Things to do in London today

It’s worth saying from the off that I don’t think there’s any perfect way for a brand new, big budget, one hour David Bowie film spectacular to pan out. He did so much stuff, that has been written about and discussed so exhaustively that almost anything you do with a new project will flirt with either cliché or perversity, especially with a relatively brief runtime.  The latest original work from dedicated immersive film house the Lightroom – directed by Mark Grimmer – is definitely not perfect. There are bits that had me rolling my eyes, especially the sections where cutesy animated cutouts of Bowie doing stuff like ‘reading important books’ or ‘hanging out in art galleries’ are used to illustrate recordings of his musings on the creative process. Bowie’s voiceover is, I’m sorry to say, not that thrilling. I get it: there is simply not enough time or space to bring in his many, many collaborators, so having archive audio of Bowie’s ponderings on his art and craft that roughly correspond to whatever area of his career the film is highlighting at the time makes sense.  Still, it’s not hyper-illuminating and feels like it all comes from the same era of his career (I’m guessing the ’90s/early ’00s). Video footage of a profoundly awkward 1975 interview with Russell Harty feels like it provides a much more interesting look at Bowie than his assured latter-day ponderings.It’s also worth saying that despite a vaguely chronological trajectory, you will almost certainly be very...

Before I enter The Music is Black: A British Story I’m handed a pair of headphones with a sensor on top. These will be my auditory guide through an exhibition that tells the story of Black British music from the past 125 years. As I move through the show, my ears are blessed with the sounds of composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, ‘Silly Games’ singer Janet Kay, Sade, jungle pioneer Shy FX and Little Simz. What is a music exhibition without the melodies, after all?  Kicking things off with a bang, the V&A East’s first exhibition explores the trailblazers, visionaries and unsung heroes of Black music in the UK from the 1900s to the present day. From swing and jazz, to jungle, grime and trip hop, no genre goes uncovered. More than 200 objects from the V&A’s collection are displayed, with photographs, instruments, fashion, sheet music and artworks on show.  The Music is Black doesn’t shy away from the murky past. At the beginning, you are confronted with the horrifying realities of slavery and colonialism – from a graphic showing the volume of slave ship voyages through the 16th to 19th centuries, to the 1633 Royal charter legalising the trade of enslaved Africans. There are items, like an Ethiopian prayer book, marked as looted by British troops (although there’s no mention of returning it). The stark opening is a grave reminder that early protest music paved the way for the tunes we listen to today.  It’s a comprehensive and triumphant ode to some of the best...

Londoners have fallen hard for the sour, sticky, spicy flavours of Korean cuisine, but most of us stick to a few familiar classics like kimchi and bibimbap. Take your obsession a step further at Jung Festival, the UK’s first festival of Korean food, which'll assemble a mouthwatering line-up of indie traders and brands to introduce you to new dishes and new flavours. Head to King’s Cross’s Canopy Market for a free-entry market with names including Chickenhaus, Hoho London, Kiwa and Hongdae Pocha, who’ll serve up delicious dishes inspired by Korea's rich culinary traditions. 

The pretty waterways of Little Venice will erupt with music and  colour for the annual IWA Canalway Cavalcade from Saturday. The fundraising event has been going on since 1983, bringing dozens of craft of all shapes and sizes to the area, dressed up to the nines and showing off the best of life on London’s canals. Watch as boat owners compete in boat handling competitions and, after dark, take part in an illuminated procession. On land, there’ll be arts and crafts stalls next to marquees full of food and craft beers from local traders and a programme of live music performers. 

Plenty of things have happened on April 23, but Shakespeare’s birthday has gotta be one of the most monumental in history. No wonder the V&A sets aside 10 days for a programme of live performances, talks, screenings and workshops (plus more) by actors, musicians, dancers and comedians around the Bard’s day of birth. This year’s festival has a daily free Shakespeare trail centring on objects from the museum's collection, and a teeming programme of events inspired by the loose theme of 'echoes', with an emphasis on music and memory. Highlights include reminisces from drag queen Jodie Harsh (May 1), a concert by South African Cultural Gospel Choir (April 25), and a Friday Late themed around lost queer venues (April 24). Browse the V&As online listings for full details.

A hat in the shape of an upside-down shoe; a dress resembling an inside-out human body; embroidered jackets covered with gorgeous pink roses, sparkling zodiac symbols and vibrant vegetables. Elsa Schiaparelli made clothes that were as surprising as they were beautiful. The V&A has plundered the well of ingenuity that is Maison Schiaparelli in its latest landmark fashion exhibition – the first British exhibition dedicated to the Italian designer, who rose to fame in Paris between the World Wars – and there are some real treasures to be found.  With over 400 objects, including 100 ensembles and 50 artworks (by the likes of Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Man Ray), as well as accessories, jewellery, photographs, perfumes and an excellent collection of buttons, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art presents a deep dive into the fantastical and surreal world of the fashion house. Founded on Paris’ Place Vendôme in 1927, the exhibition spans the 1920s to the present day, showing glorious garments from Creative Director Daniel Roseberry, who has been at the helm since 2019.  Excitingly, many of Schiaparelli’s 20th-century creations appear astoundingly contemporary. Knits from 1927, some of the designer’s first works, are patterned with pretty bows that the TikTok girlies of today would die for. There’s also an incredible gold chainmail headdress which wouldn’t look amiss on Florence Pugh in Dune, or on a ‘medievalcore’ Pinterest board. A shirred form-fitting dress with a visible zip – a...

The Southbank’s graffitied skate mecca is about as iconic as skate parks get. This spring, the Southbank Centre is celebrating 50 years of the concrete space beneath the Queen Elizabeth Hall that was first adopted by skaters in 1976. To tell the story of the legendary park, the Southbank centre has collaborated with the skate community to identify key events, figures and moments that have shaped the space, bringing all the stories together in one mega exhibition. Skate 50 will comprise photographs, films, sound art and animations, featuring contributions from Winstan Whitter, Dan Magee, Lev Tanju, Jack Brooks, the Keep Rolling Project, Beatrice Dillon and Sofia Negri.   

If streetwear is a religion, Nigo is one of its deities. The man behind A Bathing Ape (Bape, for short) is worshipped by hypebeasts the world over, not only for his pioneering approach to streetwear but also for his cultural footprint. Inextricably linked to hip hop – Nigo is besties with Pharell, and everyone from Biggie Smalls to Drake and Lil Wayne have donned his designs – the Japanese designer’s work is characterised by bold camo prints, Warholian pop-culture references and brash graphics.  For the first time, the man behind Bape and Human Made, and the creative director of Kenzo since 2021, has his own London retrospective. The Design Museum’s exhibition features 700 objects – 600 of which come from Nigo’s personal archive – including records, toys, magazines, music videos and a whole lotta clothes, spanning the ‘80s to the present day.  Nigo: From Japan With Love starts with a joyful recreation of the designer’s teenage bedroom – a dream of an ‘80s boudoir displaying Nigo’s own teenage relics: a lava lamp, a Kangol hat, stacks of hip hop records and his very first vintage piece – a shredded Levi’s type II denim jacket. It then moves through a selection of his most treasured objects, which range from Star Wars figurines to a Mr Peanut canvas jacket, and an absolutely amazing 1970s McDonald’s uniform from Hawaii, where the traditional flowers of the Hawaiian shirt are replaced by illustrations of burgers, fries and shakes. His obsession with Americana and vintage...

Give Netflix a rest and see something new at this annual fest of free film screenings in weird and wonderful venues across south east London, including boxing gyms, pubs, parks and churches. Library Deptford Lounge is putting on Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion with a disco afterwards (Apr 24), Kitschy cocktail den Little Nan's is showing cult classic Showgirls (Apr 30), and the fest will close with an outdoor screening of School of Rock in Telegraph Hill Park (May 3). 

Cast your mind back to 1996. The Spice Girls released Wannabe, the Macarena was one of the biggest tunes in the charts, England reached the semi-finals of the Euros, and Dolly the sheep became the first cloned mammal. Relive it all (or experience it for the first time, if you weren’t born then) in this free exhibition at Barbican, celebrating the era of Cool Britannia.  Mel B’s leopard print catsuit, Gerri Halliwell’s Union Jack print boots and Liam Gallagher’s tambourine are some of the items on display, curated by former Sun editor and its ‘Bizarre’ columnist, Dominic Mohan. 

This 1968 play by the great dramatist of the fractured American Dream isn’t one of Arthur Miller’s best. But The Price is compelling in its uncompromising cynicism, originally written as a rebuke to how Miller perceived the abstract, consequence-free tone of 1960s theatre. New York cop Victor (Elliot Cowan) has returned with his wife, Esther (Faye Castelow), to his long-dead father’s home to sell off the furniture before the house is demolished. This re-opens old wounds about what he feels he sacrificed to care for his bankrupted parent while his brother, Walter (John Hopkins), became a doctor. A heavyweight creative team led by director Jonathan Munby makes the weight of this past almost tangible. With Anna Watson’s lighting picking out chairs and lamps and mementos as if they were bones, Jon Bausor’s forced-perspective set is mausoleum-like. There’s a dusty, stifling density to the piles of things that crowd out the stage.  Into this tale of family strife drops wily furniture dealer Gregory (Henry Goodman), knocking on 90 years old and a man of many lives. He’s someone who – in contrast to everyone else on stage – relentlessly adapts to the present rather than hopelessly seeking meaning, blame or absolution in the past. Nostalgia isn’t his game. He’s a show-stopping character, played to twinkly inscrutable perfection by Goodman, whose shambolic bluster hovers beguilingly between sincerity and lived-in pragmatism as he informs Victor that these things from his past don’t...

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...

It’s difficult to pinpoint why the moment Paddington walks on stage at the start of his new musical is quite so moving.  Spoiler alert: ‘Paddington’ is a small woman (Arti Shah) in a bear costume (by Tahra Zafar), with a regular-sized man (James Hameed) doing the voice and remote controlling the facial expressions from backstage. Which doesn’t sound groundbreaking but it’s enough to make us believe that Paddington is really in the room with us. Which is surely the point of the endeavor. He’s not the Paddington of the films: he looks different, more teddy-like, and Hameed’s voice is much younger and more boyish than Ben Whishaw’s. He looks more like the Paddington of Michael Bond’s books, but he’s not really him either, on account of all the singing he does and how much more wordy that makes him. He is a new Paddington. But he is, fundamentally, Paddington, right there in the room with us. Does that make it a good performance? I mean sure, he’s a triple threat: adorable, polite and also a bear. The normal rules for a musical theatre lead are suspended here. But Hameed can sing well, and there’s enough expression in both face and body for Paddington to feel genuinely alive to us. Shah doesn’t really dance, but a couple of elaborately choreographed sequences in which our hero pings around causing chaos are impressively physical. Main attraction aside, a fine creative team led by director Luke Sheppard has created a very enjoyable show indeed. It’s by and large a stage...

For 43 years, Banana Cabaret has been a much-loved fixture on London's comedy circuit. Hosted by Balham pub The Bedford, it's nurtured talents including Lee Mack and Sara Pascoe, and has been central to the birth of the UK's alternative comedy movement. Now, its producer Dave Vickers is ready to retire, and he's throwing one last big bash to celebrate. Banana Cabaret's farewell festival goes on throughout May, with a packed line-up of big comedy names, including Al Murray doing his touring show 'All You Need Is Guv', and mixed bills with the likes of Zoe Lyons, Milton Jones, Luisa Omelan, and many more. Until then, Best of Banana Cabaret shows will run every weekend in March and April, with special guest appearances including Tim Vine and Harry Hill.

If you’ve recently found yourself on the Piccadilly Line during evening rush hour, you may have noticed fellow passengers sporting feather boas, bowler hats and other attempts at Belle Époque attire. They’re on the way to the latest immersive dining experience from The Lost Estate, creators of popular festive show The Great Christmas Feast.  The immersive specialists’ new production is set in 1890s Paris, specifically Le Chat Noir, the legendary Montmartre nightclub that birthed cabaret as we understand it. Stepping into a nondescript warehouse round the corner from West Kensington tube station, guests find themselves transported to a sumptuous, low-lit cabaret bar.  A lot of care has been taken over the design, which is replete with Art Nouveau touches, from Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s iconic feline prints adorning the walls and swirly Paris Métro-esque patterns decorating the banquette seating. The attention to detail extends all the way to the authentic 1890s adverts in the programme. There’s a lot more to like about Chat Noir! The show is based around the nightclub’s grand reopening following refurbishments that made it one of the first venues in Paris to boast electric lighting. The plot is well-researched, deftly bringing together a diverse range of Belle Époque references and characters. There’s music from the club’s sometime resident pianist, the composer Erik Satie and regular visitor Claude Debussy. Performers include celebrated illusionist Joseph Bautier,...

Feature: I went to the new Punchdrunk show and I’m not allowed to review it but here are some things I can tell you about it anyway Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett on Lander 23: ‘it’s high stakes, high adrenaline’. Post 2022’s The Burnt City, immersive theatre legends Punchdrunk seem genuinely liberated by apparently ditching the mask-based format that’s defined most of their previous body of work. Viola’s Room (2024) was a focussed and unnerving hourlong plunge into a twisted fairytale; and Lander 23 is something completely different again, being a ‘stealth based exploration game’ based on ‘videogame mechanics’ that will see audiences deployed in teams of four onto an alien planet to try and find out the fate of the titular landing vehicle, which has disappeared mysteriously. This all feels very new and indeed, in acknowledgement of this the show is billed as ‘early access’, that is to say it’s effectively a work-in-progress for now (and there won’t be reviews, or at least not during this period). Exactly what will happen in it is vague beyond the above synopsis. What we do know is that Lander 23 will run to about 90 minutes, that it’s based on videogames, that it’s possible to ‘die’ in it (you’ll come back to life though), and that the set will be a ‘modded’ version of the Trojan cityscape from The Burnt City. You also have to technically see it in groups of four, meaning tickets are only purchasable in pairs, although if you want to come down solo you can ring the box office...

Usually when reviewing children’s theatre I completely disregard the opinions of my own kids, who are pathetically easily pleased and woefully lacking in in-depth knowledge of the theatrical arts.  This is different though: a rare collaboration between the Unicorn and the RSC, Rachel Bagshaw and Robin Belfield’s production is an 80-minute edit of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that nonetheless uses only the original Shakespearean language. If my eldest, a relatively bookish tween, isn’t feeling it then surely it’s fundamentally failed to render Shakespeare accessible. Plus: I’m a theatre critic! I’m nervous about what my child thinks about his first Shakespeare play. If he took against it, it would be kind of akin to him taking against my best friend from home, or something.  Anyway, he liked it. Not as much as he liked the new Super Mario movie. But not only did he indicate he’d enjoyed it, he backed this up by having clearly followed the plot. So if you’re thinking of going to this production to get your little one started early on some culture then surely that should be enough to recommend it? To offer a slightly more in-depth analysis: Belfield’s edit is really very nicely done indeed. Around an hour has been lopped off, but no key scenes or characters have been abandoned, and it’s all quite tidily done. The racier bits of the Bottom/Titania ‘romance’ are the most obvious casualties but it seemed like a reasonable place to start: and remember if you want to see a full...

This review is from 2016, and of the original, two-part version of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. This will close in September 2026, and in October 9 2026, it will slim down to a single show approximately two hours and 55 minutes in length. In the unlikely event you were worried a leap to the stage for JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series would result in it becoming aggressively highbrow, self-consciously arty or grindingly bereft of magical high jinks, just chill the hell out, muggle.  ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ is an absolute hoot, a joyous, big-hearted, ludicrously incident-packed and magic-heavy romp that has to stand as one of the most unrelentingly entertaining things to hit the West End. Writer Jack Thorne, director John Tiffany and a world-class team have played a blinder; if the two-part, five-hour-plus show is clearly a bit on the long side, it’s forgivable. ‘The Cursed Child’ emphatically exists for fans of Harry Potter, and much of its power derives from the visceral, often highly emotional impact of feeling that you’re in the same room as Rowling’s iconic characters.  There’s also a sense that this story of wizards and witches is being treated with the respect its now substantially grown-up fanbase craves. No disrespect to D-Rad and chums, but the leads here are in a different acting league to their film counterparts’: Jamie Parker and Alex Price are superb as battered, damaged, middle-aged versions of old enemies Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. Sam...

This review is from 2024. What a long, strange trip it’s been. Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle, which she gigged around New England before scraping the money together to record it as a critically acclaimed 2010 concept album that featured the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on guest vocals as the various mythological heroes and villains. Going through the next 14 years blow-by-blow would be time-consuming, but in short thanks to what I can only describe as THEATRE MAGIC, Hadestown is now a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It played the National Theatre in 2018, on its way to becoming the most unusual Broadway smash of the modern era. And it’s finally come back to us. Now in a normcore West End theatre, its otherness feels considerably more pronounced than it did at the NT. The howling voodoo brass that accompanies opener ‘Road to Hell’ is like nothing else in Theatreland. Mitchell”s original songs are still there but have mutated and outgrown the original folk palette thanks to the efforts of arrangers Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose. Rachel Hauck’s set – which barely changes – is a New Orleans-style saloon bar, with the cast all dressed like sexy Dustbowl pilgrims. It’s virtually sung through. It is essentially a staged concert, but it’s done with such pulsing musical...

In an era where even Andrew Lloyd Webber has concluded he needs to move with the times, West End super producer Cameron Mackintosh remains obstinately grounded in the twentieth century. That’s not to say the man’s a dinosaur: he’s the UK producer of Hamilton, for starters. But he has a core of shows that have been in his stable for decades, that he returns to semi-frequently and sometimes claims to be reinventing. Really, though, the new takes on Miss Saigon, or Mary Poppins, or Les Mis are the equivalent of giving an old trophy a good buff and polish – you might make it sparkle a bit more, but it’s the same trophy.  Mackintosh was not the first producer of Lionel Bart’s all-singing Charles Dickens smash Oliver! – he was 13 when it opened – but he did produce a 1977 revival that was totally faithful to the original 1960 incarnation, down to using the same sets. He revived it once again in the ’80s, then did a new version in 1994, which was brought back in 2008. Now we have a ‘fully reconceived’ take from two old Oliver! hands: Mackintosh and director Matthew Bourne, the choreographer on the last incarnation.  Bourne is best known for sexy gothic dance pieces, and he certainly brings his full gothic sexiness to bear here: a cumulonimbus-worth of dry ice seeps through the inky recesses of Lez Brotherston’s brooding multilevel Victorian London sets. Sweeney Todd’s barbers could plausibly be just ariound the corner. Bourne’s choreography is not very ostentatious, but there are...

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...

The Wellcome Collection’s big spring exhibition is a deep dive into perceptions of ageing. Expect the Euston Road institution’s typical blend of art, science and pop culture in the 120+ artworks and objects on display, which range from16th century woodcuts made by German printmaker Sebald Beham to Deborah Roberts’ contemporary collages exploring Black childhood. There’ll also be a spotlight on the Wellcome Trust-funded health research project Age of Wonder – one of the largest studies of adoloscence in the world – and an exploration of how societies can adapt to improve everyone’s experience of ageing.

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.

This is a big show of big paintings. Big, energetic, happy paintings which are just as enjoyable to stand in front of as one can imagine they were to make. Hurvin Anderson is the artist responsible, and the 80 paintings on show at Tate Britain amount to 30 years worth of work. Some date back to 1995 when he was an art student at the Royal College of Art; others were made this year (some he even finished off once they’d been hung). ‘Ball Watching’ hangs by the door, next to the entrance. Painted at art school, it captures a moment in Anderson’s youth living in Birmingham, the city in which he was born and raised after his parents emigrated from Jamaica. He and his friends would play football in Handsworth Park, often kicking the football into the lake – here, as the title suggests, they stand watching it. Compared with the sun-bleached, paint-dripped, tree-filled tropicana that fill the later rooms, the palette is darker, the figures less defined, the sky, rendered in broad brushstrokes, feels as though a foaming sponge has been dragged across a car windscreen. The paintings do something similar for the viewer as they do for Anderson: they hold you between places What it establishes, however, is what has kept Hurvin Anderson returning to the studio for three decades: the urge to paint his experience as a Black man of Caribbean heritage, born and raised in the UK. That sense of inbetweenness – belonging to two places, either side of the Atlantic – plays out through...

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...

If you were to type Michaelina Wautier into the web, the results wouldn’t amount to much. You’d learn she was a painter living and working in Brussels. That she died in 1689 at the age of 75 (pretty good going, given 17th-century Europe’s fondness for endemic infections). And that, since then, she has been largely forgotten. For much of the intervening time, few art historians believed that paintings bearing her signature could possibly have been made by a woman, instead attributing them to her brother or other male artists.  Her altarpiece-sized religious paintings were assumed to be too ambitious for a woman, while nudes posed another problem: how was she meant to accurately paint the human body – let alone the male nude – when the academies that taught such things barred her from entering? You begin to see why Wautier’s authorship was doubted for so long. And yet she did it all: flowers and still lifes, portraits and large-scale history paintings. Twenty-five of them are now on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, in the first UK exhibition devoted to the artist. Her works are shown alongside those of better-known contemporaries - Peter Paul Rubens and David Teniers the Younger - as well paintings by her older brother, Charles Wautier, who she is thought to have shared a studio with. Like someone laying out every qualification in a job interview, she throws everything she can into the canvas You only have to stand in front of Wautier’s flower paintings to see why she...

‘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.