Things to do in London today

Popping up each summer on the steps where the Regent’s Canal passes Granary Square, Everyman’s Screen on the Canal is one of the city’s best loved outdoor cinemas, thanks to its atmospheric setting, eclectic programming and the fact that it doesn’t cost viewers a penny. Pop down on a sunny afternoon to catch live coverage from Wimbledon every day of the tournament, plus the usual mix of live sports, classic movies, family-friendly flicks and recent hits. So far we know that Devil Wears Prada, Dune: Part One, Some Like It Hot and Paddington in Peru are all on the lineup, and there are plenty more still to be revealed. Best enjoyed with a couple of tinned cocktails and some picky bits from the nearby Waitrose, or classic cinema snacks from Everyman’s on-site bar.  This year, the pop-up has been pimped out by local Kings Cross artist and UAL Central Saint Martin’s graduate Alice Wilson. She’s created a unique folklore-inspired design that will appear across popcorn and the screen itself.   

Summer by the River is back in London Bridge City(the area of the South Bank between London Bridge and Tower Bridge, duh), with an eclectic mix of entertainment, as well as food and drink from its new bar The Clubhouse, which is a breezy, European take on the classic sports clubs, complete with stylish covered seating and riverside views. You’ll be able to watch all the key Wimbledon matches outside in the sun on the big screen. Just turn up and grab a seat. 

Soho hotel Ham Yard is creating a Centre Court in the city this summer, so you can watch all the action at the Wimbledon tennis championships alfresco without having to queue. The hotel restaurant’s leafy courtyard is setting up a huge LED screen showing all the matches. Watch them with a special edition Pimm’s cocktail in hand, and while eating strawberries and cream or a picnic afternoon tea. Wireless headphones are available for dedicated fans who don’t want to miss any match points.  Available throughout the Wimbledon fortnight, afternoon tea starts at £53 per person. Tables for drinks are available on a walk-in basis throughout the tournament. For the Ladies' and Gentlemen's Finals, guests can reserve a prime viewing table for £30 per person, including a Wimbledon Cup No.1 cocktail and homemade strawberries and cream ice cream.

Is it art, or is it maths? It’s a question even MC Escher himself couldn’t answer about his own work. While the Dutch printmaker known for his infinite staircases, metamorphosing tessellations and paradoxical buildings was rejected by the art world, he was revered by mathematicians, and is now one of the most famous optical illusionists of all time.  The OG creator of images that make you go ‘Huh?’ is going under the microscope in London with a blockbuster exhibition celebrating his life and work this summer. Created by Italian company Arthemisia and the immersive peeps at Fever, MC Escher: The Exhibition has arrived at Somerset House as part of its world tour.  The family-friendly display is surprisingly big. With more than 150 artworks on show, it tells the story of Escher’s life and work in chronological order, before it gets to the biggies – the ones that have been wheeled out in maths classrooms for decades – towards the end. You’ll see the originals of ‘Waterfall’, where water appears to run upwards, ‘Ascending and Descending’, the looping staircase that goes up and down simultaneously, and ‘Belvedere’ depicting an impossible tower. And you’ll learn about the techniques and mathematics that make these illusions possible along the way.  The meticulous craft that went into his totally baffling work is evident. On a personal level, I can see why Escher was rebuffed by the art world. Many of his works seem like something from a bad acid trip: giant, bulbous ants;...

This immersive exhibition from Australian filmmaker and architect Liam Young is impressively audacious, taking up multiple spaces in the Barbican, including a rather pungent underground carpark. What is In Other Worlds? Well, it’s not an art exhibition in the classic sense, but a sort of multimedia hybrid of visual art, storytelling, and speculative sci-fi, combined to make the point that while humanity has famously screwed up the planet, the means to un-screw it are within our grasp if we embrace radical solutions. If that sounds a bit worthy for you, then sure, it is kind of worthy. At the same time, it’s weird, psychedelic and vividly imaginative, offering more a sort of fever dream of a possible future than an actual pragmatic solution for climate change et al. At its centre is the mad vision of the Planet City, an unimaginably dense single urban environment in which all ten billion of Earth’s inhabitants live, while the rest of the planet is effectively allowed to rewild, with visits to nature confined to a sort of annual opportunity for every citizen on the planet to be dropped randomly somewhere on the planet. This is obviously an insane idea, but the vision Young and collaborators present is nonetheless really weird and cool. Physically, we’re presented with taller-than-a-person scale models of gargantuan tower blocks comprising of individual homes madly piled on top of one another, while a giant screen projects a Young-directed digital film shows us a vision of...

With its 210-foot tower, and walls adorned with over a hundred varieties of marble, Westminster Cathedral is already a sight to behold, but it’ll be looking more spectacular than ever this July, when this visual show wuill shed new light on the iconic building, quite literally. Known for hosting dazzling immersive experiences at World Heritage sites across the globe, Luminiscence will take over the neo-byzantine cathedral this summer, with an visual experience journeying through the history of the Big Smoke, told using light projections mapped onto its grand interiors, plus a voiceover by Hugh Bonneville, and classical hits from the likes of Beethoven, Vivaldi and Bach, performed live by the Lux Aeterna choir. It promises to be a truly special opportunity to familiarise yourself with one of London’s most iconic landmarks. 

While the Science Museum remains one of London’s quintessential free days out, there’s an ever-growing list of paying bolt-ons for those who are happy to spend a little (or a lot), from the glorious hands on experiments of the WonderLab to the retro videogames mecca of Power Up to a very decent science afternoon tea featuring petri dish jellies and test tubes filled with sweets. Joining them is Smithsonian Starstruck, a galactic VR experience from America’s prestigious Smithsonian Institution, in which the 360 digital imaginings of some of space’s most stunning and surreal vistas are rooted in hard astronomy, and not the fanciful slop that creeps into several nominally educational London VR experiences I could name.  It's basically a guide to all the mad shit in our galaxy, with a reassuring-voiced American man taking us on a virtual journey around various observatories and space telescopes, and the wild celestial phenomena they can nominally see. We watch the dawn of the universe. We visit an uninhabitable planet strewn with diamonds. We stand before the event horizon of a black hole. It is all, undeniably, pretty visually stunning: from a looming gigantic sun on another world to the bizarre spectacle of light being dragged into a physics-defying gravity well, this is spectacular (albeit, to be clear, often an interpretation of what these things might look like given available data). You’ll also learn a decent amount about the phenomena depicted without feeling...

Grab a deck chair and settle in for some sunny tennis watching at Camden Market's Wimbledon pop-up. All the games will be screened live on an outdoor screen at MarketPlace, Hawley Wharf, and there’ll be strawberries and cream and plenty of drinks available from nearby stalls. There’ll also be a giant Connect 4 to play between sets. 

In April this year a Yung Lean music video went viral. Depicting schoolboys in Leeds, the excellent video shows the rapper as a menacing bully, cigarette dangling from his mouth, as he flushes heads down toilets, gets high in classrooms and rides through corridors on wheely tables. It also features some mesmerising choreography by Damien Jalet. Now this video is on display as part of a film exhibition at 180 Studios.  Created by Gener8ion, a creative duo comprising film director Romain Gavras and producer Surkin (real name Benoit Heitz), Visions of 2034 is promoting an audiovisual album, Love & Tears, made by the pair. It’s also a way for Gavras to show off several of his highly acclaimed music videos, created for the likes of MIA, Jamie xx, Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis and 070 Shake.  So what is the exhibition about? Imagine that it is the year 2034. Gavras and Surkin have created a series of short films (or are they music videos?) that postulate all the terrible things that will be happening in the world: Athens is uninhabitable thanks to toxic algae blooms; volcanoes are erupting; schoolboys are getting high on lithium from 6G antennas and bullying each other from within an inch of their lives.   Gavras and Surkin appear to have predicted the future In some of these films Gavras and Surkin appear to have predicted the future. In videos shot in 2010, 2018 and 2019, respectively, ICE-style raids round up redheads for social cleansing; an AI-type machine creates a...

With its abundance of big protests, buskers, pigeons and tourists, Trafalgar Square is famously one of the least chill bits of central London. But all that is about to change this summer with a new pop-up, designed to bring some of the plant-filled peacefulness of Cornwall's Lost Gardens of Heligan to Zone 1. Lost Oasis is the handiwork of leading landscape designers, who are transforming the space outside St Martin-in-the-Fields church into a plant filled dining, drinking and entertainment spot.  Ferns, palms and fragrant jasmine will surround eating spots manned by a rotating line-up of top chefs including Nathan Outlaw, Simon Stallard, Jordan Bailey, Emily Scott, Adam Handling MBE and Sally Abé.  On the entertainment side, there'll be screenings of FIFA World Cup, Wimbledon, Formula 1 British Grand Prix, alongside live music provided by Sofar Sounds and live comedy. In need of refreshment? There'll be drinks at the Mud Maid Bar, inspired by a famous Heligan sculpture, as well as the chance to pour your own pints of the appley stuff from the Cornish Orchard Cider Tree. Just check online before you turn up: Lost Oasis is only open to public walk-ins on days when there's not a special ticketed event. 

This review is from 2019. See our new review of the Sam Ryder-starring 2026 London Palladium version of Jesus Christ Superstar HERE. First seen in 2016 at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, Timothy Sheader’s bombastic revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera arrives at the Barbican with superstar ratings, even if it’s lost some of its, well, superstar turns. It looks incredible: Tom Scutt’s set of rusty girders and a cross-shaped catwalk is moodily, then gloriously, lit by Lee Curran, especially a final, ascending beam of light behind the crucifixion. But the real touchstone is the show’s concert origins: characters swagger around the stage clutching microphones, or moon over acoustic guitars; later, electrical cords are the things they’re bound and hung by. But this staging also allows for rock-god excess, and it’s showered in gold and glitter. Herod is high-camp in a gold cape; Judas’s hands are dipped in silver for all to see, branded guilty by gilt.Drew McOnie’s edgy choreography turns the cast into a mob, whether united in juddering, convulsive devotion, or baying for blood. There’s a low-slung, swaggering looseness to the big chorus numbers that feels pleasingly modern, matched by costumes of artfully drapey grey marl: Jesus’s followers look like they’ve been dragged backwards through a branch of AllSaints.It also sounds incredible: musical director Ed Bussey drives relentlessly down the rock route, with an electrifying live band on set, turned up loud. There’s no...

This nailbitingly tense thriller is director Felix Barrett’s second ‘normal’ piece of theatre to open in London in the last year, following West End smash Paranormal Activity. If you don’t know the name, Barrett is the founder and driving force behind brooding immersive theatre legends Punchdrunk. But his straight plays aren’t so much a case of him moonlighting as a normie director as a fascinating extension of the day job. Yes, The Guilty is fairly straightforward as a text. Concerning a troubled police call centre operator, it’s writer Chloe Moss’s adaptation of the Danish film Den Skyldige and its Jake Gyllenhaal-starring Hollywood remake. You could probably have a fairly good time taking a version to the Edinburgh Fringe. But at the risk of throwing around an entirely debased term, this production is about as immersive as sitting in a seat watching a single guy onstage gets. The action is enhanced by an arsenal of disorienting light and sound tricks, some of which you might recognise from Punchdrunk shows (most notably the thunderous deployment of Massive Attack’s ‘Angel’ at the start, also recently used in Punchdrunk’s Viola’s Room). Gareth Fry, the sound designer for Viola’s Room and Complicité’s landmark The Encounter is back on board, as is much of the rest of the Paranormal Activity creative team. Subtle shifts in light and the crackly strangeness of the calls he receives take on a feverish, nocturnal quality, only growing stranger as the show wears on. The single...

Aussie prodigy Simon Stone seems to be the de facto resident director at the Bridge these days: last year he directed Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, and next year he’ll direct Chekhov’s Ivanov. This year, he tackles The Oresteia, which is credited as ‘Aeschelus and others’. That’s a nod to the fact that Stone’s adaptations are extremely free and easy and you can expect only the loosest relationship to any one specific version of the story of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon who takes violent revenge on his mum Clytamnestra for his father’s murder. Excactly how Stone’s Oresteia will play out is TBC, but the sole line of description suggests a typicaly free adaptation: ‘A contemporary family wakes up in a Greek myth and can’t seem to find a way out of their hellish destiny.’ Stone’s plays invariably come with big names attached, and The Oresteia boasts a cast headed by US star Mary-Louise Parker as Montie (the character names seem to have little bearing on the originals), David Morrissey as Christopher, Tom Glynn-Carney as Augie, Rosie Sheehy as Alice, Lloyd Hutchinson as Melville, John Macmillan as Jerome and Archie Madekwe as Lorenzo.

  Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece Arcadia is rarely revived. Fans say it’s his most perfect work; critics that it’s brainy, too wordy, and too specific to its pre-millennial moment. Back in the ’90s, writers and literary academics were more rock and roll than scientists, a new discovery about Byron could feasibly make the front page of the Sun newspaper, and pop culture was as yet unlittered by scientific metaphors for life, the universe and everything.  Both fans and critics are right. However Stoppard’s melancholy intellectual comedy, which counterpoints characters in the same English country house in two very different time periods, remains a unique and dazzling work. It won’t make you reconsider the nature of love or the state of the nation, it doesn’t have a Lear or a Rooster Byron to raise hell, in fact, its dozen characters are a bouquet of amusing foibles and intellectual positions, less memorable than the ideas they express, less likeable than the laughs they provide. Unusually, it’s the construction of the play which is indelibly brilliant: the way it weaves together characters from two eras, the 1990s and the early 19th century, in a cat’s cradle of fiercely expounded ideas including but not limited to chaos theory, determinism, Newtonian steam entropy, the overthrow of reason by passion, the sex lives of the Romantic poets and the cultural significance of changing styles in landscape gardening. As a pair of rival academics in the 1990s try to unearth the...

This latest entry in London’s unending stream of Midsummer Night’s Dreams has plenty of ideas. But does Atri Banerjee’s production have a single coherent central idea? If it does, I couldn’t see it. And not for the trees. Naomi Dawson’s set isn’t a bucolic forest but a sort of unadorned wooden copy of the steps on which the audience sits, which later opens up to reveal a dressing area with a marginally more foresty look. The quote ‘this green plot’ is ironically printed at the top. The minor fairies also hang out there: they are styled as a hippie-ish band who play the new agey ballads specially written for this production by rising theatre polymath Maimuna Memon. Add to this a fairly standard quartet of runaway lovers, a largely timid group of Mechanicals dominated – for better or worse – by Nadeem Islam’s cacophonously exuberant Bottom, and the main fairies, who leave little impression beyond Oliver Huband’s adorably hangdog Oberon, who seems to be dressed for a night of disco dancing.  There are so many concepts flitting around that it can be hard to focus on what’s actually going on. The design recalls Jamie Lloyd’s MDF period, but Lloyd really committed to the bit in his stark, pared-back productions. Banerjee has disco fairy kings and songs that get in the way of all that: at one point it takes Jenny Rainford’s Titania about five minutes to go to sleep because there’s an entire number about it. It’s just a bit disjointed, and less of a laugh than it should be....

The title of Hideki Noda's latest play is ‘minus three twenty Fahrenheit’, roughly the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, the temperature at which a body sits suspended in cryogenic storage. It's also, roughly, the temperature at which this review nearly froze trying to explain the plot to a friend afterwards.  The Japanese theatrmaker’s company NODA MAP returns to Sadler's Wells for a third round, following A Night at the Kabuki (2022) and Love in Action (2024), with its latest being billed as ‘a Faustian descent through myth, memory and other bad ideas’. Unsurprisingly, then, given that Noda is notorious for jam-packing his plays, this one runs across three timelines, all featuring characters chasing angel bones.  In the modern strand, sniping pharma siblings President Oolong Deathmask (Satoshi Hashimoto) and Chairman Oolong Cha (Shoko Takada) – the production's best running joke – hunt the mythical bone using the vibrating one in the body of Help’s (Sadawo Abe) as their compass. With the help of their research team, they want it ground into supplements for an engineered Ultimate Human, or harvested to cure a genetic condition called AngelDN – either way there’s money in it. In the medieval strand, Mephisto (Suzu Hirose), the half-angel half-devil heroine, stakes a wager against God which sets up a fateful pact with Dr. Faust (Isao Hashizume). In antiquity, an empire answers to Queen Himiko, based on the legenadry shaman-ruler of early Japan. For all its denser themes,...

If you’re in the market for a meticulously accurate, 100 percent culturally sensitive drama about the events that led to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand… then approach US playwright Rajiv Joseph’s play with caution. Indeed, I spent the first half hour or so of Lyndsey Turner’s UK premiere slightly distracted by imagining the probable reaction of a Serbian friend of mine.  That’s not to say Joseph hasn’t done his research. His absurdist account of the recruitment and radicalisation of Ferdinand’s would-be assassins in the name of Yugoslav nationalism is very, very obviously not how it went down exactly. But this pointedly surreal play never pretends otherwise,and it has a spine of fact, particularly in its darkly comic but relatively illuminating depiction of Dragutin Dimitrijević, the Serb nationalist paramilitary who’d led the massacre of the country’s royal family in 1903 and who is widely held to have orchestrated – or at least enabled – the murder that triggered the First World War.  Were the assassins really the gormless, ideology-free naïfs that we see in Gavrilo (Stanley Morgan), Trifko (Abraham Popoola) and Nedeljko (Chris Walley) - sweet young men with no interest in Balkan politics at all, who Marc Wootton’s bonkers Dragutin grooms into enacting his plans? All evidence says no, although at the same time there’s no question that they were disaffected teenagers, not hardened soldiers. It is also clear that they had strictly regional ambitions and...

There is evidence to suggest that giving the hero of Edmond Rostan’s French classic a big prosthetic nose is increasingly considered passé. Certainly the last major London revival – a brooding, rap-battling affair directed by Jamie Lloyd – was a case in point. James McAvoy starred as Cyrano, the brilliant wordsmith with an obtrusively big schnozz. But he did it sans stuck-on snout – it worked by suggesting Cyrano’s inability to directly woo his love Roxane was down to a crippling case of low self-esteem, amounting to body dysmorphia.  Lloyd’s take was a modern-dress masterpiece. So when posters appeared of this RSC transfer – with Adrian Lester in period clobber and sporting a spectacularly fake conker – it looked kinda stuffy by comparison. But not a bit of it! Yes, co-adaptors Simon Evans (who also directs) and Debris Stevenson restore the work to 1640 France – a time when the country was stuck in the Thirty Years’ War – and yes, it comes with all the trimmings of that era (pocket swords! Mournful violin players!). It’s very much the romantic tragicomedy Rostand wrote, but despite its period setting, it feels wholly current.  Lester’s Cyrano appears as a man of swaggering confidence – a soldier as adept with a sword as with a quill. Though there’s no mistake his nose has held him back in life – it seems to prompt a Tourettes-like response from those who meet him – he takes it on the chin, keeping his insecurities stoically bottled up. Rarely does limerence sound as...

This review is from 2022 and the original, Ralph Spall-starring London run for Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation. The production returns in 2026 with a new cast headed by Richard Coyle as Atticus Finch. Meet Atticus Finch: centrist dad. Aaron Sorkin’s smash Broadway stage version of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ makes a fair few tweaks to Harper Lee’s 1960 literary masterpiece.  Most predictably, there’s the ‘West Wing’ mastermind’s trademark sparkling dialogue. Yes, he remains faithful to the idea that we’re in ’30s Alabama, but his polished wit is very much present and correct, most especially in the goofily pinging three-way narration provided by his child characters: plucky Scout (Gwyneth Keyworth), chippy Jem (Harry Redding) and dorky Dill (David Moorst). The narrative structure has been tinkered with: the climactic trial scene is now parcelled up into chunks throughout the play rather than included as a single sweeping sequence.  The plot, however, is essentially unchanged. By far Sorkin’s most significant intervention via Bartlett Sher’s production is to pointedly reimagine the play’s white lawyer hero Atticus Finch. Rafe Spall’s interpretation of the role steers well clear of Gregory Peck’s immortal screen version and, to a large extent, the book. Peck’s Finch was famously sonorous-voiced and saintly. In both book and film, Finch was explicitly seen through the adoring eyes of his daughter Scout. Here, with his chipmunk Alabama twang, Spall simply *sounds* less like a wise...

  Ava Pickett has had the career start every writer dreams of. Your debut play about Anne Boleyn (but not really about Anne Boleyn) becomes the hottest ticket in town at the Almeida Theatre and earns you two Olivier nominations. In the process, you gain the attention of it-girl star of the moment Margot Robbie, who declares you a generational talent. Oh, and you’re also writing a film about Joan of Arc with Baz Luhrmann. Because why not. Pickett’s ascension has been so swift, that, I must admit, I approached 1536’s West End transfer with slight scepticism. Could it really live up to all that the hype? The answer, thankfully, is: yes, and then some. Co-produced with Robbie’s production company Lucky Chap, 1536 is an astonishing production. Director Lyndsey Turner has crafted a heady, sensory experience, one that is jolted forward by faultless performances from the female leads. The 110-minute one-act run time might raise eyebrows, yet the show never loses pace, and refuses to overcook things either. 1536 is a once-in-a-blue-moon theatrical experience. I laughed. I cried. I probably could have screamed too. The year, it’ll come as no surprise to hear, is 1536, where three women in their early twenties sit in a field in rural Essex. With so little going on in their lives, the girls are scandalised by the goss Jane (Liv Hill) has heard from London: that King Henry VIII has had his second wife Anne Boleyn arrested. The practical Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) wonders aloud if Henry...

The Wellcome Collection’s big spring exhibition is a deep dive into perceptions of ageing. Expect the Euston Road institution’s typical blend of art, science and pop culture in the 120+ artworks and objects on display, which range from16th century woodcuts made by German printmaker Sebald Beham to Deborah Roberts’ contemporary collages exploring Black childhood. There’ll also be a spotlight on the Wellcome Trust-funded health research project Age of Wonder – one of the largest studies of adoloscence in the world – and an exploration of how societies can adapt to improve everyone’s experience of ageing.

Henry Moore’s bulbous and undulating sculptures were designed to be seen outside and surrounded by nature. So we’re happy to say that Kew is displaying a huge collection of his works as they were intended at this mega exhibition. The world’s biggest ever exhibition of Moore will open at the botanical gardens, with 30 sculptures on show in the open air and more than 90 works including carvings and drawings displayed in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery. Several of his famous and iconic reclining figures will be on view, as well as more abstract and amorphous pieces like the massive bronze marvel ‘Large Two Forms’. 

There’s something irresistably fascinating about seeing into artist’s studios – messy materials, stacks of canvases, and a peek behind the curtain into the work spaces for some of the world’s best creative minds. To coincide with the Courtauld’s major Barbara Hepworth exhibition, the gallery is running a companion show of photographs taken by Paul Laib offering a look inside Hepworth’s London studio that she shared with Ben Nicholson in the 1930s. 

This is a big show of big paintings. Big, energetic, happy paintings which are just as enjoyable to stand in front of as one can imagine they were to make. Hurvin Anderson is the artist responsible, and the 80 paintings on show at Tate Britain amount to 30 years worth of work. Some date back to 1995 when he was an art student at the Royal College of Art; others were made this year (some he even finished off once they’d been hung). ‘Ball Watching’ hangs by the door, next to the entrance. Painted at art school, it captures a moment in Anderson’s youth living in Birmingham, the city in which he was born and raised after his parents emigrated from Jamaica. He and his friends would play football in Handsworth Park, often kicking the football into the lake – here, as the title suggests, they stand watching it. Compared with the sun-bleached, paint-dripped, tree-filled tropicana that fill the later rooms, the palette is darker, the figures less defined, the sky, rendered in broad brushstrokes, feels as though a foaming sponge has been dragged across a car windscreen. The paintings do something similar for the viewer as they do for Anderson: they hold you between places What it establishes, however, is what has kept Hurvin Anderson returning to the studio for three decades: the urge to paint his experience as a Black man of Caribbean heritage, born and raised in the UK. That sense of inbetweenness – belonging to two places, either side of the Atlantic – plays out through...

For Brits of a certain age, James McNeill Whistler will always conjure memories of that scene in the Mr Bean film. But while Rowan Atkinson’s 1997 opus was a memorable introduction to the American Gilded Age painter, Tate Britain’s grand new retrospective will properly acquaint you with his work – minus any snot-related hijinks – through his paintings, prints, and a litany of personal effects.  Using decoration from his Chelsea studio, the opening room establishes Whistler as a bohemian and fashionable man, but the contextual statement also foreshadows his fall from social grace later in his career (thanks to a lawsuit that left him penniless – more on that later). Thus, a unique, non-linear curatorial narrative is introduced. After arriving from New England in Paris in 1855, Whistler prolifically produced moody etchings that express the stoic dinginess of the French capital with dense and dynamic shadows. His first attempts at oil painting also happened here. The medium became an even bigger preoccupation when he moved to an equally morose city: London. Whether it’s choked by smog or cluttered with cargo, the Thames is his muse during his early years in the Big Smoke. The chaotic figuration of ships floating past in Wapping and the spectral abstraction of a frozen river in Chelsea in Ice represent two extremes of how Whistler turns urban ugliness into visual harmony. Conducting tone, colour, and blankness with orchestral balance, he’s acutely aware of the musicality...

A stroll through 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. The second room of the exhibition features a large-scale projection of a work on video entitled ‘Why I Never Became A Dancer’. It begins with the artist recalling an incident in her youth when she entered a local dance competition only to run off stage mid-performance when a group of men with whom she’d previously had sexual encounters chanted ‘slag’ at her until she could no longer even hear the music. The film ends with a sequence of Emin dancing, totally uninhibited, to the disco classic ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ by Sylvester, and the work is dedicated to each of her aggressors, calling them out by name. It is the perfect encapsulation of both Emin’s defiant approach to life and her ability to turn traumatic experiences into mesmerising art. Longform video is an...

This renowned annual photography exhibition returns to the Natural History Museum for its 61st edition, showcasing the very best entries of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. On display are images of the most extraordinary species on the planet captured by professional and amateur photographers. This year’s entries are TBA right now, but the winners are reliably spectacular – pictured is last year’s champion Shane Gross, whose mesmirising underwater shot of western toad tadpoles involved snorkelled for hours in a lake on Vancouver Island, making sure not to disturb fine layers of silt and algae at the bottom. Don’t miss what is always a highlight in the NHM’s calendar.

If you find a London greengrocer selling lemons and oranges as plump, waxy, and gorgeous as the ones in Francisco de Zurbarán’s still lifes on view at the National Gallery, do let me know. The Baroque master trained as a painter in Seville, the land of citrus, so he was well placed to get his eye in, but even so, this first UK exhibition makes a persuasive case that Zurbarán’s brush turned them into something approaching the divine. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he painted so few of them; only 10 still lifes are known today, and most of the examples in this exhibition are attributed to his son Juan.  Maybe he simply didn’t have the time. It was the beginning of the 17th century; gold was flowing into Seville from the Americas, the Catholic revival was in full swing, and Seville’s religious orders were trying to outdo one another with ever grander, more extravagantly decorated churches. Zurbarán’s earliest dated work, The Crucifixion (1627), promptly sent him shooting up the Baroque algorithm, and commissions soon came flooding in. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble The Spanish artist and writer Antonio Palomino once wrote that ‘everyone who sees it, and does not know it, believes it to be a sculpture.’ It’s the first painting you encounter in the exhibition, and 399 years on, you understand what Palomino meant. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble against the pitch-black background, while the white cloth around his waist...

Portraits are tricky things: can you ever really sift the individual from the image? And it gets even harder when the subject is one of the most recognisable faces of all time – a woman who was seemingly born to appear on camera. Since she died in 1962 – aged just 36, and already perhaps the most famous person on the planet – Marilyn Monroe has transcended mere stardom to become an icon: the image of glamour, sex, tragedy and celebrity itself. Marking what would have been her 100th birthday, the National Portrait Gallery grapples with that iconic status in a show that’s both beautiful and troubling. ‘Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait’ sets out its stall early, emphasising Monroe’s agency in shaping her image: not an artist’s muse, but an active collaborator. Exploited by Hollywood, coerced and abused by her husbands, at least Monroe could claw back some control over the way she was portrayed. She spent hours poring over contact sheets, and forbade some images from being published. (In one photo here, an out-take print from her very last photoshoot, the actor has scratched out her face with a hairpin.) Marilyn Monroe has transcended mere stardom to become an icon: the image of glamour, sex, tragedy and celebrity itself Deliberately light on biography, the show goes big on the star’s work with individual photographers: big names like Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Henri Cartier-Bresson, but also friends (Milton H Greene, Eve Arnold), lovers (André de Dienes) and collaborators...

Donald Locke shows don’t come around often. But like proverbial buses, you wait for ages, and then three arrive at once, in the form of this touring exhibition moving from Birmingham to Bristol and now Camden Art Centre in London.  It’s not the first time the late Guyanese-British artist has shown here, though you’d be forgiven for missing it. Back in 1970, Locke exhibited ceramics under the pseudonym Issorosano Ite. He arrived in the UK from Guyana in his mid-twenties to study ceramics in Bath and Edinburgh, even though painting was his initial obsession. ‘With the arrogance of youth, I was going to be the greatest painter in the world,’ he said of his early ambition. Well, he did both, yet what he made doesn’t sit neatly within a single camp. Rather, his practices – spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics – would morph into one another. While the forms may appear a little abstract, the thinking behind them is not Take ‘Trophies of Empire’ (1972–74), one of his most iconic works and included in Resistant Forms. An open cabinet of 27 pigeonholes houses dark, cylindrical ceramic forms (bullets, we come to understand) cradled within trophy cups, spurs, and leather cuffs, sourced by Locke from Portobello Market. It’s not the last you’ll see of them. Look at the large, wild, black paintings next door, made a decade or two later while he was living in Phoenix and Atlanta. You’ll spot Queen Victoria, the Warhol-like revolver—now look again: those ‘trophies’ reappear...