Things to do in London today

The first major West End revival of Edward Albee’s classic play in a decade has a cast to die for, as Billy Crudup and Gillian Anderson play the iconically awful George and Martha, an acidic middle aged couple who invite George’s young colleague Nick and his wife Honey over for a bizarre evening of weird and problematic game playing. And @sohoplace is a wonderfully intimate venue to watch the horrors unfold. The catch is that the show is heavily sold out, though at time of writing there were a decent number of more expensive tickets available across the run. The great Marianne Elliott will direct a cast that’s rounded out by Josh Dylan as Nick, and Phoebe Horn as Honey.

Richard E Grant’s delightfully wayward career has taken in plenty of theatre, but none of it’s been in London for a very long time (his last appearance here was in 2005 with Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged). A treat, then, to finally see the great thesp give the people what they want: playing a bonkers posh person in Noël Coward’s ultimately bonkers posh person comedy, Hay Fever. He’ll star opposite big name US star Christine Baranski – in her UK stage debut – playing dysfunctional older couple David and Judith Bliss, parents to Sorel and Simon. One evening, all four Blisses invite a guest over without telling any of the others – calamity ensues. Other casting is TBA but keep an eye on the whole ensemble: it’s one of Coward’ spurely funniest plays, and last major West End production in 2012 offered a big break to Phobe Waller-Bridge as Sorel. Emily Burns directs.

Is getting a drink with an ex always a bad idea? If the aim to create the chaos and drama befitting a side-splitting one-act play, well: you might be onto something. Debuting in London after runs in New York and Los Angeles, Douglas Lyons’ Table 17 is dependent on people making bad, often unjustifiable, choices. Decisions are made and details revealed that elicit audible boos from the audience, some of whom sit on cabaret tables and have been actively encouraged in the pre-show to talk backand let rip. It’s all part of the fun.  Directed by Tony-winner Zhailon Levingston (he of Broadway’s acclaimed CATS The Jellicle Ball), Table 17 is unafraid to conjure these big emotions – and big sounds – from its crowd. Constantly wrongfooting the audience, the show flips from laugh-out-loud hilarity to genuine tragedy in minutes, changing costumes and switching timelines at equal pace. It’s a stylish and exhilarating theatrical experience, jolted forward by three powerful, emotive performances. The characters might be car crashes, but you won’t want to look away from a production this slick. The former couple in question are the confident Jada (Marisha Wallace) and kinda corny mechanic-cum-music-producer Dallas (the West End’s original Alexander Hamilton, Jamael Westman). We meet both individually, delivering respective monologues as they get ready for their date (or not-date?). The pair primp and preen, as Jada switches one bandage dress for another and Dallas opts for the corduroy...

Almost a century on and I think we can be adult about the fact that 20th century American playwright Clifford Odets was never in the same league as the older Eugene O’Neill, or the younger Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller (who both clearly owed him a debt). Golden Boy, from 1937, is a fine play but clunkier than any of those writers at their best, with rougher-drawn characters and a somewhat on-the-nose consideration of art versus violence as embodied by protagonist Joe Bonaparte, a sensitive Italian-American violinist who throws himself into the world of boxing, with ultimately tragic results.  But it’s boring to quibble about the flaws of a worthwhile revival: not every US play from the middle of the last century can be A View from the Bridge. Though elements of Sam Yates’ stylish take will doubtless prove to be divisive, I thought it was great, a crack cast meeting a bold vision that seeks to do more than just squeeze Golden Boy into standard naturalist tragedy shapes. The story opens with Tom, a down-on-his-luck boxer manager in ‘30s New York. He’s played by Daniel Mays with a not entirely dissimilar note to his Nathan Detroit in the Bridge Theatre's recent Guys & Dolls: all comic bluster and goggling eyes. Like Nathan, he even has a girlfriend he won’t marry, although Hayley Squires' Lorna is a more intense character, and the chief impediment to their wedded bliss is that Tom already has a wife.  Business is bad, but then step into the ring – first metaphorically,...

Coincidentally taking the number of OG Stranger Things cast members in a London play this month to two – Gaten Matarazzo is heading up the West End revival of Rent – Affluenza by Andy Sandberg stars Noah Schanpp (aka Will Byers) as a teen whose legal defence for the devastation he causesd on a drunken car drive is based upon notion that he was simply too affluent to understand the consequences of his actions. Shockingly, this is based upon the real case of Ethan Couch, a 16-year-old Texan who killed four people in a crash but whose defence rested on the notion he was so coddled by his parents he couldn’t tell right from wrong. Sandberg himself directs.

Playwright James Graham made his breakthrough with This House, a drama about the hung Labour parliament of the 1970s and at this stage in his career we’ve more or less acceped that he can write about anything and make it interesting. Certainly a drama about influential economist John Maynard Keynes – he’s the guy who came up with the idea of spending your way out of a recession – doesn’t immediately sound gripping. But quite aside from the fact that his economic theories are ripe for Graham’s irrevent but factually compelling stardust, he was also a fasicinating figure, not a dry economist but a bisexual member of the boho Bloomsbury Set, who was married to the great Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Graham’s new play The Standard of Living joins Keynes as the Great Depression starts to bite and he attempts to fabricate a response. Rory Kinnear will play the protagonist, with Royal Ballet principal Natalia Osipova as Lopokova and Thomas Flynn as his lover Duncan Grant, in a production directed by the great Nicholas Hytner.

Read our review of Man to Man HERE. There are lots of highlights to the Royal Court’s seventieth anniversary season. But where the Gary Oldman-starring production of Krapp’s Last Tape and the hit Broadway play John Proctor is the Villain would have been expected to come to London eventually, Man to Man is altogether more of a surprise. Manfred Karge’s hallucinatory solo play about a widow who assumes her late husband’s job and identity in inter-war Germany had its UK premiere at Edinburgh Traverse Theatre in 1987 before transferring to the Court the following year. Stephen Unwin’s production provided a breakthrough for an androgynous young actor named Tilda Swinton, starting her down the path to global cult fame.  Now, in a similar way to the Court’s 2025 revival of 4.48 Psychosis, the whole band is back together for a revival of Man to Man once again starring Swinton and directed by Unwin. Although Swinton has starred in the odd stage role in Europe since, she’s not performed in the UK for over three decades, and who knows if she’ll do so again.

Thelma & Louise songwriter Neko Case interviewed: ‘the way we deal with sexual violence has gotten much worse’ This musical version of Thelma & Louise has many things going for it, notably some thrilling songs from alt-country legend Neko Case, a great cast led by Amy Lennox and Rachel Turner, and some sparking dialogue from Callie Khouri, screenwriter of the classic 1991 Ridley Scott feminist road movie.  It doesn’t quite work though, in large part because it doesn’t make a convincing argument for why this story needs this treatment. Not to say there shouldn’t be a Thelma & Louise musical. But I think Khouri and co could have done more with the medium than offer up the exact plot of Thelma & Louise (the film) with songs bolted on. It’s still decent and on the whole the more we’re left alone with just the leads, the better it is: Tucker is very good as the sensible one with the traumatic past (Louise); Amy Lennox is borderline sensational as the married one who loosens up, hits the bottle and gets laid on the road (Louise). And it gets extra good during the wilder, more concert-like sections at the start of each half, when it threatens to break into something quite formally different. But for the most part we get the film’s linear road-movie plot, slowed down and gummed up by the deployment of the ensemble in every scene. That and the frequent need to cut away to the relatively superfluous figure of Hal (Trevor Dion), the kind-hearted homicide detective who comes on board...

The Cherry Orchard is, of course, one of Chekhov’s great plays, and follows an aiing aristocratic family as they contemplate the end of their beloved country estate and the sale of its beloved orchard. It was last seen in London a couple of years back in an absolutely bonkers production at the Donmar. Expect something less eccentric but powerfully poignant from the great director Ian Rickson, who turned in a fine Uncle Vanya on the cusp of the pandemic. This production will reunite him with Kristin Scott Thomas, who almost 20 years ago starred in his Royal Court production of The Seagull. She’ll play big hearted but finanically irresponsible aristocract Lyubov Ranevskaya, with Stephen Mangan co-starring as awkward noveux riche interloper Lopakhin.

Kimberly Akimbo has the sort of outlandish premise that makes you wonder if it’s going to be another entry in the annals of ‘mad things that only Americans are interested in’. But any  musical that wins five Tony awards and tempts the legendary Maria Friedman out of unofficial retirement is probably going to be alright, isn’t it? Well yes. In David Lindsay-Abaire’s adaptation of his own, more obscure 2001 play, Friedman stars as Kimberly LeVaco, a 15-year-old New Jersey schoolgirl who suffers from an unnamed condition which makes her age at four times the usual speed. This is obviously not a real thing that could really happen (or not in such a neat way). But this inverted suburban Benjamin Button allows itself the one wild metaphysical flourish and plays it with a beautifully straight bat. And of course, it’s a metaphor. Kimberly laconically notes early on that not many kids with the condition live beyond the age of 16. It could have been a musical about a teen with cancer or other more tangible terminal condition. But making it weird stops it feeling like a mawkish weepie about a dying girl and opens it up – Kimberly’s condition feels as much a metaphor for the transience of childhood and the fleetingness of life in general than a story to view literally. It’s also a rare gift of a role to a sixtysomething actor and – like Victoria Clark, who won a Tony for the Broadway production - Friedman absolutely seizes it in Michael Longhurst’s UK premiere. She is sensational as...

In a massive coup for the British Museum and for London as a whole, the Bayeux Tapestry is on display in Britain for the first time in 900 years. The 70-metre-long artwork is an intricately embroidered depiction of the 1066 Battle of Hastings, in which William the Conquerer took the English throne, and it’s coming to the British Museum. Although it’s believed to have been embroidered in Canterbury, the tapestry has resided in Bayeux, Normandy for the past nine centuries. Despite numerous attempts from Brits to borrow the masterpiece over the past century, it is finally on show on British soil for the first time, nearly 1000 years after it was made. You absolutely don’t want to miss an exhibition which feels like the most significant thing British Museum has done in our lifetimes. Read our full review of the exhibition here.

Once again, Regent’s Park will be taken over by sculptures this autumn to coincide with the Frieze art fair coming to London. While tickets to the fair can cost up to £250 and are usually reserved for the collectors, dealers and creators of the art world, Frieze Sculpture is totally free to visit and gives a chance to the proles to get a peak at some contemporary artworks in the open air. Fatoş Üstek will curate the exhibition for the fourth year in a row. This year, instead of viewing the sculptures in isolation, the display is curated as a web of interconnected objects, linked together with materials, stories and communities. Highlights will include Angel Otero’s threshold-like doorway descending beneath the grass, and Tarini Sethi’s intricate stainless-steel screens depicting utopian scenes. 

Serpentine North will host a major solo exhibition by Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar. The New Delhi-based artist is best known for his body of lyrical films, which move between documentary, travelogue and visual essay while exploring the legacies of decolonisation on the Indian subcontinent, incorporating the themes of violence, power, labour, indigenous rights, memory and censorship.  

A woman pushes a shopping trolley across a cracked, weed-strewn car park beneath an apocalyptic sky. In the distance, a crater has ripped through the tarmac, while in the foreground of the painting, four thuggish military types are crammed into a car. They’re helmeted, masked and donning wraparound shades. Menace tips into farce as their gun-laden belts sag to expose piggy pink builder’s bums. Welcome to the United States, 2026.  This is Parking Lot of Violent Forces and Depressive Positions, one of ten new works in Nicole Eisenman’s latest show at Sadie Coles HQ on Savile Row. The French-born American artist has spent decades turning the mess of contemporary life into cartoon tragicomedy. Eisenman emerged as an artist in New York in the early 1990s, amid the AIDS epidemic and culture wars, and by the late 2000s her work had shifted from the introspective towards the explicitly political: war, recession, protest, climate crisis and the increasingly rancorous state of American public life. This is Eisenman at her most viciously effective. Those sinister goons in the carpark aren’t explicitly identified as ICE agents, but the fistful of zip ties one of them holds suggests as much. It wouldn’t be unfamiliar territory: following Trump’s election in 2016, Eisenman began making paintings about the American right, part of a political commentary that stretches back through the Iraq War and George W Bush’s re-election and, more recently, includes the protests following the murder...

New-York based artist Autumn Knight constructs installations and performances inspired by her background in theatre and psychology. In I Can’t Complain, her first major presentation in the UK, she explores the act of complaining and the ways in which it can be cathartic, frustrating and politically empowering. At the centre of the show is an audio installation that collates coversations about everyday irritations, exposing how minor things like food quality can be indicative of deeper inequalities. On select days (October 1,12 and 15), Knight will be in the space for solo performances that delve further into the concept of complaining, asking questions about who gets to complain? And how are those complaints received?     

Tony and Olivier Award-winning English artist and stage designer Es Devlin gets her first UK museum show this autumn. The Design Museum’s landmark retrospective will delve into the stories behind the London-based designer’s 30-year practice encompassing everything from kinetic stage sculptures to monumental art installations. Developed in close collaboration with Devlin – who has worked on everything from the Olympic opening ceremony to the Superbowl half-time show – it will feature rare maquettes, sketches, annotated texts and process materials, as well as new large scale installations conceived especially for the exhibition. 

In his latest paintings, Pakistan-born, New York-based artist Salman Toor explores the struggle and desire for belonging, both culturally and emotionally. Bringing together 19 of the artist’s paintings, some of which have never been seen in Britain before, this is Toor’s first solo exhibition in Europe and will be full of work deeply rooted in his personal experiences, as well as inspired by an admiration for the Old Masters, especially in Baroque and 18th-century painting. 

London’s art lovers go mad for a bit of French Impressionism, so it’s a little surprising that the capital hasn’t hosted an exhibition on one of its leading figures, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, since the National Gallery’s 2007 show on his landscapes nearly 20 years ago. And now, just weeks after France’s most recent high profile art heist targeted the Musée Renoir, the Trafalgar Square institution once again hosts a major exhibition dedicated to the divisive painter. Created in partnership with Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Renoir and Love will focus on the most significant and prolific years of the artist’s career, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s. Opening in October 2026, it will feature several of Renoir’s most iconic works, including  the 1876 painting Bal au Moulin de la Galette, exhibited for the first time ever in the UK.