Things to do in London today

Director Clint Dyer has put a very bold spin on Ken Kelsey’s countercultural classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The former National Theatre deputy has reimagined Dale Wasserman’s 1963 stage adaptation as an intersectional work about racial hierarchies, in which the outnumbered white staff of a psychiatric hospital keep a largely Black patient population in check via icy self-belief and exploitation of their charges’ vulnerabilities. On paper it’s a solid metaphor for systematic oppression, that chimes with the civil rights era in which the play was written.  But Kesey’s essentially libertarian allegory for how the system crushes bright, interesting and rebellious individuals does not really translate that well into a parable of collective solidarity. And it’s not just a question of intent, but quality. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not exactly Shakespeare-level stuff, ie a text so fundamentally robust that it can take aggressive reinterpretation. Rather, it’s a paranoid individualist hippie’s view of the mid-century US mental healthcare system. It’s not without merit in 2026, but as a cultural artefact it clearly peaked in significance over half a century ago with the Jack Nicholson film (something its Christian Slater-starring last London revival unabashedly channelled). Pre-show, information is projected onto the walls about the historic African-American gathering space of Congo Square in New Orleans, and the origin of the city’s Black Mardi Gras Indians. Ben...

Anya Reiss’s new adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is a panic attack in textual form, that smartly amplifies the debt-related anxieties that underpin the 1879 original into something extremely modern and extremely nerve-wracking. Nora (Romola Garai) is an anxious, impulsive woman, who we first meet in her bougie rental house surrounded by obscene amounts of Christmas shopping. Her workaholic husband Torvald (Tom Mothersdale) is taken aback by the sprawl of purchases, but Garai’s Nora remains brittly giddy, reminding him of how different this is to their last Christmas: they are on the cusp of being rich, with the last stages of the multimillion-pound sale of his company going through.  It is, however, all built on a lie, albeit a lie Nora has very nearly gotten away with. Desperate after Torvald’s drug addiction almost ruined them, she laid her hands on a vast sum of money to pay for him to go to a fancy rehab centre. He believes – or chooses to believe – that it was paid for by an improbable inheritance from Nora’s late father. In fact, she acquired it by illicit means that finally come out when Torvald lets go of his longterm employee Nils (James Corrigan), who tells Nora that her secret is dependent on his being reinstated.  Reiss’s updates are an impressively incisive, white-knuckle engagement with contemporary anxieties Reiss is a former Royal Court prodigy who made a big splash in her late teens and early twenties before mostly drifting off into TV. Although...

Inter Alia opens with Rosamund Pike wigged and gowned and rocking out, rasping ‘fuck the patriarchy’ into a mic. This is not a power ballad: the Saltburn and Gone Girl star plays Jess Parks, a pioneering feminist judge, and she is performing the emotional cut-and-thrust of a recent rape trial with relish, deploying her icy froideur to slay macho barristers who are attempting to slut shame vulnerable complainants. The dimly lit blokes in the backing band are, it transpires, Parks' husband and son: a fitting setup for Suzie Miller's three-hand play that feels more like a 100-minute monologue. Like its companion legal drama Prima Facie, which was a massive hit starring Jodie Comer, Inter Alia is a spectacularly demanding showcase for a female star, and Pike delivers the goods with stadium-level charisma, intelligence and flair. Miller’s play is based on interviews with female judges who juggle demanding careers with caring responsibilities and social lives: ‘inter alia’ means ‘among other things’. It's fun to see Pike in an earthier, more physical theatrical role, very different from the icy Hitchcock blondes she's known for on film. Initially, we see her dashing from court to robing room, fielding a dozen missed calls from her sweet bumbling lout of a teenage son, Harry (Cormac McAlinden) who can't find a Hawaian shirt for a party he's going to later, then dashing home to prepare a supper for guests while getting dolled up, taking phone calls and questions, and ironing...

You probably want to know about Sadie Sink. But first we must talk about the sure-to-be-divisive device in auteur director Robert Icke’s take on Romeo & Juliet.  It has what one might call Sliding Doors scenes, wherein we see pivotal moments play out differently to Shakespeare’s plot, before a blinding flash of light resets the scene and we see the story take its inexorable turn for the tragic.  At best they’re an effective way of countering the fact that the bleak end of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy is only arrived at by a series of mind-boggling coincidences and mishaps. Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello… those guys were probably always going to die. The starcross’d lovers – nope, you can easily imagine a world where things worked out better for them, and in acknowledging this Icke elevates the plot’s sillier moments. However, these interventions are extraneous (it’s obviously not how the play is going to be performed in future) and he overplays his hand in a final scene that teeters on the mawkish. It would have made for a more elegant production if he’d left it be, but auteurs are gonna auteur. Sadie Sink then. The Stranger Things star is good. She’s very good. And indeed, one of the reasons the parallel universe stuff feels extraneous is that Icke’s cast is so spectacular that having a fiddly conceit gets in the way of them.  The party scene, in which Sink’s gawky Juliet and Noah Jupe’s puppyish Romeo set eyes on each other for the first time, is electric. Rather than go...

Les Liaisons Dangereuses – I think it’s French for ‘the sexy meetings’ – is a classic play, though I’m not convinced that’s the same as being a good one. Starting life in 1782 as an epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Christopher Hampton’s 1985 stage adaptation was a sensation, adapted into a hit 1988 film and clearly responsible for the ‘90s teen remake Cruel Intentions. It was always trashy, mind, and in a post-#MeToo world I’d say there are some hard questions to be asked about its titillating realpolitik.  Accepting all that, this is a pretty good production of it, as you’d expect from the great Marianne Elliott’s first show at the NT in over a decade, with a to die for cast headed by Lesley Manville and Aiden Turner.  The duo play callous, capricious, above all very sexy French toffs Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil and Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont, ex-lovers whose relationship has degenerated into callous game playing.  Manville is of course an absurdly good actor, one of the all time greats, and Turner is not bloody bad either. In the sexy, sinister, mirror-filled world conjured by Rosanna Vize’s set and Tom Jackson Greaves’ whirling choreography – filled with silent, glowering courtiers who dance with menacing elegance – the two leads are the main attraction and rightly so. The play has issues but by god do they work it, and not necessarily in the ways you’d expect. Manville’s Merteuil is sexy but not overtly sensuous. Rather, she is cerebral, an expert...

Two thoughts buzzed around my head while watching the first London revival of Michael Frayn’s 1998 megahit Copenhagen.  Number one, it’s astonishing that the first time around this hyper-dense show, substantially concerned with theoretical physics, ran in the West End for two years, following a year at the National.  And number two, it would probably land differently if the Americans nuked Tehran on press night which (at the time of writing) was a genuine possibility.  The play feels curiously more and less relevant than it must have done in the late ’90s, which should please venerable mischief maker Frayn (himself in his own nineties now). In Michael Longhurst’s first UK revival we are in an abstract, lightly sketched version of the afterlife. Joanna Scotcher’s set is a revolving black disc of a stage (I think meant to resemble an atom), surrounded by black water. Pulsing lights hanging from the ceiling reflect gorgeously on the mirrored back wall – their reflection evokes the lights of a city, perhaps the Danish capital. On the disc are three people: Danish theoretical physicist Nils Bohr (Richard Schiff), his wife Margrethe (Alex Kingston) and his German former protégé Werner Heisenberg (Damien Molony). Freely acknowledging they’re now dead, they dwell for almost three hours on a single meeting and its implications: what did Bohr and Heisenberg discuss, precisely, when the German came to visit his old mentor in occupied Copenhagen in 1941? In a dizzyingly clever...

Coincidentally topical, with Artemis II in the news this past week, Theo Jamieson and Adam Lenson’s new musical Flyby concerns an astronaut who drifts very far from home – and asks us to piece together why. After a slightly misplaced opening jump scare (this is not, despite brief suggestion, a horror), three narrators set the scene for Lenson’s production. Daniel DeFoe (Stuart Thompson), a name that nods to another fictional castaway, has stolen a spacecraft, The Ostrich, and gone off-grid on what appears to be a one-way mission to nowhere. The question of why is teased out through flashbacks, data logs and intermittent narration from Gina Beck, Rupert Young and Simbi Akande that feels, for the most part, unnecessary. In the past Daniel falls for documentary film-maker Emily Baker (Poppy Gilbert, of The Other Bennett Sister), a woman of fierce, sometimes supercilious intellect. Their relationship unfurls through familiar markers: the first trip away, the hike, the move-in, all staged across Libby Todd's minimal living room set and aided by swift costume changes (Eleanor Bull). It's the bright-eyed period when intellectual sparring feels like foreplay and each other's flaws are still endearing, until, of course, they're not. Emily can be morally superior, a bit of a bully – she carries the weight of being daughter to a celebrated, philandering filmmaker, and is both product and critic of a certain artistic ego. Gilbert is magnetic in the role, as believable in a teenage...

How often does a night at the theatre begin with an actual full-on karaoke session? Maybe yours does all the time, but certainly not mine (and more’s the pity). Yet that’s the set-up at Heart Wall – enter the auditorium at the Bush Theatre, scan the QR codes covering the walls, and sign up to sing. As pre-shows go, ticketholders belting while the crowd claps and the barman and girl sitting at the on stage bar laugh is a delightfully high concept way to kick things off. But that makes sense. Heart Wall, written by Kit Withington and directed by Katie Greenall, is full of equally big ideas. Not all of them are fully realised in the show’s one act, yet this is a lively, emotive piece of work, providing one of the most fun nights at the theatre I’ve had in a long time. (No, I didn’t sing). The girl at the bar is 23-year-old Franky (Rowan Robinson), who’s returned home, to an undisclosed town in the north of England, to surprise her parents. Father Dez (Deka Walmsley) hugs Franky with bewilderment-tinged delight. After all, it’s been over a year since his daughter has come home. The father-daughter chemistry between Franky and Dez is instantaneous, even if his London-swelling daughter might look down her nose at her hometown. Franky’s told that this, life at home, is ‘enough’, but she clearly doesn’t believe it. Robinson has a masterful handle of this kind of snobbery, preventing the character from ever becoming fully unpleasant even when she acts out or makes snide remarks....

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.

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...

Want to gawp at some of the masterpieces in the National Gallery but can’t face schlepping to central London? Croydon will be taken over with life-sized reproductions of some of the gallery’s biggest bangers in this free outdoor art exhibition. From Van Gogh, to Monet and Turner, CR0’s town centre will be awash with artwork. Locations to spot the paintings include the Queen’s Gardens, Croydon Minster, Whitgift Shopping Centre and Park Hill Park. Pieces will also be installed in Coulsdon, New Addington, Purley, Thornton Heath and Upper Norwood.

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. 

Get a glimpse of the hidden lives of queer people in midcentury New York at this intimate exhibition. Before homosexuality was legalised, Donna Gottschalk photographed the people she described as ‘brave and defiant warriors’ for daring to live openly as themselves, and take part in the emerging lesbian, trans and gay rights movements. This Photographers Gallery exhibition of her work puts her images in conversation with texts by writer Hélène Giannecchini, who is decades her junior, creating an intergenerational dialogue charting changing times. 

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. 

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.

‘Exuberance’ is the word of the day at the opening of The Picture Comes First, Rose Wylie’s marvellous retrospective at the Royal Academy. It is referenced in the press materials, and emphasised repeatedly by the show’s curator and the gallery staff on hand to answer questions. After a stroll through the galleries, it is not hard to see why. Though hugely varied in their subject matter – ranging from the Blitz to Nicole Kidman – Wylie’s paintings are unified by a joyful and vibrant energy which beams out from all of them. The RA’s high ceilings and grand interiors act as a brilliant canvas for the artist’s large-scale, often child-like works. The 91-year-old Wylie is the first female painter to have a full retrospective in the space, a fact the institution has shouted proudly about, though on many levels it seems rather shameful given its 250+ year residency in Burlington House. Nevertheless, it only adds to Wylie’s credentials as a trailblazing feminist artist.  Wylie’s paintings are unified by a joyful and vibrant energy The worlds of fashion, entertainment and celebrity are frequent sources of inspiration for the painter. In Lilith and Gucci Boy, she depicts Lilith, the supposed first wife of Adam (of Garden of Eden fame), who left him as she refused to be subservient. In a standout piece, she paints the character adjacent to an attendee of a Gucci fashion show, and labels her ‘the first feminist’. A series of four paintings that depict Nicole Kidman posing on a red...