Things to do in London today

There’s a lot of big spectacle in the West End at the moment. Big musicals, big stars, big budgets. Which makes Ryan Calais Cameron’s fifties-set three hander about a potentially commie actor seem pretty conventional. We’ve got sharp suits, big pours of scotch, a haze of cigarette smoke. We’ve got a no-bullshit lawyer who speaks in cliches (‘now we’re cooking with gas’ etc) and a nervy wannabe writer trying to break the big time. All a bit familiar, a bit old-fashioned.  But to assume that’s all that this play’s going to be – a pastiche of a fast-patter period piece – is to underestimate Calais Cameron who, after all, smashed the West End with his beautiful play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy. Because in walks Sidney Poitier, the guy who’d go on to become the first Black man to win an Oscar, and then the whole thing gets richer and tenser, with big speeches that borrow the cadences and blueprints of the golden age, becoming a play that feels both completely contemporary and like an instant classic.  The play is a transfer from the Kiln Theatre, directed by its artistic director Amit Sharma, and it works so well in the West End, maybe because it’s a really simple idea: Poitier is about to be cast in a big breakout role, but NBC’s lawyers want him to sign an oath that he’s not a communist, as well as denounce a friend. It’s three actors arguing in a nicely furnished office. That’s literally it.  First there’s the initial tension of...

  One of the biggest winners of Euro 2024 was undoubtedly the playwright James Graham. Having promised to update his smash Gareth Southgate drama Dear England following the final tournament of his subject’s tenure as England men’s team manager, Graham must have been thrilled when our boys neither crashed out nor triumphed, but rather did precisely as well as they had done in Euro 2020. Major changes were not therefore necessary; Dear England has been tweaked a bit for its third run in three years, but not a lot. A new cast hasn’t radically changed the vibe either: as Southgate, Gwilym Lee is broadly going going for exactly the same sort of respectful impersonation as his predecessor Joseph Fiennes; likewise Ryan Whittle’s scene-stealingly funny Harry Kane is pretty much the same as Will Close’s scene-stealingly funny Harry Kane. Clearly it’s back because it gets bums on seats rather than because Graham has astonishing new insights to share. But who cares? Graham has written deeper and more important plays than Dear England. But the secret of its success is that – unlike the actual England men’s team – it is consistently, relentlessly entertaining.  Of course there’s the worry that Rupert Goold’s pacy, widescreen production might overhype Southgate, or lionise him in luvvie-ish terms. Yes, by some metrics he’s the most successful England manager in history. But that’s not necessarily how the average England fan sees him.  As ever with England, it comes down to penalties....

Get past the dry sponsor’s name and there’s a terrific nominees exhibition here for this prestigious annual photography prize backed by a German finance company. This year’s judges have narrowed down four photographers – one each from Peru, South Africa, Spain and the USA – each nominated for a specific book or exhibition created in 2024. There’s a slight whiplash effect from moving between such different projects – each of them powerful and involving – but collectively this show is a great testament to just how differently artists can lean into photography in an age where believing what you see is becoming harder and harder. Trust is a powerful tool for a photographer, and you feel it being employed in such different ways in this show. Spanish photographer Cristina De Middel pays homage to those taking the migration route from Central America to the USA. But what is real and what is not in her careful, mysterious images? Surely that person about to pole vault over Trump’s famed border wall is an invention?  South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa trusts us with a disturbing family story: the sudden disappearance of his elder sister when he was just a little boy. Where did she go? What happened to her? It’s too traumatic not to be horribly real and Sobekwa uses new and found photography to deal with and share his pain. It’s too traumatic not to be horribly real Peruvian photographer Tarrah Krajnak also takes an autobiographical approach, but in a more poetic way,...

The first show I remember seeing at the Yard Theatre was called Manga Sister and was a 40-minute micro opera about a samurai going nuts at an old people’s home. I liked it a lot. But it’s fair to say that Hackney Wick’s only theatre has come a long way in the 14 years since then, as it closes the doors of its original building not with a fringe curio but a revival of Tennessee Williams’s greatest play The Glass Menagerie. Yard artistic director Jay Miller is not a man afraid to throw out a lot of ideas and see what sticks, and it took a while for me to settle into his revival, which eschews period detail in favour of a dreamy no place chased by contemporary music (notably John Maus’s gorgeously elegiac Hey Moon), where everyone is kitted out is strange, luxuriant, beautiful costumes courtesy of ‘Lambdog1066’ (probably not their real name but so what if it is). And yet Miller has a clear and lucid plan for it. The ’30s-set 1944 drama, based on Williams’s own family, tends to depict aging Southern belle Amanda Wingfield as a suffocating force of nature whose overbearing love has ruined the lives of her children, Tom (probably gay) and Laura (probably disabled). Miller upends this. Sharon Small’s Amanda is ultimately a decent sort: if the engine of the play is her relationship with her troubled son, then here Small and Tom Varey’s charmingly battered Tom (he kind of looks like ‘70s Dylan) laugh together as much as they argue. She is reined in, a carefully modulated...

Leeds is another planet in this exhibition from veteran British photographer Peter Mitchell, a name nowhere near as well-known as contemporaries like Don McCullin or Martin Parr – but a truly worthwhile discovery if you’ve never heard of him. A Londoner who moved to Leeds in 1972 and never left, Mitchell’s photos in this small but transporting exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery take us on a tour of the backstreets and alleys of his adopted city, mainly during the 1970s, giving us proud shopkeepers and aproned artisans standing in front of crumbling premises, many of which look more Victorian or Edwardian than late-twentieth-century. Mitchell’s work – most of it in colour – has an unfussy, curious documentary appeal, all muted tones and small details like the lettering of shopfronts taking on a nostalgia four decades later. But there’s also playfulness. Someone once told Mitchell – now in his eighties – that his photos felt like they’d been taken by an alien visiting Earth. He turned that comment into a gag and interspersed actual NASA pictures of the surface of Mars among photos of timewarp shopfronts and ageing houses. He extends the joke by framing many of his works with faux-scientific ruled edges, turning all of Leeds into a lab rat. The captions, with their more modern references, including a reference to digital photos, were clearly written much later. They add another sense of time passing to the show.  He gives us utopia being shattered in front of our eyes...

‘Mrs Doubtfire’ is the latest in a seemingly endless post-pandemic string of musical takes on retro movies. ‘Back to the Future’, ‘Dirty Dancing’, ‘Groundhog Day’... if you were born in the ’80s, the West End has decided that by now you're obviously loaded and ready to be milked of your money like a pantomime cow. Only this genuinely funny comedy musical doesn't feel like a cash grab, thanks to its twenty-first-century jokes, perfectly paced book, and silly voices galore. Writer John O’Farrell has worked on ‘Have I Got News For You’ and ‘Spitting Image’, and some of that topical flair can be seen here. Freshly divorced dad Daniel is a comic actor whose voiceover recording seshes ingeniously break out of the American world of the story: he begins with a witty theatre pre-show announcement, then breaks into non-naff impressions of Prince Harry and Boris Johnson. Refreshingly, this production has resisted the temptation to cast a famous funny person in the role, and musical theatre actor Gabriel Vick pulls off both the gags and the songs with impressive aplomb.This story’s serious bits aren't quite as well-handled. O’Farrell struggles a little to make Daniel’s ex-wife Miranda (Laura Tebbutt) more than a boring disciplinarian foil to Daniel's relentless zaniness (here, she gets an improbable fashion career and a 2D hunky love interest). Karey and Wayne Kirkpatricks’ lyrics don't zing with the kind of psychological insights or witty couplets musical theatre fans dream of. But...

Absurdly prolific as he is, it sometimes feels like we could do with cloning playwright James Graham a few times. His reassuringly familiar but diverse body of work has done so much to bring obscure chapters of recent history to life – from the whipping operation of the hung 1970s Labour parliament to the 1968 television clashes between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr – that it feels faintly bleak pondering the great stories that one James Graham alone has to let slide.  Punch, which originated at the Nottingham Playhouse last year, is the perfect example of what he does. It tells the poignant story of Jacob (David Shields), a lad from Nottingham who got into a totally pointless fight – if you can even call it that – with James, a (never-seen) paramedic just a few years older than him. On a big night out, Jacob punched James precisely once. James went down, and a couple of weeks later he died, his life support switched off following a bleed to the brain. Graham’s script delves into this with typical deftness: arguably his plays all amount to really, really good explainers. We get the incident and also its profoundly complicated aftermath. But we also get a forensic dive into Jacob’s life, his journey from a sweet primary schooler who loves his single mum to his gradual falling in with the wrong crowd, as undiagnosed neurological conditions and the roughness of his estate begin to bite. Shields is terrific as Jacob: his performance is a modulated study in the ferocity...

Fashion icon, model, club promoter, musician; Leigh Bowery was a multi-hyphenate before multi-hyphenate became a thing. But above all else, he was a muse, as the Tate Modern’s extensive new exhibition tracing the Melbourne native’s life and legacy does an excellent job of portraying.  Starting with his arrival onto London’s New Romantic scene in 1980, we’re whisked through Bowery’s many different eras in loose chronological order, from his early days as a club promoter for the short-lived but influential Taboo, through to his later practice as a performance artist, clothes designer and life model for Lucian Freud.  Re-invention was what Bowery stood for, and the Tate does a great attempt of categorising his many selves, from the walls (the first section is plastered in the Star Trek wallpaper from his home, the next his favoured polka-dot motif, and so on), to the clothes, video clips and portraits on display, which grow ever more out-there as Bowery gained confidence in his craft and voice with each year he lived in London. In the final room, beautiful blown-up fashion photographs show him literally shape-shifting, wrapping and warping his flesh like a sculptor working the wheel.  Photos show him literally shape-shifting, wrapping and warping his flesh like a sculptor In the curator’s tour, we’re told that this exhibition could have been called ‘Leigh Bowery and Friends’ and perhaps that would have been more appropriate: the Bowery on show here wouldn’t exist without...

Ever wished you could be someone else? How about trying out multiple personalities? That’s exactly what the ‘passengers’ of You Me Bum Bum Train get to do. The labour of love of its creators Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, who founded it in 2004, this immersive cult show has popped up in secret spots across London, taking participants one by one through a series of weird, wonderful, intense and exhilarating experiences. Each participant signs a non-disclosure agreement so that the mystery of what actually happens gets preserved and so everything is a total surprise. You are the star of each of the incredibly realistic scenes, with hundreds of volunteer actors (and the occasional celebrity) guiding you through – but how you react is entirely up to you. This is a safe space to unleash that main character energy and lean into different parts of your personality you had no idea were there, which can be a life changing experience. A shocked first timer I chatted to afterwards said that he would ‘never be the same again’; a 70-something veteran YMBBT rider exclaimed that these shows were the most memorable moments of his entire life.  In the early 2010s I went to more immersive theatrical events than I care to remember, including four YMBBTs. My immersive days are now long behind me but when it was announced that YMBBT was back after eight years, I knew I had to have another dose. Wearing my comfiest of clothes and ready for anything, I turned up at the secret West End location...

London’s museums and galleries are enjoying a nostalgic love affair with the subcultures of 1980s Britain this year. On right now are Tate Britain’s The 80s: Photographing Britain documenting the huge social upheaval of the era, and the Fashion and Textile Museum’s Outlaws delving into the fashions of the New Romantics. Next up is Tate Modern’s Leigh Bowery exhibition, highlighting one of the decade’s most significant cultural figures, followed by the Design Museum’s autumn exhibition on the era’s countercultural headquarters, the Blitz Club. And then there’s the National Portrait Gallery’s offering, The Face Magazine: Culture Shift.  Is five overlapping shows about Thatcher’s Britain too many? Not judging by the number of people that my dad would refer to as ‘older funsters’ poring over magazine spreads on the exhibition’s opening day. For Brits of a certain age, The Face was the pop culture bible of their youth. Its pages were a chaotic, colourful blend of music, fashion, nightlife, and subcultural anthropology, combining the grit, tone, and subject matter of the era’s music publications with the creative flair, quality, and splashy colour photography of the big fashion magazines.  All of this is expounded in effusive hyperboles on the wall text at the beginning of the exhibition, a co-curation between the Portrait Gallery and former employees of the magazine. Setting the scene at the entrance is a pleasingly nostalgic video montage of scenes from 80s Britain. Thatcher...