Things to do in London today

It’s been 75 years since the Festival of Britain, an era-defining cultural event designed to boost national morale post-WW2, took place on London’s Southbank. There’s a whole host of events lined up throughout 2026 to commemorate the anniversary, from the You Are Here festival in May to a a celebration of the life and work of Benjamin Zephaniah in June. And to honour to the thousands of pioneers in dance, music, literature and art that have graced the Southbank Centre’s hallowed halls since 1951, legendary illustrator Quentin Blake has created thirty life-size characters who will be dotted around around the venue between now and November. Look out for dancers, skaters, parkour athletes, opera singers, a violinist and more. 

They’re mad about mud over at Somerset House. Hot on the heels of last year’s exhibition Soil: The World At Our Feet comes another exhibition all about rocks, dirt and dust. A multi-sensory project by artist masharu, The Museum of Edible Earth has been touring across the world since 2017, and features hundreds of globally-sourced earths, which visitors are invited to touch, smell and even taste in an exploration of rituals, culinary traditions and healing practices from across the world.

Did you know that the samurai believed gender and sexuality were fluid, and that they practically invented the concept of being non-binary? Because I certainly didn’t. This progressive view was one of many riveting – and surprising – things I learned at the blockbuster Samurai exhibition at the British Museum.  You don’t have to be a history buff to find Samurai intriguing – I’m not a medieval period obsessive, but like a lot of Zillenials I am a big fan of all things Japanese. This exhibition of treasures from Nihon, therefore, understandably appealed to me, and I suspect this will be the case for anyone who has spent hours trawling the internet for the perfect santoku knife or vintage Comme des Garçons jacket. 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. Examining the enduring legacy of the Japanese warriors in the present day, Samurai illustrates how the image of the noble fighter has been mythologised, altered and co-opted over the years, sometimes for nefarious means (as seen in a chilling Nazi pamphlet promoting the relations between Japan and Germany).  an incredible selection of ornate helmets resemble sculptures more than headgear Many of the artefacts on display are stunning – from intricately decorated partition screens, to...

Awaken your inner child by delving into enchanted lands, magical creatures and timeless tales at the British Library’s interactive family-friendly exhibition. All the bangers from your childhood will be explored – from Goldilocks, to Aladdin – through books, artworks, interactive displays, theatrical design, story sharing spaces, costumes and activities. Opening in time for the Easter holidays, Fairy Tales is ideal for passing a few hours with the little’uns. 

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.

Once, Hampton Court Palace was the stamping ground of tyrannical Tudor king Henry VIII. It's unclear whether he would have enjoyed Easter egg hunts: perhaps he would have decapitated anyone who tried to make him trek round the garden before he could eat his sweetmeats. But don't let that stop you from enjoying an Easter adventure with a gorgeous Tudor backdrop this spring. As you hunt for the Lindt Gold Bunnies that are dotted throughout the historic grounds, you can learn all about the legendary figures who have made their mark throughout the decades of this London landmark. The trail takes around 90 minutes and is self-led. Once you've found all the Lindt Gold Bunny statues, you'll be rewarded with your very own edible gold bunny (or non-chocolate treat). Suitable for kids aged between 3 and 12.

The UK’s largest queer film event returns to the BFI Southbank (and to the BFI Player online) for its 40th edition from March 18-29, with its usual jam-packed line-up of world premieres, feature films, documentaries and shorts programmes, plus all manner of talks, panels, workshops, free events and after-hours fun. The 2026 festival will open with the world premiere of American documentary maker Jennifer Kroot’s riotous new film Hunky Jesus, which follows social justice movement the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence as they prepare to host their legendary annual Easter Sunday drag contest in San Francisco.  The mid-festival Special Presentation will be Kiwi director Paloma Schneideman’s ‘tender, unflinching’ coming of age drama Big Girls Don’t Cry, following 14-year-old Sid over one transformative summer in the early 2000s. And the festival will close with Black Burns Fast, South African director’s debut feature, following nerdy student Luthando through her sexual awakening at a prestigious boarding school.  Other highlights to look out for include the world premiere of Madfabulous, Welsh director Celyn Jones’s quirky period drama based on the life of irreverent socialite Henry Cyril Paget, the fifth Marquess of Anglesey, starring It’s A Sin’s Callum Scott Howells, Stud Life director Campbell X’s long-awaited second feature Low Rider, and Barbara Forever, NYC documentary-maker Brydie O’Connor’s portrait of trailblazing photographer Barbara Hammer. Alongside the usual...

Somerset House Studios’ biannual experimental sound and music series is back. Based at Somerset House. Assembly bills itself as a ‘live testing ground’ premiering new works in a format that combines a festival with an exhibition. Head along to hear live experiments with sound, listen to works created on site and listen to premieres of works not yet shown in the UK. It brings together current residents and alumni, as well as international artists. There’ll also be critical conversations by leading practitioners across sound and contemporary art. If you’re looking for a different kind of festival experience, this is the place. 

This King’s Cross Lightroom now has surely the weirdest repertoire of any venue in London, possibly the world. With an oeuvre based around massive megabit projection-based immersive films, its shows so far have been a David Hockney exhibition, a Tom Hanks-narrated film about the moon landings, a Vogue documentary and a visualiser for Coldplay’s upcoming album. It’s such a random collection of concepts that it’s hard to say there was or is anything ‘missing’ from the extremely esoteric selection of bases covered. But certainly, as the school summer holidays roll around it’s very welcome to see it add an overtly child-friendly show to its roster. Bar a short Coldplay break, Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs will play daily at Lightroom from now until at least the end of October half-term. It is, as you would imagine, a dinosaur documentary. And indeed, if the name rings a specific bell it’s because it’s culled from the David Attenborough-narrated Apple TV series of the same name. It’s quite the remix, though: Attenborough is out, and Damian Lewis is in, delivering a slightly melodramatic voiceover that lacks Sir David’s colossal gravitas but is, nonetheless, absolutely fine. Presumably Attenborough is absent because he’s very busy and very old, because while the film reuses several of the more spectacular setpieces from the TV series, it’s sufficiently different that repurposing the old narration would be a stretch. Any child with any degree of fondness for the...

Southbank Centre's REPLAY: A Limitless Recycled Playground is a very fun place indeed. It was wildly popular with families last year, and now it's back for 2026 for under 12s to have an hour-long dose of interactive creative fun. Herd Theatre has colourful, interactive wonderland for kids to create and play in, full of with recycled materials ready for repurposing and making. The experience is accompanied by a score made of recycled sounds, as well as prompts to encourage kids and adults to play side by side.

Maxim Gorky’s Summerfolk is the sort of esoteric classic that only gets staged very occasionally: I think this NT revival is the third UK production ever, and the first this century. It’s not hard to see either the reason for its reputation or its infrequent staging. Concerning a group of dissolute nouveau-riche Russians spending a frivolous summer arguing among themselves as societal storm clouds gather, it is pretty damn Chekhovian. On the other hand its enormous cast and prodigious uncut running time mean it’s well beyond the means of most theatres to put on: it has only ever been staged here by the NT and RSC.  This new adaptation by Nina and Moses Raine is a full hour shorter than its previous National Theatre outing in 1999. It’s still overwhelming at first: it feels like you’ve been plunged into a sprawling existential soap opera, teeming with characters and plot lines that have been running for years that you’re having to familiarise yourself with on the fly. Gradually, though, Robert Hastie’s revival does take shape thanks to some delicious luxury casting. Foremost is Sophie Rundle as the gorgeous, disaffected Varvara, who rails with mounting fury against… everything basically. The rootless insubstantiality of her peers; the annoying men who insist on adoring her; her awful husband Sergei, very entertainingly played as a gravelly voiced boor by Paul Ready. The pleasures are pretty soapy throughout: essentially three hours of compulsive people watching. The 22...

Read our review of Teeth ‘n’ Smiles. It’s been years since a David Hare play went to the West End – so in 2026, naturally, there are two of them. Over at the Theatre Royal Haymarket his latest Grace Pervades will star his regular collaborator Ralph Fiennes. And at the Duke of York’s one of his oldest plays – dating back to 1975 – will star an unexpected newcomer. Rebecca Lucy Taylor - aka sardonic pop star Self Esteem – did do a stint in the West End’s Cabaret a couple of years back, but she's never been in a straight up play (or, for what it's worth, had to face theatre critics before).  You probably wouldn't have put money on her drama debut being in a Hare play. But actually Teeth 'n' Smiles makes perfect sense for her, being a late ’60s-set drama that concerns Maggie Frisbee, an embittered, alcoholic rock star left raging and washed up at the end of the decade. The role was originated by a young Helen Mirren – who based her performance on Janis Joplin – and in that context it’s not hard to see why Taylor might have been intrigued. Plus! There are songs for Maggie to perform, originally written by Nick and Tony Bicât, but with new contributions from Taylor herself.  It’ll be directed by Daniel Raggett, who did such an excellent job with West End hit Accidental Death of an Anarchist a couple of years back. Taylor is joined by a large cast that includes the great Phil Daniels as Sarrafian.

West End Shakespeare in the post-pandemic era is almost exclusively the preserve of just two auteur Brit directors: Jamie Lloyd and Robert Icke. And who can complain about that – Lloyd’s flamboyand reimaginings and Icke’s rigorously intellectual – but always moving – interrogations cover pretty much all the bases not already covereed by the copious other outlets for the Bard’s work in London.  Icke has in fact already directed Shakespeare’s great romantic tragedy Romeo & Juliet – it was the one time prodigy’s first ever professional show, a 2012 production for Headlong. A lot has happened since then, though contemporary reviews were glowing and many Icke-ian conceits – notably a ticking clock, which the cast manipulated – were already in place. So maybe it’ll share something with it, though there’s a totally different creative team and Icke’s restless intellect is liable to have drifted on to other aspects. What we can definitely say is it has some pretty damn heavyweight lead casting in the form of Stranger Things star Sadie Sink as Juliet. Despite being just 23, she’s racked up a decent number of Broadway performances: as a girl the flame-haired performer spent years in Annie, and her return to the stage post fame came with 2025’s hipster smash John Proctor is the Villian. This will, however, be her first stab at Shakespeare. She’ll be joined by Noah Jupe as Romeo. He is less well-known but his face might be familiar: he played middle child Marcus in the Quiet Place...

For the first 15 minutes or so, I thought I had Welcome to Pemfort’s number. Sarah Power’s play presents as a cosily familiar comedy about a clutch of small-town eccentrics pulling together in an effort to stage a fundraising fun day for the titular medieval fort (not a castle!) that forms the chief point of interest in their sleepy town. And Power has crafted a classic trio of oddballs: dotty older lady boss Uma (Debra Gillett), autistic nerd Glenn (Ali Hadji-Heshmati) and hippyish Ria (Lydia Larson), who believes she’s made friends with a deer. The three of them run Pemfort in relative harmony. But it’s the hire of Sean Delaney’s ex-con Kurtis that starts the real story, the quirky villager tropes used as cover to ask some very hard questions about community and forgiveness. Curtis is a good-hearted, sensitive person who has done the work, wants to be better and wholeheartedly regrets the terrible crime he committed as a young man (exactly what it was we only discover around the halfway point). But his arrival is, nonetheless, a seismic event for the small community. Really, Power’s play is a meditation on human nature and the ability to forgive, magnified through the lens of smalltown life, where every addition to the community is scrutinised and dwelt upon. Clearly Kurtis deserves to be given a second chance. But is it realistic to think he’ll get one? Should he have simply lied about his past? These are hard, painful questions that Power asks unsparingly while also,...

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is as American as apple pie and the electric chair. So on paper it seems like a strange first choice of play for Michael Sheen’s new Welsh National Theatre.   But never fear: 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: a couple of incidental place name changes, a couple of hymns. But for the most part the difference is that every cast member not only has a chunky Welsh accent – as the omniscient Stage Manager, Sheen finds a whole new layer of fruitiness in his Rs – but there’s also a warmth and heartiness to their deliveries that softens (and maybe sentimentalises) a strange play that’s often intentionally served up cold and dry.  For its more conventional first two acts, Sheen’s stomach padded Stage Manager is a twinkle-eyed, avuncular guide to life in Grover’s Corners at the turn of the twentieth century as we meet the townsfolk and eventually watch the courtship and then wedding of Emily Webb (Yasemin Özdemir) and George Gibbs (Peter Devlin). Traditionally the play is performed on a bare stage, without props but Goodridge’s production uses staging based around Jess Williams’ dynamic, upbeat movement and the lifting, placing, twirling etc of various wooden boards and props.  Amping up the boisterous charm does feel like it changes Our Town: it conceals the cerebral...

I could definitely cobble together a wanky theory for you about why there’s so much great horror theatre around at the moment.  But all you need to know is that there just is, and that following Paranormal Activity and A Ghost in Your Ear – and with the Almeida’s fine looking Under the Shadow on the horizon – there’s reason to get your hopes up that when a nominally scary new play comes along it won’t make you die screaming of cringe. Tim Foley is a playwright who has also written several Doctor Who audio adventures, two strands to his career that come together very nicely in It Walks Around the House at Night, a rip-roaring horror adventure that packs in laughs and chills in equal measure without actively crossing the line into full on comedy. Superficially the set up is remarkably similar to Hampstead Theatre’s A Ghost in Your Ear: both are about misfit out of work actors who get caught up in ominous supernatural goings on in spooky mansions. But where Jamie Armitage’s play was heavily indebted to MR James, Foley’s is more of a spicy mix, with early Lovecraft the prominent flavour. Joe (George Naylor) is a cynical gay ‘actor’ – inverted commas because in reality he works in a shitty pub while not getting any acting work. He’s on the cusp of trying to get a real job when one of the regulars – a handsome, aloof man named David who Joe dubs ‘the mysterious stranger’ – asks if Joe could do a gig at his country estate. The idea is that Joe will get bed and board and dress as...

This review is from Inter Alia’s National Theatre premiere in July 2025. In March 2026 it will transfer to the West End, with Pike again leading the cast. Playwrights usually want to flex their range after their first big hit. But it’s to the credit of Suzie Miller that she cares so much about the issues explored in her smash Prima Facie that she’s come up with a follow up that you have to at least describe as ‘a companion piece’.  Both Prima Facie and Inter Alia are named after legal terms, both are about high-achieving female members of the legal profession, and while Prima Facie was a monologue and Inter Alia is a three-hander, both have a huge-scale female role at their centre that makes them the perfect vehicle for a screen star looking to scratch the stage itch. And so both have had Justin Martin-directed UK premieres starring major celebrities: Jodie Comer made her stage debut in Prima Facie, while Rosamund Pike treads the boards for the first time in years in Inter Alia. The most crucial similarity, however, is not entirely apparent from the first half hour or so of Inter Alia, which is basically an extended sequence of Pike’s high court judge Jessica frenziedly girlbossing as she juggles her extremely high-powered job with a busy social life and being a mum to vulnerable teen Harry (Jasper Talbot). It’s a breathless performance from Pike, who crests and surges from neuroticism to icy confidence. It’s draining: there’s barely room for us or her to breathe, and a...

This hugely enjoyable tech satire-slash-thriller from US playwright Aaron Loeb is so good at bamboozling you as to what it’s going to be about that I almost hesitate to get into the plot. It’s good! Go see it! Isn’t that enough of a review for you? Okay, there isn’t a massive rug-pulling twist in ROI. But there is some fun misdirection in what initially looks set to be a satire on ethical investment funds. Sassy but idealistic May (Millicent Wong) is the protege – or in his words, ‘work daughter’ – of Paul (Lloyd Owen), the seen-it-all boss of ethical investors the Montrose Fund. One day, she stumbles across a unicorn: Willa (Letty Thomas) is a nervy, spectrum-y doctor with zero people skills who wants an insane $30bn investment in her ideas. But what she’s proposing intrigues May: advanced gene therapy that could change the world by eliminating most genetic conditions (eg cancer, Alzheimer’s). Willa contends that big pharma has suppressed such technology because it would tank their profits. May persuades Paul to take the plunge. The whole play is pointing towards ethical venture capitalist May discovering that she’s more capitalist than ethical. But in fact she proves to be a spirited, unbending heroine, winningly played by Wong. Really ROI is about two things: the inevitably of technological change, and how ill-equipped flawed human beings are to be its avatars.  Loeb is clearly interested in tech and what the near future might look like. It’s not po-facedly THIS WILL...

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the godmother of rock and roll. Raised by her mother, a travelling Arkansas evangelist, she played guitar and sang on the road from the age of six and grew up to be a huge recording star, touring from church halls to Carnegie Hall via Harlem’s Cotton Club. Her electric guitar-powered classic, ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’, broke gospel music into the R&B charts for the first time in 1945, while sultrier nightclub hits such as ‘I Want a Tall Skinny Papa’ ruffled pentecostal feathers back in Dixieland. Her story and her music are extraordinary. So it’s a privilege and a treat to see British soul goddess Beverly Knight play Rosetta in this intimate two-hander, a play with songs that’s all about the music.  Knight is a singer who raises the hackles on the back of your neck: from the tips of her outstretched fingers to her swiveling hips, her body is an instrument. But she does more here, channeling Rosetta Tharpe in a stomping dramatic performance that conveys the passion, resilience, and sheer physical hard work of her life on the road. Most jukebox shows tell a life story through songs, but this one is more like a staged scene dramatising the relationship between Rosetta and the young Marie Knight, who recorded and toured together for three years. We meet them the night before their first show together: they’re bunking up in a funeral home (the South being too racist for them to rent a room or sleep safely in their van). The setup is a good...

This review is from 2023. SplitLip’s delightful spoof WW2 musical has been heading inexorably for the West End for something like five years now. It’s a fringe theatre comet that’s gathered mass and momentum via seasons at the New Diorama, Southwark Playhouse and Riverside Studios, and has now made impact in Theatreland – wiping out a West End dinosaur to boot, as it displaces ‘The Woman in Black’ after over 30 years at the Fortune Theatre. And it’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company, which consists of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Robert. All bar Hagan perform in the show, with Claire Marie Hall and Jak Malone rounding out the cast. This is very much their triumph. And though it’s been redirected for the West End by Robert Hastie, ‘Operation Mincemeat’ is at heart the same show it always was. There are no added backing dancers or bombastic reorchestrations. It’s slicker and bigger in its way, but still feels endearingly shambolic where it counts. It’s a very larky account of the World War 2 Operation Mincemeat, a ploy from British intelligence to feed the German army disinformation via a briefcase of false war plans strapped to a corpse that they hoped to pass off as a downed British pilot (yes, there was a recent film with exactly the same name, about exactly the same thing, and yes they do make a joke about this). The story centres on Charles Cholmondeley (Cumming), the socially inept MI5 operative who dreams up the plan, and...

Analogue photographer Sam Laurnence Cunnane travels across Europe by van for long periods of time to find subtly beautiful scenes and capture his ‘floating eye’ images. The titular work of his Hayward Gallery exhibition, for example, depicts a stretch of newly tarmacked road that appears as a deep blue river. This show will mark the Irish photographer’s London debut and is the fifth exhibition in the RC Foundation Project Space Exhibition Series, which highlights a new generation of international artists. 

Once again you can expect to see remarkable feats of astrophotography at the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition. It’s a chance to see magical views of both our own night sky and of galaxies far, far away. The winning spacey visions come from dozens of professional and amateur snappers in various categories including ‘Planets, Comets and Asteroids’, ‘Stars and Nebulae’, ‘Galaxies’ and ‘Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year’ for under-16s. Soar down to Greenwich to see the winners from 2025's competition on display. 

London’s cultural institutions are having a love affair with the New Romantics this year. First there was Outlaws, the Fashion and Textile Museum’s exhibition on the subversive fashion trends of 1980s London. Then the Tate Modern announced a major retrospective on pioneering fashion maverick Leigh Bowery. Now it’s the Design Museum’s turn to direct its attention towards the most flamboyant subculture of its era, via this exhibition on the Blitz club, the iconic (and we really don’t use that word lightly) Covent Garden nightclub where New Romanticism was born in 1979. Forty years after it closed, the trailblazing club’s atmosphere will be recreated through a ‘sensory extravaganza’ incorporating music, film, art, graphic design and some very ostentatious outfits. This will include several items that have never been on public display before, while some of the scene’s key figures have been involved in the development of the exhibition. Time to liberally apply the kohl eyeliner, fish out your frilliest shirt and whack on some Spandau Ballet: the 80s are back, baby!

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. One ticket gains entry to two companion exhibitions – designed to be experienced one after the other, both shows are riffs on a similar theme.   First up is Chinese sculpture artist Yin Xiuzhen’s Heart to Heart, an ode to used clothes by the Chinese sculpture artist. She describes clothing as a ‘second skin’ which collects the essence of every wearer. A garment, then, becomes a tapestry of all the bodies it’s clothed. Memory is embedded into matter. This effect magnifies with the size of her installations.  Xiuzhen’s ‘Portable Cities’ series is a tribute to how every suitcase is a home, especially since many of us live out of our bags on the move. Unfolding over an airport luggage carousel stitched together using black and white clothes, suitcases contain different cities made out of the garments of its citizens. Hovering above is a gigantic aeroplane, similarly fashioned together. Suitcases, trunks, and other storage receptacles reappear throughout the show; to Xiuzhen ‘home is no longer a fixed address but a collection of belongings packed and ready for transport.’ In the next room is ‘Collective Subconscious (Blue)’: a minibus cut in half and elongated into something resembling a caterpillar. Four-hundred pieces of clothing stitched together and stretched over a metal frame make up the body of this vehicle. As you peer in through the...

Pictorialism îs known as the first international art photography movement and this exhibition will take curious minds inside the scene, exploring how it developed around the world between the 1880s and 1960s.

‘Fun’ is a quality which seems to be all too frequently forgotten by curatorial teams. But it certainly takes pride of place at the Saatchi Gallery’s The Long Now, an expansive, nine- room retrospective which aims to both celebrate its past and reiterate its commitment to championing innovation in the present and future. The show is curated by Philippa Adams, who previously served as the gallery’s Senior Director for over 20 years, and is divided into spaces dedicated to key themes which have underpinned its exhibitions over the last four decades. Abstraction, landscapes, AI and technology, and climate change are all given their own rooms. They’re populated with works, old and new, by artists with whom the gallery shares a long-running history, as well as commissions from emerging artists.A reinvention of the wheel, conceptually speaking, it may not be, but it’s a bona fide feast for the eyes. Across two floors, each room has been curated and installed with care to ensure every piece in the room can shine - no space feels overstuffed. Adams has clearly given careful consideration to how the works will complement each other, both in terms of colour and scale, which enhances the viewing experience and makes you want to linger in every room. It’s a rarity that you find yourself at an exhibition where you genuinely don’t know where to look. However, starting from the very first room, dedicated to mark making and boasting Rannva Kunoy’s marvellous, luminescent,...

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too. It starts, like any good procession, with a load of geezers with trumpets, parping to herald the arrival of victorious Caesar. As they blare, a Black soldier in gorgeous, gilded armour looks back, leading you to the next panel where statues of gods are paraded on carts. Then come the spoils of war, with mounds of seized weapons and armour piled high, then come vases and sacrificial animals, riders on elephant-back, men struggling to carry the loot that symbolises their victory. The final panel, Caesar himself bringing up the rear, remains in Hampton Court, so there is no conclusion here, just a steady, unstoppable stream of glory and rejoicing.  The paintings are faded and damaged, and have been so badly lit that you can only see them properly from a distance and at an angle. But still, they remain breathtaking in their sweeping, chaotic beauty.  Partly, this massive work is a celebration of the glories of the classical world and its brilliance, seen from the other side of some very dark ages. But along with its rise, you can’t help but also think of Rome's demise, of what would eventually...

‘Nigerian Modernism’ celebrates the achievements of Nigerian artists working on either side of a decade of independence from British colonial rule in 1960. As well as traversing networks in the country’s locales of Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos and Enugu, it also looks further afield to London, Munich and Paris, exploring how artistic collectives fused Nigerian, African and European techniques and traditions in their multidimensional works.

There’s an undeniable bliss that comes from being next to a large body of water, and this cold London winter has left me craving a day trip to the seaside. However, my desire for escape was sated by visiting Seurat and the Sea at the Courtauld Gallery, where I wandered through quiet coastal towns and had the shore all to myself.  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, which in turn birthed Neo-Impressionism. The aim of this psychedelic morse-code was that the eye, rather than the brush, would blend colours together to create the image.  Though renowned for his scenes of leisuring Parisians such as Bathers at Asnières and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, more than half of Seurat’s output (and the subject of this show) is stoic visions of the sea from towns along the northern French coast. Seeing as I’ve always found Seurat’s rendering of people somewhat flat and uninspiring, thankfully, these paintings are devoid of people – the only human presence being the boats punctuating the horizon. This heightens the sense of serenity as you trace the geometric silhouettes of ports and harbours mingling with the carefree contours of the surrounding coast. Pointillism really lends itself to seascapes, the unblended paint shimmering under the gallery spotlights like sunlight over the...

Celebrating the centenary of one of Picasso’s most iconic artworks, The Three Dancers, this exhibition explores the Spanish artist’s fascination with performers – including dancers, bullfighters, musicians, acrobats and other entertainers – via more than 45 works ranging from paintings and sculpture to textile and works on paper, some of which are being exhibited in the UK for the first time. They’ll be exhibited in an appropriately theatrical environment too, courtesy of courtesy of contemporary artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang and author and curator Enrique Fuenteblanca, who will transform the Tate Modern’s exhibition rooms into a theatre space that will host a variety of dance and performance pieces throughout the exhibition, including an excerpt from Carmen presented by interdisciplinary arts collective Moved by the Motion, and a site-specific work by flamenco artist Yinka Esi Graves.  Picasso exhibitions might be ten a penny in London these days, but this one sounds like it might stand out.