Things to do in London today

Seemingly set somewhere between heaven, Ibiza and a novelty Instagram backdrop, Jamie Lloyd’s remarkable production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing eschews a conventional set in favour of a drift of candy-pink confetti that blankets the gargantuan Drury Lane stage. Designed by Soutra Gilmour, there is never not confetti falling, wafting through the air like man-made cherry blossom. At moments of high excitement (of which there are many) it erupts from the rafters. The first half ends with co-star Hayley Atwell’s lovestruck Beatrice squealing orgasmically - the full Donna Summer - with her back to us, caught up in a snowdrift of confetti, a gigantic pink heart hovering over her. There are those who have become cynical about Lloyd ever since his career went into overdrive with his smash 2023 revival of Sunset Boulevard. And to be fair, those that moaned about the casting of Sigourney Weaver in The Tempest – which preceded Much Ado at Drury Lane, and shares much of the same cast – were basically right, though one celebrity miscasting hardly ruins a career. But accusations that he relies too much on live video (he’s used it in two shows), the same monochrome palette (okay, there has been a lot of black) and relentless tasteful moodiness are all but trolled by this none-more-pink symphony of a production, that totally abandons conventional cool in favour of Tom Hiddleston’s dad dancing. This impressionistic Much Ado doesn’t take place in a specific space or time, but...

London has seen no shortage of Impressionism exhibitions in recent years. Do we need another? Possibly not. But this one does offer the chance to see some magnificent paintings from the collection of arts patron and Impressionism superfan Oskar Reinhart for the first time outside of his native Switzerland.  And the Courtauld Gallery is the perfect host, thanks to the many overlaps the collections of Samuel Courtauld and Reinhart, two men fascinated with Cézanne, van Gogh and Manet. This leads to some very literal parallels: for example, two Honoré Daumier paintings depicting Don Quijote and his groom, Sancho Panza, hang on opposing sides of the same wall, one in the permanent collection and one in the temporary exhibition. The exhibition starts with a punchy trio. Immediately, you’re confronted by Goya’s ‘Still Life With Three Salmon Steaks’. Painted during the Peninsular War, it’s shot through with violence: against a stark black backdrop, the vivid pinks of the meat are almost unbearably fleshy, streaked with blood that pools at the base of the steaks. Goya, who masterfully depicts nightmares in his black paintings, here grounds his horror in the gut-churningly real. The effect is intense and bodily. ‘A Man Suffering From Delusions of Military Rank’, by Théodore Géricault, is a deeply unsettling portrait, part of a group of works thought to depict individuals with mental illnesses. Here, a gaunt man wears an approximation of military dress (a hospital ward tag hanging...

The four canvases on display from Noah Davis’s 2013 show, ‘The Missing Link’, are large and consuming. In one, an anonymous Black man carries a briefcase, walking through an unknown urban landscape of Rothco-style block colour and concrete. The next is all mottled, moving marks of green and purple foliage, blending and blurring into shadows as an ominous man sits in the middle, holding a gun. Another is grid-like: small, static squares outline the windows of a building towering over swimmers at leisure, the messy paint of the water in fluid contrast to the rigid architecture above. The last image is different, again: Black bodies in motion, faded and fleeting like an out of focus photo, a single figure propelling above the rest, as if in flight.  Davis, the Los Angeles painter known for his figurative works depicting dreamlike visions of everyday Black life, was not one to be pigeonholed: each canvas here is technically unique, yet they still work as a set, each brushstroke deliberate, considered. In this retrospective, we are taken into his personal life: ‘Painting for My Dad’, created when he lost his father, shows a backturned figure standing on the rocky edge of the Earth, peering into the wide, open darkness; the unknown, unforgiving gravitational pull almost visceral. We discover his deep, well-referenced knowledge of art history and glimpse into his Underground Museum, the Arlington Heights gallery he co-founded with his wife, Karon Davis, in 2012. We learn about...

Two temporary exhibitions in and there’s a formula developing at the Young V&A. Which is absolutely fine, because it’s a good formula. Like predecessor Japan: Myth to Manga, new opening Making Egypt combines clear, lucid historical and cultural storytelling with an intriguing collection of historic artefacts set alongside modern pop cultural items influenced by them. Making Egypt is, naturally, concerned with Ancient Egypt, and over its three rooms the title is interpreted in three quite different ways. Wildest is the first room, which goes all in on the colourful and often contradictory world of their gods – a short recorded audio drama has them bickering over who literally made the world. The second room is more concerned with Egyptian writing, hieroglyphics and style, while the third covers buildings and statues – if you don’t leave it as an expert on the making of faience (a sort of turquoise ceramic that was huge 5,000 years ago) then you haven’t been paying attention. The ravishing painted wooden sarcophagus of Princess Sopdet-em-haawt is the obvious showstopper The mixing of contemporary objects with the ancient stuff is perhaps less effective than in Myth to Manga. In part, that’s because there’s far less cultural continuity between Ancient and modern Egypt than mediaeval and contemporary Japan. But the fact much of the modern stuff on display – be that a clip of the Brendan Fraser popcorn classic The Mummy, or a Games Workshop ‘Necrosphinx’ – has an orientalist...

In Coral Wylie’s nature-driven debut, absence and presence blur and spike. Pip - also played by Wylie – is a non-binary 19-year-old trying to make sense of themselves and their world. To do this, they keep a diary; filling it up with heavy feelings. ‘I don’t know myself. I don’t know how to fix it,’ they write. Pip’s parents, however, prefer to keep their worries and traumas as ungerminated seeds. Twenty years ago, Pip’s father, Craig (Wil Johnson) lost his best friend Duncan (a cracking Omari Douglas) to AIDS. But instead of speaking about their memories, Craig has tried his best to bury Duncan’s existence, deep. Near the beginning of Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew, Pip discovers one of Duncan’s old jackets with an old diary stuffed inside the pocket. Almost immediately they feel an affinity with their parents’ old friend.  The past starts to overflow like running water. Through his writing, Duncan’s personality is released in multitudes; and in these flashes Wylie’s play shimmers into something brilliant. Douglas makes Duncan an almost otherworldly vision; his diary entries pulse with humour and fire, as well as his niggling fears. Duncan’s life feels stolen; the loss of him is cruel and has left a gaping hole. Without Duncan, colour has been sucked out of Craig and his wife Lorin’s days. Max John’s set makes their once dazzling home bland and white; their walls and furniture have no decoration. In scenes from their past though, the couple are powered by their own...

By rights, Peter Hujar should be far more famous than he is. Born in New Jersey in 1934, the photographer was a contemporary of Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, and a close friend and sometime lover of Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz. He rubbed shoulders with countless artists and literary luminaries, photographing everyone from Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag and Wiliam S. Burroughs to Greer Langton, John Waters and Cookie Mueller. Pretty much anyone notable in the thriving art scene of downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s was acquainted with Hujar.  But despite being enviably well-connected, he didn’t achieve much in the way of mainstream success before his death of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987, exhibiting rarely and producing just one photobook (1976’s Portraits in Life and Death) during his lifetime. Even posthumously, he’s mostly been recognised by association with other artists; a striking portrait of the dying transgender icon Candy Darling is famed for its use as the album artwork for Antony and the Johnson’s Mercury Prize-winning album I Am A Bird Now, while an anonymous 1969 portrait titled Orgasmic Man is instantly recognisable as the cover art of Hanya Yanagihara’s bestselling novel A Little Life.  Yet Hujar’s photographs should be known in their own right. Not only was he a masterful documenter of the scene in which he operated, but a multifaceted photographer with an exceptional command of light and composition and a sensitive, compassionate eye. All of...

In my notes to the Globe’s first ever production of a Chekhov play I’d scrawled and underlined the word ‘BECKETTIAN!!’, thinking I was making a piercing and original observation that, yes, this take on Three Sisters had a certain Samuel Beckett vibe to it. Afterwards I looked at adaptor/translator Rory Mullarkey’s accompanying essay, and noted that he begins it with a quote from Waiting for Godot, so maybe he wasn’t intending to be as subtle as all that, but it’s nice to know you’re on the right track. Mullarkey has spoken about his discontent with contemporary English-language adaptations of Chekhov, noting they impose too much stuff on him. And while I feel Mullarkey has probably imposed stuff here too, it’s weird how his take actually feels novel, recasting the titular trio of sisters as less fading, doomed aristocrats waiting to get crushed by the Russian Revolution, and more trapped in an absurdist pantomime. Caroline Steinbeis’s production starts effectively: Michelle Terry’s Olga seems jerky and unnatural as she delivers her opening monologue, speaking at a virtual babble. Shannon Tarbet’s black-clad Masha is snarling, sardonic and talks in discombobulated non sequiturs. The piping in their old country home clanks and groans ominously. It feels like they’re automata, part of some great machine, doomed to repeat their days over and over and over. What we see, slowly, is the machine break down, as fraying interpersonal relationships and the apparent descent into...

When Malorie Blackman’s novel Pig Heart Boy was first published in 1999, it was essentially speculative fiction. Though the beloved Brit YA author wrote it after reading an article about the likelihood that humans would receive pig heart transplants in the future, the first one didn’t actually happen until 2022. So this is good timing for a fresh adaptation of the book. The story of Cameron, a 13-year-old schoolboy given a lifesaving but very complicated transplant  – both surgically and emotionally – feels less conceptually goofy than it did a quarter century ago, now that there’s more of a sense it could actually happen. Okay, it probably wouldn’t happen to a random British school kid, but Winsome Pinnock’s adaption feels that bit more punchy for it. Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu’s hugely enjoyable production for ages nine to 13 is not gritty naturalism, not least because of Paul Wills’s superb set, a multilevel series of TV screens attached by glowing cables that looks like a gigantic techno-organic heart. But it feels both giddy and grounded. The opening scenes show Immanuel Yeboah’s affable Cameron playing around with his schoolfriends – their extreme care for him and insistence he not exert his damaged heart is touching, albeit understandably frustrating for him. There’s a similar sense of care to the depiction of his parents’ relationship, which is on the rocks, but not in an unpleasant way - they are simply falling apart under the stress and responsibility of raising a...

In 1837, a baby-faced, wavy-haired 25-year-old Charles Dickens moved into 48 Doughty Street. In the two short years that he, his wife Catherine and their two eldest kids called the Clerkenwell address home, the author penned The Pickwick Paper, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. The property was then used as a boarding house before being bought and saved from demolition by the Dickens Fellowship in 1923, opening as the Dickens Museum two years later.  Taking up two small rooms on the first and second floors of the building, the museum’s centenary exhibition, Dickens in Doughty Street, illustrates the life and legacy of one of London’s greatest writers via letters, manuscripts, rare first editions, sketches and the cheesy love poems he wrote at 18 (thought to be his earliest surviving writing). The exhibit begins with a timeline of Charles’s portraits, tracing him from his 20s (modelling the aforementioned luscious locks) through to his 50s (sporting his signature ‘doorknocker’ beard). Move through the space and there are several cabinets showcasing manuscripts animated with scribbles, annotations and ink blotches, a wall displaying illustrations of his beloved stories and characters, like Little Nell and Fagin, and the court suit he wore to meet the royals just two months before his death (the only remaining suit of his in the world).   If The Muppets Christmas Carol is as far as your Dickens knowledge stretches, this is still an accessible showcase A speaker plays...

This much-delayed exhibition of new work by dissident art superstar Ai Weiwei promises ‘a provocative exploration of contemporary issues through the lens of historical and artistic references’, and lots of Lego and swearing. One work is called ‘F.U.C.K.’ and another is called ‘Go Fuck Yourself’, so you can be pretty sure that Ai isn’t here to fuck around.