Things to do in London this weekend (14-15 March)

The Irish really know how to celebrate, so when it comes to St Patrick’s Day in London, the city’s Celtic community has no problem showing us how it’s done. The celebration of Ireland’s patron saint is always one big welcoming bash, involving plenty of dancing, hearty traditional dishes, a huge parade and as many pints of Guinness and drams of whiskey as you can handle. Much of the action takes place this weekend, before the official holiday, including the Mayor of London’s annual St Patrick’s Day Festival celebration. Here’s our pick of where to join the craic this weekend. 

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is as American as apple pie, so on paper it seems like a strange first choice of play for Michael Sheen’s new Welsh National Theatre. But the whole thing manages to be so exuberantly Welsh that you’ll soon forget the town of Grover’s Corners is supposed to be somewhere in New Hampshire. Francesca Goodridge’s production does Welshify a few details, but it softens (and maybe sentimentalises) a strange play that’s often intentionally served up cold and dry. It’s impressive and undeniable that the Welsh National Theatre has stamped itself on a classic with its very first production. Wales is lucky to have Michael Sheen, who has turned his back on Hollywood to launch his new theatre company. And if the WNT productions keep transferring this way, then we’re lucky to have him too.

It’s easy to take our dear mums and everything they do for granted. While you should be showing her your appreciation all-year round, Mothering Sunday is the perfect chance to give your ma a proper break and do something to make her feel extra special. Now’s the time to get organised and plan a proper celebration of the matriarchs in your life for Sunday March 15 with our comprehensive guide.  

The Southbank Centre is teaming up with Switzerland’s Montreux Jazz Festival for a second time to present a weekend of events celebrating the legacy of legendary Miles Davis. There'll be a mixture of free and ticketed events, workshops, panel discussions and jam sessions inspired by the trumpeter's work, in the centenary year of his birth. Highlights include a gig from Theo Croker with a line-up of special guests, and Mercury Music Prize-nominated corto.alto playing a set that takes in broken-beat bounce and bass-heavy dub, signposting jazz's future sounds.  

The Fat Badger is allegedly a pub, but one that goes against the very concept of the pub by hiding behind a velvet rope. A woman with a guestlist will send you through the backdoor and up to the top of the stairs to the restaurant. Freed from the tyranny of the menu, you pay £105 for whatever George and the team decide they want to serve that week. Thankfully, George – who honed his craft at The River Cafe – is a chef you can trust. Despite their insistence, the Fat Badger is not a pub. It’s not even a gastropub. It is simply a very good restaurant, and there’s no shame in that, and it has some seriously great food.  

Frankenstein’s monster gets a companion, and thanks to writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, the Bride is given a voice – in fact, it’s more of a roar. Played fearlessly by Jessie Buckley, this Bride is very much alive. Gyllenhaal stitches together many genres: from B-movies and crime thrillers to musicals. An eerie black and white opening sees Buckley play Mary Shelley, suspended in an afterlife but somehow able to connect her consciousness to that of a young living human. She is Ida (also Buckley), a smart but stifled working girl in 1930s Chicago who becomes apparently possessed by the spirit of Shelley. Buckley is brilliantly unhinged as the white-haired, ink-stained Bride, whose dialogue switches from Ida’s Chicago drawl to Shelley’s cut-glass literate wit. Gyllenhaal brings thought-provoking feminist concepts into a big-budget, accessible, genre-blending movie.

There’s a double bill going on at the Hayward Gallery, and the theme is fabrics: whether it’s what we wear or the fabric of life itself. The companion exhibitions are designed to be experienced one after the other. First is Chinese sculpture artist Yin Xiuzhen’s Heart to Heart, which is an ode to used clothes. She uses pieces of clothing stitched together and stretched over metal frames to make her huge immersive installations. Next, Yin Xiuzhen’s work is a perplexingly dense tangle of crimson thread. Both installations encourage you to engage with how they’ve been constructed and exhibited. But more universally, both shows tap into something invisible yet ever-present; whether it’s the interconnectedness of all things, or how history moves forward one wardrobe change at a time. 

Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass is a really weird play. It concerns a Jewish Brooklyn housewife who is inexplicably paralysed in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, Germany’s 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom. But that doesn’t touch the fact that Miller’s last big hit is a seething Freudian stew, spiced with Jewish guilt, a heady, occasionally surreal blend of desire and regret. This is a fascinating and fitfully brilliant production of a fascinating and fitfully brilliant play. 

Have you ever swum with a sea snake? If not, you may soon get your chance. Apparently, UK waters are about half a century off becoming habitable to these potently venomous creatures, but if you’re impatient, Somerset House has you covered. Artist Diana-Fiona Armour has scaled up a 3D scan of this endangered sea snake (more professionally known as Aipysurus fuscus), sliced it into three parts, illuminated it with mesh-LED, and set it among the courtyard’s dancing fountains. By night, it makes for impactful viewing, the snake gleaming with the cold shine of a vodka luge: slick, slippery, disco-lit. 

Known to many in her home country of Colombia as ‘La Maestra’, Beatriz González is considered to be one of the most influential artists to come out of Latin America, and this vast collection of over 150 works spanning her six-decade-long career leaves you with no questions as to how she garnered such a reputation. There’s a Warholian quality to much of her work, which uses images of figures from mainstream media and pop culture as subjects, ranging from Queen Elizabeth II to Jackie Onassis to Botticelli’s Venus, all in bright, vibrant block colours. González passed away at the age of 93 in January of this year, making this reflection on her once-in-a-generation career feel all the more poignant. Paying a visit to this splendid survey of her most consequential work feels like the perfect way to pay tribute to an artist who, right up until her death, used her talent to challenge mainstream opinion and shine a light on those who needed it most.

Pixar loves a furry body-swap adventure, but the animation house has really gone full David Attenborough with its latest, in which a young woman turns into a beaver to save her verdant corner of the American burbs. The results are like Avatar meets Life on Earth with bits of Mission: Impossible, The Birds, Sharknado and John Carpenter thrown in. Somehow from that eccentric array of ingredients, the studio has cooked up its funniest and most exciting effort since 2017’s Coco. Smart storytelling and snappy editing elevate the jokes and enrich the emotions. The animation, bursting with autumnal colours, is a delight too. 

Anna Ziegler’s 90-minute two-hander, Evening all Afternoon, is a tremendous vehicle for two actors. It enables an absolutely storming stage debut for Erin Kellyman. She plays Delilah, the surly university-age American daughter to an unseen British father. He’s taken her back home to England, where she marinates in the grief at her mother’s death and the isolation of the Covid lockdown. And also resentment of her dad’s new wife Jennifer (Anastasia Hille). The play is built on a fascinating variation on the old Brit/Yank culture clash. Over the course of 90 minutes, Ziegler smartly deconstructs their facades.

Joo Young Won used to be head chef at the Michelin-starred Galvin at Windows, his new restaurant, Calong, is cosy and simple, with food made for sharing. Chef Joo was raised in South Korea, but began his cookery career in the UK, and for a long time focused on French technique. It shows. Calong sees him cooking dishes inspired by his native cuisine in a masterful light-touch fusion fashion. A warm pumpkin and crisp pear salad is delicately dressed with gochujang, cured Chalkstream trout with perfectly tart sesame and plum soy, the fried chicken is crunchy yet silky, and a BBQ onglet is sweet and tender with a bulgogi jus. It’s one of the most exciting restaurants Stoke Newington has to offer. 

Get a glimpse of the hidden lives of queer people in midcentury New York at this intimate exhibition. Before homosexuality was legalised, Donna Gottschalk photographed the people she described as ‘brave and defiant warriors’ for daring to live openly as themselves, and take part in the emerging lesbian, trans and gay rights movements. This Photographers Gallery exhibition of her work puts her images in conversation with texts by writer Hélène Giannecchini, who is decades her junior, creating an intergenerational dialogue charting changing times. 

The Young V&A’s Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends is nominally aimed at kids aged eight to 14, but there’s plenty for adults too. It’s a nice mix of nostalgic paraphernalia that will appeal to adults, and hands-on, how-to-make-your-own stop-motion film stuff that youngsters will get a kick out of. The original models are fascinating, charming and surprisingly impressive. From the gargantuan pirate ship from Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! to a series of versions of Wallace & Gromit’s Were-Rabbit that gradually strip it down to its robot skeleton. It’s just really cool – and maybe a little moving. 

The National Portrait Gallery has been on a solid run in recent years, particularly when it comes to exhibitions on contemporary portraiture – we loved its exhibitions on The Face and Jenny Saville last year – so we have high hopes for this, the biggest exhibition to be shown in the UK to date from the iconic photographer Catherine Opie. Curated in collaboration with the artist, the exhibition will span the Ohio-born artist’s three-decade career, exploring representations of home, family, identity, politics and power structures through Opie’s vivid and colourful portrait photographs. Works featured in the exhibition will span her first major work, Being and Having (1991), her portraits of LGBTQ+ friends inspired by court painter Hans Holbein, to her Baroque-like portraits of artists.

Tracey Emin: A Second Life is an evocative experience. Positioned as a 40-year retrospective through the pioneering artist’s vast and varied repertoire, the show lays bare Emin’s life through her distinct and often unsettling art, from career highs – such as the iconic, Turner Prize-nominated ‘My Bed’, which is every bit as shocking and moving today as it was in 1998 – to stark personal lows in work depicting her experiences with sexual violence, abortion and recent life-threatening illness. As you can imagine, with such subject matter, it is not always a comfortable experience for the artist and the viewer alike. However, Emin’s flair for dark comedy adds moments of levity throughout. ‘Mad Tracey from Margate’ is truly a force to be reckoned with, and a master of reflecting society back at itself, warts and all.

The Picture Comes First, Rose Wylie’s marvellous retrospective at the Royal Academy, is hugely varied in its subject matter – ranging from the Blitz to Nicole Kidman – Wylie’s paintings are unified by a joyful and vibrant energy which beams out from all of them. The RA’s high ceilings and grand interiors act as a brilliant canvas for the artist’s large-scale, often child-like works. The 91-year-old Wylie is the first female painter to have a full retrospective in the space and it only adds to Wylie’s credentials as a trailblazing feminist artist. This show is a fantastic testament to an artist who has proven tenfold that age is no barrier to reaching one’s full potential. Equal parts puzzling, entertaining and thoughtful, this show is guaranteed to leave you in a better mood than when you arrived.

After a five-year-long world tour, this blockbuster exhibition on the ancient Egyptians is finally arriving in London. Ramses and the Pharaoh’s Gold will display 180 priceless treasures on loan from the Supreme Council of Antiquities, of which the pinnacle is the coffin of Ramses II, giving Londoners the chance to see an original sarcophagus here in the Big Smoke. Other gems on show will include gold masks,  silver coffins, animal mummies, amulets, jewellery and colossal sculptures. Although superficially sounding quite similar to the recent Tutankhamun immersive exhibition, this one seems a lot more based around Ancient artefacts, with none of the fanciful CGI frippery that’s come into fashion in the world of international touring exhibitions the last couple of years.

Broadwick Soho landed in 2023 with serious flair and has been delivering a hit of West End glamour ever since. Inside the hotel, Dear Jackie is its seductive Italian dining room, all Murano glow, red silk walls and plush booths made for lingering. Expect refined Italian comfort food, standout pasta and classic cocktails from Bar Jackie to set the mood.

Our exclusive Time Out offer saves you 30% (now £33), for three courses and a cocktail worth up to £14. It’s an indulgent pre-theatre treat or the kind of Soho dinner that could easily turn into a late night.

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Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined beyond belief, through cutting-edge technology. Situated in Marble Arch, Frameless plays host to four unique galleries with hypnotic visuals and a dazzling score. Enjoy 90 minutes of surreal artwork from Bosch, Dalí and more for just £23.60!

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A revival of William Nicholson’s 1989 play, Shadowlands, stars Hugh Bonneville as the devoutly Christian Chronicles of Narnia author CS Lewis, and traces his real-life romance with the younger American poet Joy Davidman. And it’s largely delightful, not an odd couple meet cute, but a story about a genuine, real connection between two somewhat lost souls. It’s high-class MOR, a chaste romantic fantasy that plays great with the Bonneville stans. 

Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy is a truly extraordinary revival. Anthony Lau’s production is the first Rattigan we’ve seen that throws off the shackles of naturalism. Here, Rattigan joins Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen et al in being deemed a playwright whose work can be given a batshit staging and still stand tall. Staged in the round, designer Georgia Lowe’s distinctly Brechtian, wilfully anachronistic set, it liberates star Ben Daniels from period constraints, freeing him up to deliver what is easily the best stage performance of the year to date. He plays Gregor Antonescu, a Machiavellian Romanian-born financier who on the cusp of triggering a fresh financial crash. It’s an extraordinary couple of hours of theatre, the performance of the year wrapped up in a wild production that tears up everything we thought we knew about how to stage good old Terence Rattigan.

This year’s New Contemporaries exhibition, a showcase of 26 of the UK’s finest emerging artists, includes themes of – and you may want to take a breath here – dystopian futures, the climate crisis, industrialisation, gentrification, displacement, critical approaches to systems of power, digital technologies, mourning, remembrance, and loss. Among others!

Sweetmeats, from writer Karim Khan and director Natasha Kathi-Chandra, offers a love story about the older generation – slow-burning and cocooned in domestic simplicity. Two widowers, Hema (Shobu Kapoor) and Liaquat (Rehan Sheikh), meet at a Type 2 diabetes management course. It’s hardly a classic meet-cute, but it’s a plausible one. As with most romances, they begin by bickering. It has something resonant to say about forgotten generations and their desires, about the cultural specificities that connect and nourish, and about intergenerational families at a stage of life we rarely see onstage. It’s not glamorous, but it’s very sweet.

The NPG will be the UK’s first museum to stage an exhibition focussing on Lucain Freud’s works on paper, including some artworks seen on display for the first time. Focussing on Freud’s mastery of drawing in all forms, Drawing into Painting will look at the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with the human face and figure, from the 1930s to the early 21st century.

Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece is a work of burning, ravenous intelligence, and almost universally acknowledged as his best work. It’s a play about the unpredictability of humanity, how we’re defined by our transience, our sex drives, and our desire to understand. Carrie Cracknell’s revival is not an attempt to radically reconfigure Arcadia. She and her team - notably designer Alex Eales - have leaned nicely into the Old Vic’s current in-the-round configuration with a revolving circular stage that neatly encapsulates the underlying sense of cosmic wonder that underpins it all. Arcadia is a perfect play, which means there’s a lot less wiggle room for a director to impose themselves. It’s also unforgiving to actors. Cracknell gives it a nice air of intimacy and avoids having her cast speechify Stoppard’s ornate prose.

French painter Georges Seurat was dead by 31, but in fewer than 50 canvases, he left an indelible mark on art history. By applying thousands of dots and dashes of pure colour right next to each other, he pioneered the technique of Pointillism. More than half of Seurat’s output is stoic visions of the sea from towns along the northern French coast. Featuring works painted over five summers between 1885-90, the linear curation of the show tracks you through each stop Seurat made along the coast. As his style becomes more refined with each sojourn, dashes turn into dots, which condense tighter and closer, deepening the dreamy shading of these scenes. The paintings become windows through which you can feel the sea breeze. This is him returning to the fundamental aspect of not just painting but sight itself. 

Did you know that the samurai believed gender and sexuality were fluid, and that they practically invented the concept of being non-binary? This progressive view is one of many riveting – and surprising – things to be learnt at the blockbuster Samurai exhibition at the British Museum. There’s a lot crammed into the exhibition, which outlines the past 1,000 years through 280 objects and pieces of digital media, following the rise of the samurai from fierce mercenaries in the 1100s, through to their reign as an aristocratic social class from the 1600s to the 1800s. There are enough brilliant facts, bloody details and fascinating items on display for any non-Japanophile.