Things to do in London this weekend (10-11 January)

‘Take tissues’ is a hopeless cliché for Chloé Zhao’s (Nomadland) Tudor tearjerker. Tissues won’t do. You’ll need towels. With Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal delivering the performances of their careers, Hamnet tells the story behind Shakespeare’s great tragedy – Hamlet – and much more besides. The wild power of motherhood; the fearsome responsibility of parenting; the jolting anxiety of nurturing something precious in a time of death; the drive for creative expression. Zhao holds all these primal but relatable forces in check before unleashing them in an emotionally totalising final reel. Hamnet is a deep-felt ode to loss and resilience. Zhao doesn’t just tell you about the healing power of art, she shows you. Prepare your tear ducts accordingly. 

The Orange Tree’s artistic director Tom Littler brings an assured touch to Richard Sheridan’s eighteenth-century comedy of identity confusion, aided by a top-drawer cast who know how to tap into the play’s brand of jubilant absurdity. Littler treads nimbly through the archly funny contrivances that make up this play. He keeps the same setting – the city of Bath – but has cannily shifted the time period to the 1920s and made a few minor modernisations to the language. The decade’s changing social and gender morés, signified by between-scene bursts of joyful Charleston dancing, neatly serve to renew the focus on the male pomposity and anxiety that drive the plot. This production keeps the laughter rate high, skewering pretentiousness with some well-aimed potshots at fragile egos. It’s an excellent pick-me-up for the post-Christmas slump.    

In 1824, the young King Liholiho and Queen Kamāmalu travelled across oceans from their kingdom, Hawaiʻi, to seek an alliance with the British Crown. This winter British Museum will shine a light on the lesser-known story about the historical relationship between Hawaiʻi’ and the United Kingdom, showing artefacts and treasures created by Hawaiian makers of the past and present. You’ll be able to see everything from feathered cloaks worn by chiefs, to finely carved deities, powerful shark-toothed weapons, and bold contemporary works by Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) artists.

The original Plaza Khao Gaeng surprised everyone with its monumental greatness. A restaurant slipped into a food hall mezzanine isn’t supposed to be one of the best in London, and yet the bijoux, southern Thai-inspired canteen blew minds and mouths with its relentless approach to flavour and fun when it opened in 2022. Run by a Brit, Plaza held up its hands when it came to its inauthenticity, but made up for it with the dedication that chef-founder Luke Farrell poured into the place. Now, Plaza has a space to call its very own in Borough Yards. Menu favourites from the first location remain: creamy massaman curry with huge hunks of tender beef shoulder and the khua kling muu, punchy dry-fried pork with chillies, but there are also plenty of dishes unique to Plaza 2:0: a sexy strawberry dish that’s actually the hardest fruit salad in south London and the gaeng som pla, a sour orange curry with fillets of flaky bass. Go for big Thai flavours, super spice levels and lots of fishy dishes. 

Akram Khan’s remarkable reinterpretation of Giselle is back on at the Coliseum for a very short run. One of the most interesting takes on a classical ballet to come out of London in the past decade, Khan's electric choreography combines with Vincenzo Lamagna's earthier take on Adolphe Adam's wildly romantic score, played live by English National Ballet Philharmonic.

If you've been depleted by a December of office parties, omnipresent treats, and mulled wine on weeknights, then help is at hand. New festival Equanimity is designed to help Londoners reset and recharge in the heart of King's Cross. The centrepiece is Slomo's pop-up spa, which offers two wood-fired saunas, three cold plunge pools and a roaring fire, offering a corner of Scandinavia in Lewis Cubitt Square. On Sundays, the Slomo tipi will offer somatic breathwork sessions and Reset Retreats. There'll also be yoga, breathwork, meditation and sound healing sessions led by a range of expert practitioners. 

The ultimate sadgirl ballet is returning to the Royal Opera House in winter 2026. Wayne McGregor’s sweeping and expressive ballet exploring the life and work of Virginia Woolf, accompanied by Max Richter’s haunting original score, has been one of the Royal Ballet’s big hitters over the past decade. First staged in 2015, the dance triptych inspired by extracts from Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves picked up an Olivier award for best dance production. 

Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 play Woman in Mind, has been a West End hit a couple of times before, in productions directed by Ayckbourn himself. Here, Michael Longhurst does the honour, in an alluring revival. Sheridan Smith plays Susan, an embittered middle-aged mother who begins the play having taken a bump to the head that’s caused her perception of reality to become unmoored. She believes she’s a model parent with a dream life, before long Susan’s ‘real’ family intrudes, headed by her windbag vicar husband Gerald (Tim McMullen), who she drawlingly tears strips off while yearning for his imaginary counterpart. It’s an extremely handsome production with something melancholic and Chekhovian at its core. 

Wayne Thiebaud treated the basic kitsch of American life as if it was the most important subject matter in the whole history of art. His bold, gorgeous, luscious still lifes of hot dogs, pies and ice creams were a stunning precursor to pop art, an exercise in elevating the everyday to almost divine levels. Delicious.

The Southbank Centre is shining a light on some great artworks this winter – literally. In its annual Winter Lights exhibition, the institution will be bringing a selection of pieces to the streets surrounding the venue. Everything on display uses light and colour to dive into topics like identity, environment and tech, making it both an attention-grabbing and thought-provoking exhibit.

Rising star Jordan Fein’s sumptuous revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods is the first actual proper major Sondheim revival to be staged in this country since the great man’s passing. It’s a clever send up of fairytales that pushes familiar stories into absurd, existential, eventually very moving territory, but it’s also a fiddly musical with a lot of moving parts. You need to get it right, and Fein smashes it, largely thanks to exceptional casting. The whole thing looks astonishing: Tom Scutt’s astonishingly lush, vivid woods are glistening, eerie and primal. The costumes are similarly ravishing. It’s just great, really, a sublime production of a sublime musical with a sublime cast.

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

If you boil a sauna down to its nuts and bolts, it’s essentially just a really hot room and some water to create steam with. Wild, then, how much of a positive affect those two simple ingredients can have on our bodies, healing weary muscles, doing wonders for our skin, and helping all the horrible toxins we insist on putting in our insides get back out. There are a wealth of top saunas around the city. From plunge pools and infrared therapy rooms to Finnish-style homages and ones soundtracked by DJ sets, you’ll find the steam sesh for you in the capital.

Look, we love London. But even so, we can't deny that this city is devilishly good at coming up with ways to drain your bank balance. As Time Out editors, we’ve become experts at hunting down ways to enjoy the city on a shoestring. Lots of us started out as broke students here, and since then, we’ve scoured every corner for cheap things to do before payday hits. Read on for some fab, free ways to make yourself (and your bank balance) very happy indeed. 

The groanworthy title sets the tone for this fun re-telling of Dracula via close harmony singing and a stream of winkingly awful puns. Co-writers Dan Patterson (Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Mock the Week) and Jez Bond, also directing, feed an irreverent combination of Bram Stoker’s novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film version through a Mel Brooks musical mangle. This production may be gothic in origin but is panto in spirit. The actors are perfectly attuned to the show’s loudly enjoyable silliness while bringing powerhouse musical theatre chops to the singing.

Spoiler alert: ‘Paddington’ is a small woman (Arti Shah) in a bear costume (by Gabriella Slade), with a regular-sized man (James Hameed) doing the voice and remote controlling the facial expressions from backstage, and it’s enough to make us believe that Paddington is really in the room with us. He’s not the Paddington of the films or of Michael Bond’s books, but he’s not really him either, on account of all the singing he does and how much more wordy that makes him. He is a new Paddington. But he is, fundamentally, Paddington, right there in the room with us. Main attraction aside, a fine creative team led by director Luke Sheppard has created a very enjoyable show indeed. It’s by and large a stage adaptation of the first Paddington movie, although writer Jessica Swale has been quite free. It has a looser, more knockabout air, less droll, more cartoonish. It’s a luxury musical, and when the maximalism works, it really works.

It's no longer impossible to find tasty and satisfying alternatives to pints at London’s pubs and bars – in fact, some of the no-alcohol options on offer right now are even better than their boozy cousins. And they come with an added bonus of leaving you hangover-free. These bars cater to non-drinkers for Dry January and beyond. We've got buzzing drinking dens that also specialise in alcohol-free cocktails, completely dry tasting rooms and pubs with a penchant for low-and-no beers. These zero-percent champions are 100 percent fantastic. 

At first sight, Candice Lin’s g/hosti, a new commission from the Whitechapel Gallery, evokes a childlike playfulness. At its centre is a maze of cardboard panels which are painted with animals like dogs, cats, and mice, cavorting in a mythical forest. Its simplistic style and bright, warm colours feel akin to the sort of whimsical mural you might find painted on the wall of a primary school. The more you weave through the circular labyrinth, however, the more you realise you’re immersed in something altogether more sinister and political than first meets the eye. g/hosti is a show that could be misconceived if you do not linger long enough to absorb its hidden details. The more it unfolds, the more it unsettles and makes you think. 

Even we culture-mad London superfans have to admit that every once in a while, it’s nice to have a little break from it all. When the capital’s hustle and bustle leaves you feeling a little drained, you can find some escape from the crowds and hordes of tourists by getting up and getting out just for a day. In dire need of crisp country air, a relaxing spa day or a gorgeous, long walk? These day trips from London are all under two hours from Zone 1 and will give you the relief you need this winter.

In a city where eating out seems to be getting pricier by the minute, this list remains one of Time Out London's handiest guides. We've given the list a seasonal spin and here you'll find some of the cosiest (and best value) meals for embracing winter in London, such as Durak Tantuni's comforting Turkish meat wrap, a champion curry at Indian YMCA, and a visit to the Oyster Shack in Epping Forest - perfect to cap off a woodland walk in the wilds of the suburbs. 

Fallen Angels is a nicely crafted old-fashioned pleasure. Or certainly in this straight-down-the-line period revival. Julia (Janie Dee) and Jane (Alexandra Gilbreath) are middle-aged best friends. Julia is posh and poised. Jane is posh and shambolic. They are spending the weekend together while their distant husbands go off golfing. But things get spicy, quickly: they receive word that Maurice, a Frenchman they both had sexual relationships with before marriage, is in town and intending to visit them. They freak out and start drinking heavily, convinced that Maurice will want to play hide the saucisson with them both. And they’re sorely tempted to sample his charcuterie. In this slick-but-conservative take it’s fun enough, but it was genuinely ahead of its time 100 years ago. 

For the last three years Hampstead Theatre has been staging lesser-revived Tom Stoppards over Christmas, and for Stoppard fans it’s been fun to see them come to life. But Indian Ink is a deep cut. A vehicle for his former partner Felicity Kendal, Stoppard wrote it first as a radio drama and then expanded and enriched it into this version, which premiered in 1995. Here is Felicity Kendal returning to Indian Ink so many years later, but playing the elderly Mrs Swan rather than the young Flora Crewe. And in a play about looking back, and the lives of artists, and making sense of past romances, she watches Ashbourne Serkis bring alive the lines written for her by her old lover just weeks after his death. That in itself is very moving, even if the play remains one for the Stoppard pilgrims.

John le Carré breakthrough The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is in safe hands with playwright David Eldridge and director Jeremy Herrin, whose adaptation settles in at the West End after scoring good notices in Chichester. This is a slick and yes, maybe slightly MOR adaptation of Le Carre’s taut, brutal espionage yarn. But it’s a very good one, and Eldridge deftly crafts an intensely interior world, with us seeing the action unfold as much from within jaded spy protagonist Alec Leamas’s head as without. Herrin’s production goes heavy on the noir, and with good reason. Rory Keenan is magnificently grumpy and rumpled as Leamas, a hardbitten British spy in Cold War Berlin who is brought home after his last informer is executed by Hans-Dieter Mundt, a ruthless counterintelligence agent who has systematically dismantled the British spy apparatus in East Germany. The story feels fresh because Keenan’s it feels like Leamas is really living it – those shocking final hairpin plot twists are still jaw-dropping.

Lee Miller lived many lives. Starting her career as a model, she went on to become the muse for Man Ray and the Surrealist movement, starred in films, and then pivot into a famous photographer before traversing war-torn Europe as a daredevil journalist. Later, she settled in Sussex and became a celebrity chef. All of those eras are up on the Tate Britain’s walls for the gallery’s blockbuster exhibition. Dividing Miller’s extraordinary career chronologically, it’s a time-travelling experience as well as a showcase of her technical and compositional skills.

Expectations have been high for Ivo van Hove’s revival of Arthur Miller’s 1947 breakthrough All My Sons, because Van Hove made his own UK breakthrough with his extraordinary 2014 production of Miller’s A View from the Bridge. And by Hove, he’s done it again. To some extent the secret of his triumph here is ‘cast really really good actors’, foremost Bryan Cranston and Paapa Essiudu, who offer two of the best stage performances of 2025. But what van Hove has done is discretely uncouple Miller’s play from the naturalism that often stifles it. The whole thing plays out symphonically, building to an astonishing crescendo. Right near the end, Joe finally says the play’s name, its meaning clear at last. When I’ve seen the play before, there’s been no special reaction. Here, the audience gasped.

Unless you’re fluent in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Hiberno-English, John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World requires proper, eyes-wide-open concentration. And even more so in this NT revival, in which director Caitríona McLaughlin celebrates the lyrical language of the play in all its glory. At its best, hers is a production that rewards attentiveness, weaving in beautiful, affecting images of County Mayo folklore alongside some standout acting performances. 
Most of the audience will likely have bagged tickets to see the outstanding Nicola Coughlan, and they will not be disappointed. The Bridgerton megastar looks right at home as the feisty barmaid Pegeen, while Lorcan Cranitch, as Pegeen’s alcohol-fuelled father, gives a convincing, powerhouse interpretation. 

★★★★ 'Frameless has managed to create something genuinely exciting' – Time Out

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 £24!

Get £24.80 tickets (originally £31), only through Time Out Offers.

This exhibition will put the work of two rivals – and two of Britain’s greatest painters – J.M.W. Turner and John Constable side by side. Although both had different paths to success, they each became recognised as stars of the art world and shared a connection to nature and recreating it in their landscape paintings. Explore the pair’s intertwined lives and legacies and get new insight into their creativity via sketchbooks, personal items and must-see artworks.

Amazing news for lovers of neat symmetry, loud primary colours and twee outfits. West London’s Design Museum will be staging a blockbuster show delving into the iconic aesthetic of another of Hollywood’s most distinctive auteurs, the Texas-born Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning director Wes Anderson. The film director’s first official retrospective promises to be a different beast. A collaboration between the Design Museum and Cinémathèque Française, it has been curated in partnership with Wes Anderson himself and his production company American Empirical Pictures and follows his work from his early experiments in the 1990s right up to his recent Oscar-winning flicks, featuring original props, costumes and behind-the-scenes insights.