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The final weekend of November is going to be a total fun-fest with all the events we've rounded up below! Hop between Christmas markets to pick up festive gifts and delicious treats, catch Danny Boyle discussing his latest flick 'Steve Jobs' at a special screening, or unleash your inner kid with a day of play at the Barbican. Enjoy!
Things to do
Mayfair Christmas Market, Mayfair Place, Sat, free. Mayfair Place will be closed to traffic for this new Christmas market hosted by local restaurant Novikov. Shop for gifts, decorations, food products and even trees, and make sure to drop by Santa's Grotto with any younger visitors.
Serious Play, Barbican Centre, Sat, free. This one-day public event is a celebration of play occurring alongside the Barbican's exhibition ‘The World of Charles and Ray Eames’. Toys and play were an important aspect of the Eames's process and they designed many toys and games including The House of Cards, The Plywood Elephant, and Solar Do-Nothing Machine.
London Type-In, The Jones Family Project, Sat, free. This meet-up for typewriter enthusiasts lets you test your typing skills, take a look at some beautiful machines, meet avid collectors and send letters with free stationary and stamps provided.
Christmas Designer Market, V&A Museum of Childhood, Sun, free. The Musuem of Childhood and Dot to Dot present a one-stop stop shop for early Xmas present shopping. There will be an eclectic selection of gifts from independent designer-makers to browse and buy.
Hyper Japan Christmas Market, Tobacco Dock, all weekend, £13-£16. Hyper Japan is back this November with a Christmas market celebrating Japanese culture and cuisine at its best. Browse stalls selling fashion goods, toys, wrapping paper, traditional tableware and crockery.
Being A Man, Southbank Centre, all weekend, £15 day pass, £35 three day pass. The Southbank Centre's Being a Man (BAM) Festival returns for a second year of music, comedy, literature, performance, screenings and discussion exploring the challenges and pressures of modern masculine identity.
…or check out more events happening in London this weekend.
Eating and drinking
Struie Road, Workshop Coffee Co, TONIGHT, £35. Running south from the small Scottish village of Arday, Struie Road and the land that surrounds it is known for its high quality meat, fish, cheese and whisky. Wild Game Co. founder Andy Waugh who grew up there, sources all the food he serves at his supper clubs from the area, transforming the produce into eight courses of seasonal delight with a modern twist.
Wine Car Boot, West Handyside Canopy, Fri-Sat, £12 one session, £20 for two sessions, £30 for three sessions. Try and buy from London's best wine merchants, line your stomach with something delicious from the food stalls and listen to the live music to sip and sample.
Love Brunch with John Gregory-Smith, Carousel, Sun, £10. Author of several cookbooks (most recently 'Turkish Delights') John Gregory-Smith will be using the skills learnt on his travels to serve up a Levantine brunch to raise money for the Unicef Syrian Children's Appeal.
Foodies Festival Christmas, The Truman Brewery, all weekend, £12 adv, £15-£18 day tickets, £23 three day pass, £35-£39 VIP, cons available. The Foodies Festival returns with another Chrimbo special, which promises three days of festive culinary fun including live cooking demonstrations, drinks master classes, a Champagne Ski Bar and a Pudding Hall selling mulled wine, eggnog, cakes, pies and bonbons galore.
Thank Ya Papa, Styx Bar, all weekend, £35-£45. Tuck into a Mississippi-style Thanksgiving feast with Slap Ya Papa, whose Michelin-trained chefs have designed a menu of candied yams, deep-fried turkeys and plenty more.
…or check out the latest restaurant reviews.
Comedy
Pajama Men – 2 Man 3 Musketeers, Soho Theatre, Fri-Sat, £22.50, £20 concs. This rubber-limbed physical comedy pair loosely follow the plot of Dumas’s novel in their latest epic adventure show. The PJs are enormously talented, seamlessly shifting between a vast number of characters.
Max & Ivan: The End, Soho Theatre, Fri-Sat, £15, £12.50 concs. Max and Ivan aren’t just any old sketch act – their feel-good storytelling shows are like live Hollywood movies, complete with explosions, love interests and unexpected twists.
Phil Wang: Philth, The Invisible Dot Ltd, Fri-Sat, £10, £9 concs. Phil Wang's developing into a talented stand-up. He's nailed his persona, now – confident yet laidback and slightly aloof – and his smart material reveals his most recent goofs.
UK Jewish Comedy Festival, JW3, Sat-Sun, £10. The Jewish Comedy Festival (the country's first), from NW3's JW3 venue, is back for a second year, featuring stand-up shows, conversations, films and more throughout the week.
…or check out all the critics’ choice comedy shows.
Live music
Eska, Islington Assembly Hall, TONIGHT, £19.50, £13.50-£16.50 adv. Nominated for this year’s Mercury Prize after years as a session singer, Eska Mtungwazi is finally headed for star status. Her innovative soul music touches on afrobeat, folk, funk and electronica, and she’s got a truly incredible voice.
UFest CoSign Concert, Copper Box Arena, Sat, £10. Five top talents rock the Olympic Park as part of a new youth culture festival, UFest. Catch Naughty Boy, Lady Leshurr, the Mobo-winning Section Boyz, Big Narstie and Fekky plus four unknown acts voted by the public.
Public Service Broadcasting, O2 Academy Brixton, Sun, £24. Thrilling post-rock soundscapes laced with sampled voices from archive films and radio.
…or take a look at all the live music events in London this weekend.
Nightlife
Winterville Spiegeltent: Bugged Out’s Little Bugger, Victoria Park, TONIGHT, £5. Party crew Bugged Out are hosting a series of full-on-fun weekly club nights at the Spigeltent in east London festive pop-up village Winterville. Tonight boasts guest DJ Artwork, one third of Dubstep super-group Magnetic Man but also a stellar selector in his own right.
Livin' Proof Eighth Birthday, Oval Space, Sat, £20 (door tickets only). Livin' Proof celebrates eight years of prime hip hop parties, with long-standing residents Snips, Rags, Budgie and Khalil working through the finest, freshest and funkiest sounds. Happy birthday, LP!
Straight Nasty, VFD, Sat, £5, £3 before 11pm. Abandon every notion of cool, descend to the Vogue Fabrics basement and party to the pop anthems you lived for when you were a tween: everything from Destiny's Child to the Spice Girls to Peter Andre, mixed up with some more contemporary pop sounds.
Horse Meat Disco, The Eagle, Sun, £6. This long-standing residency from obscenely funky and highly acclaimed DJ crew Horse Meat Disco has become a Sunday night staple for many.
…or see all the parties planned this weekend.
Film
Shuffle Festival: Steve Jobs and Danny Boyle Screening, Second Home, TONIGHT, £35. Catch the smash-hit Steve Jobs biopic, and hear from the man who brought it to the big screen at this special event in east London's Second Home. Danny Boyle who directed the film will be taking part in an exclusive Q&A session during the event which aims to raise funds for the fantastic Shuffle Festival.
Classic Cinema Club: ‘Z’, Ealing Town Hall, TONIGHT, £7, £6 concs. Costa-Gavras's crowd-pleasing thriller was based on the 1965 Lambrakis affair, in which investigation of the accidental death of a medical professor uncovered a network of police and government corruption.
Full Moon Film Night: ‘Night of the Living Dead’, Deptford Cinema, Sat, £5, £3.50 concs. With its radical rewriting of a genre in which good had always triumphed over evil, Romero's first feature shattered the conventions of horror. Together with a small group of fellow survivors, young Barbara holes up in a farmhouse besieged by an ever-swelling tide of flesh-eating zombies.
Out 1: Noli Mi Tangere, Prince Charles Cinema, Sat, £40. Can you endure 13 hours of arty Frenchness? The full version of Jacques Rivette's grand experiment is almost too much to cope with. This features improvisations by some of the best New Wave actors, edited and arranged so that sometimes it's telling a complex mystery story – about thirteen conspirators, two theatre groups, and a couple of crazed outsiders.
Or at the cinema...
Carol★★★★★ Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara shine in Todd Haynes's beautiful, 1950s-set Patricia Highsmith adaptation.
Black Mass ★★★☆☆ Anyone easy-to-please and mourning the fact that Martin Scorsese hasn’t made a mobster flick in a while should take heart from ‘Black Mass’. It’s the entertaining, if limited, tale of how seriously nasty South Boston crim James ‘Whitey’ Bulger operated with near immunity from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.
…or see all of the latest releases.
© Nigel Beighton
Theatre
Licensed to Ill, Camden People's Theatre, Fri-Sat, £12, £10 concs. This ultra-DIY, (ironically un-licensed) Beastie Boys musical is super-fun.
Pericles, Shakespeare's Globe, Fri-Sat, £10-£62. The first indoor Shakespeare production at the Globe is this thrillingly derring-do heavy take on the Bard's late play.
The Divided Laing, Arcola Theatre, Fri-Sat, £12-£19, £15 concs. An engrossing drama about batshit mental '60s psychiatrist RD Laing.
…or see our theatre critics’ choices.
This week's best new art
Peter Blake: Portraits and People, Waddington Custot, Fri-Sat, free. Leslie Waddington, Peter Blake’s gallerist since the height of his 1960s pop art fame, is one of the portraits in this career-spanning show, which also features a series of wrestlers.
Allen Jones: Colour Matters, Marlborough, Fri-Sat, free. New sculptures by the British artist notorious for his stylised images of the female form.
Gavin Turk: Wittgenstein’s Dream, Freud Museum, all weekend, £7, £4-£5 concs, free under 12s. The British artist explores the tempestuous relationship between two of Vienna’s most enlightened thinkers, Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein with his installation in Freud’s former home.
Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA, al weekend, free. The annual art trend barometer presents work by 37 fine art graduates.
…or see all London art reviews.
And finally
Win... exclusive tickets to the NYE's fireworks display and champagne on the Coca-Cola London Eye or exclusive tickets to 'Soaring Flight' at The Courtauld Gallery and a private gliding lesson
Grab... a three-course dining experience and a glass of Champagne at The Ritz Restaurant
Book… these gigs while you still can
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