The best things to do on Valentine’s Day in London 2025

London’s wobbliest Bridge is back for a fourth film outing. Despite all the usual romantic shenanigans, pratfalls and white wines, Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones is a singleton in name only these days, with two kids and much unprocessed grief for Colin Firth’s now-deceased QC, Mark Darcy (look out for a spectral Firth this time). Leo Woodall, last seen raising pulses in Netflix’s One Day, plays her young love interest, with Chiwetel Ejiofor perhaps the better long-term bet as her kids’ teacher. Out on Valentine’s Day, it’ll make you feel good, if it doesn’t make you feel old first.

While Jamie Lloyd’s productions often involve mad celebrity casting of the sort you’d never have expected to see in your lifetime – see his imminent US production of Waiting for Godot starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter – he also has go-to actors, and it’s a pleasure to see two of them join forces for this middle-aged Much Ado. MCU veterans Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell have never actually shared the screen in any of the Marvel films, but they’ll share the stage nightly for a couple of months in the second half of Lloyd’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane season of Shakespeare, playing bickering lovers Benedick and Beatrice. It’s arguably one of the most famous rom-coms of all-time, and with the production opening just ahead of the big day, it’s make a great date night for Valentine’s Day. 

Planning a date night trip to the theatre, but keen to avoid anything too saccharine? Mike Barlett’s latest play might be just the thing. Nicola Walker and Stephen Mangan have already played one troubled couple in the TV show The Split, and now they take on another in the latest of Bartlett’s intimate ‘relationship plays’ in the vein of Cock and Bull. Walker and Mangan star as Polly and Nick, a couple who decide to open up their marriage, with Erin Doherty’s Kate the third drafted in to bring some sparkle back to their relationship. James Macdonald directs this straight-into-the-West End premiere, having done the honours for the smash revival of Cock a couple of years back.

You can’t go wrong with the ballet on Valentine’s Day, particularly when it’s a big, romantic production of a Russian classic, like John Cranko’s adaptation of Pushkin’s verse-novel ‘Onegin’. Returning to the Royal Opera House to mark the 60th anniversary of its creation, the ballet tells the story of Onegin – who dazzles then devastates young, bookish country girl Tatiana, only to realise years later what a mistake he made by rejecting her – and works up a ballet filled with subtle, intelligent movement, and with the capacity to plunge powerful psychological depths.

Sure, Jethro Compton’s stage version of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is predominantly about a man inexplicably born at the age of 70, who ages backwards. But it’s also a soaring folk opera and a romantic weepy that overwhelms you with a cascade of song and feeling, and as such isn’t unfitting as a Valentine’s Day evening out. A labour of love that has worked its way slowly to the West End over the five years since it debuted at Southwark Playhouse, Compton’s interpretation is very different to both Fitzgerald’s and the 2008 David Fincher film starring Brad Pitt. For starters it’s not set in nineteenth century America, but is virtually a love letter to Compton’s native Cornwall, its story spanning much of the twentieth century. It has a joy, romance and big-hearted elan that stands in stark contrast to Fitzgerald’s cynicism. The last ten minutes or so are actively sublime, as the final years of Benjamin’s mad existence unspool with an elegiac poetry that will have you (and your date) teetering dangerously close to tears. 

The camera is meant to be a tool of truth, an instrument that captures reality. But it captures something else in Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s work: fantasy.

The Nigerian-born artist lived in Brixton until his early death in his 30s in 1989. In the privacy of his studio, he was able to use the camera to explore ideas of difference, identity and a whole lot of desire. The camera allowed him to express his sexuality, his erotic fantasies. This exhibition is a riot of leather and muscles and bulges and pearls and wrestling and total, unbridled desire. They’re beautiful images of beautiful men expressing their deepest urges. Fani-Kayode’s mashing together of Yoruba culture, eroticism and a deep dissatisfaction with society’s injustices is powerful. The camera allowed him to live out his fantasies of a kinder, more accepting and much sexier world. That’s a reality we can all hope for.