Things to do in London today

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...

The Princess of Wales Conservatory at Kew Gardens is taking a voyage to China this February, courtesy of the latest annual mind-bending orchid display that takes over the iconic glasshouse each year. As ever, the exotic display will celebrate the natural beauty and biodiversity of its subject country: China is home to thousands of varieties of orchid, plus vast amounts of other flora and fauna besides.   Look out for sculptures of dragons and Chinese lanterns, as well as intricately woven plant installations. There’ll also be  ticketed after-hours events with live Chinese music, food, cocktails and dance performances.  Entry to the display is included in general entry to Kew Gardens.

A new free photography exhibition illustrates the beauty and fragility of the Pantanal – the world’s largest wetland that sprawls across Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. Over 60 images, captured by two of Brazil’s leading documentary photographers, will be displayed. Visitors will discover the Pantanal’s wonderful biodiversity – which includes jaguars, howler monkeys, caiman and marsh deer – alongside the ravages of wildfires and deforestation. 

For 24 years, Kinoteka has been highlighting the creativity and magic of Polish cinema in London, taking over some of the most-respected cinema locations with offerings from the Slavic country. This year will be no different so get down to the likes of BFI Southbank, the ICA and more to discover some new cinematic treasures. The festival has a tradition of putting on retrospectives of great Polish directors, and in 2026 it’s the turn of Andrzej Wajdas. The opening gala on February 4 will show Wajdas's classic 1958 film Ashes and Diamonds from a 35mm print, and there’ll be Q&As, talks and an exhibition celebrating him in the following weeks. Other programme highlights include the UK premiere Agnieszka Holland's Kafka biopic Franz at BFI IMAX, a screening of The Good Boy starring Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough from Corpus Christi director Jan Komasa and a showing of award-winning documentary Trains from Maciej J. Drygas. 

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...

What is Bubble Planet? Having opened at the tail end of 2023, Bubble Planet is another manifestation of the popular phenomenon that I’m calling Instagrammable immersive family experiences. This one is a particularly close kin to the now defunct Balloon Museum. Where is Bubble Planet? Located in the increasingly culturally vibrant Wembley Park, I’m about 75 percent certain it’s in the same building the last Secret Cinema show was in, just a few minutes walk from the station. What happens at Bubble Planet? The theme is nominally bubbles, though this is interpreted extremely freely, from a balloon room and a ball pool, to a computer generated ocean and a VR experience, both of which do technically feature bubbles. There is a lot of descriptive text on the wall, but it’s mostly waffle rather than anything you need to pay attention to. Is it any good? God help me, I have been to a lot of these things with my children and maybe I’m developing Stockholm Syndrome but I’d say Bubble Planet is the best example in London of This Sort Of Thing: I have literally seen some of these rooms (or something very close to them) before, but not in a combination that so conspicuously maximises the fun. Unburdened by the weird artistic pretensions of the Balloon Museum or the penchant for padding out the attraction with rubbishy little rooms where not much happens a la most of the other experiences, Bubble Planet all killer no filler, if by ‘killer’ you mean ‘room full of giant balloons that keep...

This review is from 2023. Power Up prices have gone up slightly and the games are changed occasionally. There's been a gaping chasm, an unfillable abyss, in London's recreational heart ever since the Trocadero finally closed its doors in 2011. It has left the city crying out for an arcade experience, somewhere to go and lose yourself in gaming. And now, Power Up is here to answer all of your RPG prayers. Admittedly, it doesn't have a rocket-shaped escalator or countless dark corners for snogging, but what it does have is bank after bank of classic videogames.They've made an attempt at education with a wall of consoles from throughout history, from the Amiga to the Xbox, but you can ignore all that if you want and just concentrate on turning your eyes square. Everything here is grouped by theme. There's a Mario section and a Sonic section, a rhythm action game bit and a VR gaming bit, there's 16-player Halo and solo Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. There are PC games and handheld consoles, Gamecubes and Megadrives. Want to save Lemmings? Race Micromachines? Fight the Empire? It's all here.If it seems a bit familiar, it should be: Power Up isn't new. The Science Museum did a version of this for Easter half-term every year for a while, but this new version of Power Up is permanent and costs just £10 to access for unlimited, all-day gaming. But even better than that, you can get an annual pass for £15. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than having to invest in a new Playstation, plus you...

There is literally nothing else on this planet as bombastic as a volcanic eruption. And yet somehow, this immersive exhibition dedicated to the destruction of the Roman town of Pompeii by the fury of Mount Vesuvius does endeavour to be ‘a bit much’.  The Last Days of Pompeii: The Immersive Exhibition is the third show to hit London this year from the Spanish company Madrid Artes Digitales (aka MAD), who also made The Legend of the Titanic (which I didn’t see) and Tutankhamun (which I did). The first thing you notice here is the thunderously loud and doomy soundtrack, which permeates every room. Later on you’ll discover that it’s the accompanying music to an immersive film that forms the centrepiece of the show.  But you won’t get to it for at least half an hour, and there’s something very silly about the nominally sober first area – an introduction to the Roman town of Pompeii and its pre-eruption history – being soundtracked by apocalyptic strings and eruption noises. Similarly, the second room contains casts of inhabitants of Pompeii in their final poses before they were entombed in ash. I’m not saying we need to be massively respectful to 2,000-year old dead Romans, but the figures are actually very moving – and would be even more so if you could turn off the overwrought score. Undoubtedly pretty sick if you’re 10, which is surely the point While the rooms at the start are intended to be sensible, this all flies out of the window by the time we start with the immersive...

Opening in time for Spooky Season and running through to May 2026, ‘Dark Secrets’ is a massive new exhibition of esoteric artefacts in Waterloo’s appropriately dingy Vaults – and a cracking day out for anyone into the occult, macabre or bizarre. A sprawling labyrinth of 27 rooms, ‘Dark Secrets’ is fundamentally an exhibition of stuff: more than 1,000 individual artefacts, many of them (apparently) displayed for the first time outside of private collections. Ritual masks, cursed dolls, leather-bound Renaissance books on witchcraft, a fragment of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema temple… if your idea of fun is gawping at weird and creepy shit (and mine certainly is), there’s a lot of it here – and it’s a refreshing change from the wave of immersive ‘exhibitions’ which often don’t amount to much more than a blank room with some projectors in. There is a vaguely chronological structure, running from Celtic druids through to the influence of the esoteric on Hollywood and comics. Horror-movie fans, look out for the original screenplay of Suspiria signed by Dario Argento. Along the way there are rooms dedicated to folkloric creatures, shamanism, voodoo, zombies, satanism, spiritualism, witch trials, Freemasonry, curses, miracles, divination, astrology, tarot… it’s like an occult bookshop brought to life. My favourite item in the show was an (ostensibly genuine) Victorian vampire-hunting kit. But I was also fascinated by a room about the collision of technology and science with the...

Britain and Hawaii have a complicated history marked by surprisingly cordial relations in the face of considerable adversity.  Captain Cook famously met his end in a skirmish on Hawaiʻi Island in 1779. Then, almost 50 years later in 1824, King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu – monarchs of the now united archipelago – came to London on a diplomatic mission to shore up support from the Empire. Tragically, they both died of measles while waiting for an audience with George IV. But the visit went well diplomatically. After a rogue British captain seized control of the islands for five months in 1843, the Royal Navy booted him out and restored sovereignty (though Queen Victoria sort of shrugged helplessly when asked for help following Hawaii’s annexation by the Americans in 1893). This is all by way of say that Britain had as close a relationship with the Kingdom of Hawaii as anyone during its 98-year existence, and this led to a relatively large amount of cool Hawaiian stuff being acquired by the British Museum and Royal Collection over the years: some of it, inevitably, under shady circumstances, but for the most part accumulated by trade or as lavish royal gifts. And it also means there’s a good story: new exhibition Hawaiʻi: a Kingdom Crossing Oceans does offer some background on the archipelago’s pre-monarchical past and American future, but it largely focuses on relations between our two kingdoms and the ill-fated royal visit.  There’s plenty of fascinating stuff here,...

Man and Boy is never going to displace The Deep Blue Sea or The Browning Version or even French without Tears as the quintessential Terence Rattigan work. But this is a truly extraordinary revival, that in its way has a significance that transcends the actual choice of play. Anthony Lau’s production is the first Rattigan I’ve seen that throws off the shackles of naturalism. Even amazing productions of his plays have basically been set in some variant of a period drawing room. But with Lau’s Man and Boy, Rattigan finally joins Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen et al in being deemed a playwright whose work can be given a batshit staging and still stand tall.  Staged in the round, designer Georgia Lowe‘s distinctly Brechtian, wilfully anachronistic set is a billiard table-like spread of green with a smattering of period decor (a wireless, a dial phone). The centre is dominated by a series of metal legged, Formica-looking tables of the sort that I don’t think existed in 1934, the year in which the play is set. And the very long dot-matrix printed financial report deployed at one point is definitely not right. Oh, and on the back wall in an alluring retro font is an actual cast list that illuminates the names and roles of whoever is on stage at the time (aesthetics aside, this is just a bloody good idea.). I don’t think every part of the design is loaded with meaning. But collectively it sets Rattigan free from chintzy tradition, and when combined with Angus MacRae’s wild, jazzy...

Arcadia is just another play you can stage in the same way that the sun is just another thing floating in the sky. Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece is a work of burning, ravenous intelligence, and while almost universally acknowledged as his best work, I get why it’s not staged very often.  I think part of the reason is that the late, great Stoppard probably gatekeepered it from half-baked revivals. But it does definitely involve a lot of people talking about maths, and as much as anything else you really need to be able to pull together a cast who can make discussions about the statistical implications of a country estate’s 200 year-old gamekeeping logs really sing. It’s obviously not a play about gamekeeping logs. It’s a play about the unpredictability of humanity, how we’re defined by our transience, our sex drives, and our desire to understand. Carrie Cracknell’s revival is not an attempt to radically reconfigure Arcadia and I doubt anyone would be so foolish as to try – it’s an incredibly specific play. She and her team - notably designer Alex Eales - have however leaned nicely into the Old Vic’s current in-the-round configuration. A bit of furniture aside, they've forgone any attempt to make it look like the country estate on which the play is set, which we visit in the early 19th century and again in the present. Instead we’ve got a revolving circular stage and lights that look like a mobile of the stars – a specific allusion to some lines in the text but also a neat...

There’s a nagging irony at the centre of Bird Grove. This play about the young Mary Ann Evans – aka future literary titan George Eliot – features copious scenes of her expressing frustration that only men have a voice in society. But the play itself is very much written by a man, Alexi Kaye Campbell. It more or less styles this out, but there are lines where you wonder how Campell wrote them with a straight face.  Maybe I’m being unfair as really Bird Grove is about two people: Mary Ann and her father, Owen Teale’s Robert Evans. A slightly cringe epilogue aside, Campbell’s play barely alludes to Eliot, but is firmly concerned with Mary Ann, a brilliant and unconventional young woman who nonetheless desperately needs her dad. Teale’s Robert is a gruff middle class widower who is paying a small fortune for the titular abode in fashionable 1840s Coventry, essentially in an effort to engage with society and bag his beloved daughter a suitable husband. He’s doing this out of care: independent women weren’t really a thing at the time and in the opening scene he’s shown to be both indulgent of Mary Ann and her unconventional friends – including a flamboyant French hypnotist! - and intolerant of douchebag suitors, giving Jonnie Broadbent’s amusingly pathetic suitor Horace short shrift. He wants to make sure she’s looked after. Matters between them become tested when Mary Ann works up the courage to tell her dad that she no longer wants to go to church as she no longer believes....

Everyone knew there was more to the late Chadwick Boseman than Black Panther, but even so it was somewhat startling when Deep Azure – a play he wrote in 2005 – popped up on the winter programming schedule of Shakespeare’s Globe.  Boseman’s playwriting career fell by the wayside as his acting one took off, and from recent interviews with his widow Taylor Simone Ledward – who had tragically little time with him before his death from cancer – it’s apparent that she wasn’t especially familiar with this work until the Globe asked to stage it. And why would she be? Deep Azure was, relatively speaking, his most successful play, but it only received one staging in Chicago. There is undeniably something random about how by far its biggest production to date is at a candlelit Jacobean playhouse in London, 21 years on. Actually, though, the fit with the Globe makes sense beyond being a show that director Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu was keen to stage. Boseman’s play is not only written in street poetry-esque rhyming verse, but it features a ghost (kind of), a revenge plot and even actually quoted passages from Hamlet. Like Hamlet, it’s set in the aftermath of a death, that of Deep (Jayden Elijah), the free-spirited lover to Selina Jones’ intense Azure. He was killed by a cop, and she’s now stuck in a spiral of despair, compounded by her own underlying body image issues. She lives with Deep’s friends Tone (Elijah Cook) and Roshad (Justice Ritchie) because she doesn’t trust herself to go home...

I wouldn’t really say Miriam Battye’s comedy The Virgins reminded me of my own teenage years, although to be fair this is probably because I was never a teenage girl. However, it did make me laugh a lot. Rosie Elnile’s set is divided into two rooms of the same unremarkable house, with a corridor in the middle. In the lounge, Joel (Ragevan Vasan) is silently playing on a console with his random mate Mel (Alec Boaden). In the kitchen, his teenage sister Chloe (Anushka Chakravarti) and her friends Jess (Alla Bruccoleri) and Phoebe (Molly Hewitt-Richards) are getting ready for a big night out.  The boys are not the focus here. The girls – clever, wordy, neurotic, virgins – are painstakingly crafting a plan to go out and get… snogged. They are smart and irrational, sweet and maddening as they try to naively micromanage their journey to adulthood. They’re treating kissing boys – and maybe more than kissing if it comes to it – as a sort of military operation to be planned, accomplished and ticked off. Deploy troops, storm the building, bring them home. But in part that’s their brains denying their actual horniness – for starters Jess is certainly incapable of vocalising the fact she obviously has a crush on Joel.  It’s hard not to see The Inbetweeners as casting a bit of a shadow here: I’m not saying Battye has even seen or been directly influenced by the C4 sitcom about a similarly aged, similarly neurotic group of boys, but at the least it’s a pretty good reference point for...

Although his glory days were undoubedly in the middle of the twentieth century, Arthur Miller’s late works still pack a punch, and none more so than 1994’s Broken Glass, which was his final original play to transfer to Broadway. Revived here a couple of times since to acclaim, it follows a New York Jewish couple with a troubled marriage who are physically stricken down just as the events of Kristalnacht unfold. In his first non-musical production since hitting the big time, rising star Jordan Fein directs a cast headed by Pearl Chanda, Eli Gelb and Nancy Carroll.

‘So… we think this is based on a true story.’ Opening Jack Nicholls’ debut play The Shitheads, these words instantly instil a sense of nervousness in the audience, a scepticism in what they’re about to watch. I mean, the cragged stone wall that spans the length of the stage seems pretty realistic. This is a show about cavepeople; caves are to be expected.  Don’t be fooled. It might be set tens of thousands of years in the past, but The Shitheads couldn’t be further from some historical re-enactment where characters dress in animal hides and communicate only in grunts. Instead, Nicholls, along with directors Aneesha Srinivasan and David Byrne, have created a strange, macabre, properly funny piece of theatre about the human condition that ponders on the future as much as the past. The concepts of ‘reality’ and ‘history’ are disrupted almost as soon as The Shitheads starts, when a majestic, ghostly puppet elk canters onto stage. Designed by Finn Caldwell and Dulcie Best and controlled by the cast, it is a breathtaking sight: huge in scale, eerie in look, with fabric trailing from its antlers and suggesting decay. The elk is being chased by strong-headed Clare (Jacoba Williams), and frenetic, jumpy Greg (Jonny Khan). The pair have only just met but bicker like old friends, Greg gleefully goading Clare while also warning her that she should be moving south. ‘The country’s going to die,’ he says. ‘The weather’s going to kill it.’ Clare is uninterested in his premonition of ‘ice...

This review is from 2017. See official website for the current cast. Okay, let’s just get this out of the way. ‘Hamilton’ is stupendously good. Yes, it’s kind of a drag that there’s so much hype around it. But there was a lot of hype around penicillin. And that worked out pretty well. If anything – and I’m truly sorry to say this – Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the US Treasury, is actually better than the hype suggests. That’s because lost in some of the more waffly discourse around its diverse casting and sociological import is the fact that ‘Hamilton’ is, first and foremost, a ferociously enjoyable show. You probably already know that it’s a hip hop musical, something that’s been tried before with limited success. Here it works brilliantly, because Miranda – who wrote everything – understands what mainstream audiences like about hip hop, what mainstream audiences like about musical theatre, and how to craft a brilliant hybrid. Put simply, it’s big emotions and big melodies from the former, and thrilling, funny, technically virtuosic storytelling from the latter. ‘Alexander Hamilton’, the opening tune, exemplifies everything that’s great about the show. It’s got a relentlessly catchy build and momentum, a crackling, edge-of-seat sense of drama, and is absolutely chockablock with information, as the key players stride on to bring us up to speed with the eventful life that Hamilton – the ‘bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a...

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...

Read our review of Dracula HERE.  Kip Williams is not a massive name in British theatre (yet), but the Aussie writer-director is starting to make some serious waves over her. His dizzyingly high tech, Sarah Snook-starring one woman Dorian Gray was a big West End hit last year, this autumn he directs a version of Jean Genet’s The Maids at the Donmar. It seems questionable as to whether we’ll get part two of his one woman Victorian horror trilogy over here – a version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde received mixed notices Down Under – but part three is coming our way in the new year as his take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula lands on our shores. In her first full London stage role since her career making turn turn in The Color Purple over a decade ago, Cynthia Erivo will return home to (hopefully) triumphantly take on 23 different roles in a tech enhanced solo romp through Dracula that plays clever visual homage to the early years of horror cinema.

You could say that Marie Antoinette was the original celebrity. The last Queen of France worked with personal stylists, had her barnet done by celebrity hairdressers, and set the agenda for the fashion of the day. She had her own personal brand – an elegant ‘MA’ monogram – which she plastered all over her jewellery, furniture, belongings, and even most intimate toiletries. Like many celebs today, the queen’s dodgy reputation, founded on obscene rumours of debauchery, promiscuity and gorging on cake, was created by tabloid sensationalism. So it’s only fitting that a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the style of the world’s most fashionable and infamous monarch should be just as fabulous, bold, sparkly and, at times, salacious. Featuring 250 objects, including loans from Versailles that have never been exhibited outside of France before now, Marie Antoinette Style takes visitors on a journey through the ill-fated queen’s forward-thinking wardrobe, dizzyingly elaborate jewellery, lavish interiors, huge hairstyles and enduring influence on fashion and art today. Alongside the myriad guffaw-inducing riches on display (a replica of the most expensive necklace ever made in France is particularly astonishing), mysteries surrounding the queen are confidently dispelled. Did she really say, ‘Let them eat cake’? (No.) Was the coupette glass actually modelled on her breast? (No, but a very realistic porcelain ‘breast bowl’ commissioned by Antoinette is on display.) What appears...

‘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.

OOF Gallery – the world’s only contemporary art gallery in a football stadium at Tottenham Hotspur’s ground – is showing the first ever exhibition dedicated to the portrayal of football in photographer Roger Mayne’s work. One of Britain’s most acclaimed street photographers, Mayne’s inner-city scenes from ’50s and ’60s London document a seismic period of postwar social change in the UK, and football is at the heart of so many of his photographs, especially of the children he captured, playing jumpers for goalposts-style games in the street. This show, featuring original prints of some of Mayne’s most notable and iconic photographs, shows football as a game (not a sport), with kids in shorts diving to save wild shots on hard concrete and dribbling down the middle of the road. It’s children living totally free – joy against the odds and the simple ecstasy of youth.

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.   

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.

There was a time when being into Wes Anderson made you a proponent of quirky indie cinema. These days, liking his stuff doesn’t make you a cinephile with niche interests, or really even particularly cool. Now firmly in the mainstream, some of Anderson’s recent films are so stylised as to feel like parodies of his own work. And yet, the universe he has created is still just as wonderful as it has ever been. At the Design Museum’s massive exhibition dedicated to the director there is the chance to step into this ever-so-charming and colourful world – if you’re a fan of Anderson’s films, you are going to love it.  Through more than 700 costumes, props, handwritten notes, scripts, storyboards, behind-the-scenes photographs, and more, Wes Anderson: The Archives travels through each of the director’s 12 feature films in chronological order.  Entering the exhibition, the words ‘No Crying’ are stamped above the doorway of a crimson-painted room (all the paint swatches were approved by Anderson himself). Visitors are then greeted with a wall of BTS polaroids, which includes a shirtless Bill Murrary flexing his biceps on the set of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and close ups of a young Jason Schwartzmann. A series of Anderson’s notebooks are laid out showing his ridiculously neat and boxy handwriting. Of course he writes like that.  The Archives shows visitors just how much detail has been poured into each of Anderson’s films: this is the crux of the whole display. We learn...

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.

Things tend to look different in the glow of candlelight, whether that’s the curious faces of people or stony sculptures sitting spectre-like in the shadows. It’s a phenomenon that Joseph Wright of Derby interrogates in the pieces displayed here – the first major exhibition dedicated to his candlelight paintings – questioning what we see and the act of looking itself. Submerging his work in darkness, he explores themes like death, morality and scepticism in a way that challenges more typical views of his output as a painter.

In a small, undecorated room, I stand amongst a group of onlookers, staring at a set of keys on the floor. A human hand crawls out through a gap between the ground and a slightly-not-long-enough wall, attempting to reach the keys. As we collectively gawk, confounded by the flailing hand, a middle-aged American woman in a sharp trouser suit asks: ‘I wonder if we’re all being terribly English about this, by not getting involved?’ She then proceeds to drag the keys along the floor, causing the hand to chase after them, never allowing it close enough to catch.  Believe it or not, we’re not the participants of some sort of University of Oxford social experiment, rather we are the voyeurs of ‘Ascenseur’, a work of art by the Brazilian artist Laura Lima. First conceived in 2013, it’s now on view in the ICA as part of a recently opened solo exhibition by Lima, spanning works from her repertoire, as well as a brand new commission from which the show, The Drawing Drawing, derives its title.  This work, the centre piece of the show, sits just behind ‘Ascenseur’ in the space’s Lower Gallery. A sort of Alice In Wonderland take on a traditional life drawing class, ‘The Drawing Drawing’ comprises several easels with stools and a nude life model, all sitting on individual podiums which revolve and orbit around the room, constantly obscuring and changing the sitter’s view of the model. People are encouraged to take a seat and use the drawing utensils provided to sketch, after which they...

Photography fans are in for a real treat this month, as Nan Goldin’s seminal series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency goes on display in full for the first time ever in the UK. Staged at the St Davis Street branch of Gagosian, the exhibition marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Goldin’s formative photobook, featuring 126 photographs shot between 1973 and 1986. An intimate, wistful portrait of Goldin’s downtown NYC community it includes photographes of pop culture icons like Cookie Mueller and Greer Lankton, shot in Goldin’s signature saturated, moody hues. Don’t miss a very rare chance to see it in all its glory.