural diplomacy. He visited places like Cuba, Chile and the USSR and the results are on display here. As a document of a world gripped by paranoia and tension, of the slow demise of communism, of the birth of neoliberalism, it’s great. 

Yes, the presence of soon-to-turn-85 stage and screen legend Ian McKellen tackling Shakespeare’s great character Sir John Falstaff is the big draw in ‘Player Kings’. But Robert Icke’s three hour-40-minute modern-dress take on the two ‘Henry IV’ plays does not pander to its star, and is unwavering in its view that this is the story of two deeply damaged men, linked grimly together. McKellen is naturally excellent as an atypically elderly Falstaff, but it also has a supporting cast to die for See it because it’s a terrific take on one of the greatest plays ever written (plus its decent straight-to-DVD sequel) blessed tremendously original lead performances.

Britain is littered with symbols of death and exploitation. Public sculptures of controversial historical figures are everywhere, and now they’re in the Serpentine too, because Yinka Shonibare CBE has put them there. The Nigerian-British art megastar has filled the gallery with recreations of statues of Churchill, Kitchener, Queen Victoria and Clive of India. But they’re scaled down, their power diminished, minimised, undermined. And of course, they’re covered in Shonibare’s signature Dutch wax print. This is what Shonibare does: highlight, tear apart and subvert the legacy of British imperialism with directness, colour and wit.

This tiny exhibition is dedicated to the miserable, chaotic, sombre depiction of feverish violence that is the last painting of one of history’s most important artists, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It isn’t in the best state of repair, but it’s still a mesmerisingly beautiful work of art. It’s a maelstrom of movement and brutality and morbidity. It’s incredible. Caravaggio would die not long after finishing this painting, but what a way to go out. Not with a whimper, and not with a bang, but with a scream of blood-drenched anguish.

Photographer Nick Waplington’s ‘Living Room’ documented the community of the Broxtowe house estate in Nottingham in the ‘90s. The book was a sensation, and this amazing little exhibition brings together previously unseen photos from the same period. It’s the same families, houses and streets, but seen anew. There are scenes of outdoor life: dad fixing the motor in the sun; a trip to the shops to pick up a pack of cigs; everyone out grabbing an ice cream in the sun or play fighting in the streets. But it’s in the titular living room that the real drama plays out. It’s ultra-basic, super-mundane, but it’s overflowing with life and joy. Everyone is laughing, playing, wrestling. It’s as beautiful, powerful, genuine and moving now as it would have been three decades ago.

In a Wakefield hospital in 1980, while Sebastian Coe was running the 1500m wearing the number 254, Jason Wilsher-Mills’s parents were told he had only a few years to live. A bout of chicken pox led to his immune system attacking itself. But, he survived. Years in hospital in recovery awakened a deep creativity in him. This show is the culmination of all that struggle and creativity. There’s a hint of Grayson Perry to this show, mashed with pop culture and grizzly medical terror. Its aim is to make his illness, his trauma, unthreatening, unscary, a way of converting pain and fear into fun and colour.

‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ is a musical about three generations of incomers in Sheffield’s iconic – and infamous – brutalist housing estate, Park Hill. It’s a stunning achievement, which takes the popular but very different elements of retro pop music, agitprop and soap opera, melts them in the crucible of 50 years of social trauma and forges something potent, gorgeous and unlike any big-ticket musical we’ve seen before. It has deeply local foundations, based on local songwriter Richard Hawley's music and it was made in Sheffield, at the Crucible Theatre, with meticulous care and attention. It has all the feels – joy, lust, fear, sadness, despair, are crafted into an emotional edifice which stands nearly as tall as the place that inspired it.

Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle, which she gigged around New England before scraping the money together to record it as a critically acclaimed 2010 concept album that featured the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on guest vocals as the various mythological heroes and villains. Now, ‘Hadestown’ is a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It’s a musical of beautiful texture and tone and it doesn’t hurt that Mitchell has penned some flat-out brilliant songs. It’s a gloriously improbable triumph.