Andrzej Lukowski

Afternoon tea is what makes a trip to London truly iconic – even if you already live here. You’ll find some of the best at London’s chicest hotels, restaurants, and art galleries - and we’ve worked out what makes an afternoon tea a truly memorable experience. It'’s not just perfect pastries, the most elegant of teeny tiny cakes and finger sarnies with the crusts cut off, but swish service, the option to have something boozy and bubbly and a picture-perfect, characterful room in which to enjoy it all. From The Ritz to a Caribbean restaurant in Walthamstow, the National Gallery and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, there's truly something for every cake-munching tea-drinker in this round-up of London's best afternoon tea spreads.  Expect to pay in the region of £50 to £80 for the pleasure per person, but you'll be in for a treat if you go with one of our recommendations. Remember, many of the teas have set times for seatings, so booking in advance is always a good idea. RECOMMENDED: The best hotels in London. Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor and knows all about tiny little cucumber sandwiches and drinking Champagne at 3pm. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines. The hottest new openings, the tastiest tips, the spiciest reviews: we’re serving it all on our London restaurants WhatsApp channel. Follow us now.

Hello, and welcome to the Time Out theatre reviews round up. From huge star vehicles and massive West End musical to hip fringe shows and more, this is a compliation of all the latest London reviews from the Time Out theatre team, which is me – Time Out theatre editor Andrzej Łukowski – plus our freelance critics. RECOMMENDED New theatre openings in London this month. A-Z of West End shows.

Hello! I'm Andrzej, the theatre editor of Time Out London, and me and my freelancers review a heck of a lot of theatre. This page is an attempt to distil the shows that are on right now into something like a best of the best based upon our actual reviews, as opposed to my predictions, which determine our longer range what to book for list. It isn’t a scientific process, and you’ll definitely see shows that got four stars above ones that got five – this is generally because the five star show is probably going to be on for years to come (hello, Hamilton) and I'm trying to draw your attention to one that’s only running for a couple more weeks. Or sometimes, we just like to shake things up a bit. It’s also deliberately light on the longer-running West End hits simply because I don’t think you need to know what I think about Les Mis before you book it (it’s fine!). So please enjoy the best shows in London, as recommended by us, having actually seen them.

London’s theatre scene is the most exciting in the world: perfectly balanced between the glossy musical theatre of Broadway and the experimentalism of Europe, it’s flavoured by the British preference for new writing and love of William Shakespeare, but there really is something for everyone. Between the showtunes of the West End and the constant pipeline of new writing from the subsidised sector, there’s a whole thrilling world, with well over 100 theatres and over venues playing host to everything from classic revivals to cutting-edge immersive work. This rolling list is constantly updated to share the best of what’s coming up and currently booking: these choices aren’t the be-all and end-all of great theatre in 2025, but they are, as a rule, the biggest and splashiest shows coming up, alongside intriguing looking smaller projects.   They’re shows worth booking for, pronto, both to avoid sellouts but to get the cheaper tickets that initially go on sale for most shows but tend to be snapped up months before they actually open. Want to see if these shows live up to the hype? Check out our theatre reviews. Check out our complete guide to musicals in London.  And head over here for a guide to every show in the West End at the moment.

Want a drink? You've come to the right place. This is Time Out’s list of best bars in London, our curated guide to London’s drinking scene, featuring the buzziest booze dens in the capital right now. If it’s on this list, it’s excellent. These are the 50 places we'd recommend to a friend, because we love drinking in them and have done many times over. From classy cocktail joints to delightful dives, hotel bars, speakeasys, bottle shops, rooftops and wine bars, London's got them all. But what makes a truly good bar? Well, our critieria for inclusion on this list is simple; a menu of genius drinks is important, but so is overall vibe – there’s no point having the perfect paloma if you have to drink it in a bar that smells of bins. To make the Top 50 a bar has to be fun, full of lovely folk, be inclusive and also look the part.  The latest additions to our list include whisky wonderland Dram Bar on Denmark Street, the hypnotic Bar Lotus in Dalston, Below Stone Nest in Chinatown, Rasputin’s by London Fields, and Bar Lina, an Italian aperitivo spot underneath a famous Soho deli. Now go forth and drink. RECOMMENDED: Like bars? Then you'll love London's best pubs.  Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor, and she'll have a dirty gin martini if you're buying. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.

Hello parents and guardians! I’m Time Out’s theatre editor and more relevantly, I'm in charge of our kids coverage. As a parent of two childen myself I can confirm that London is an amazing city raise kids in if your priority is ‘keeping them occupied’. Yes, you have to put a bit of commuter time in to take advantage of it all, but there’s a virtually endless stream of stuff for children to do, from playgrounds and parks to incredible children’s theatres, free museums to slightly more expensive zoos and aquariums, and all sorts of stuff inbetween. This is a sort of checklist of what we think the 50 best things to do in the city with kids are. Some of it is incredibly obvious: you’re probably aware that London has a Natural History Museum. But it’s worth stressing is a really, really great Natural History Museum, and whether you’re just visiting or have lived here all your life, a visit is a terrific day out. Alongside that, we’ve got 49 other ideas for things to do with childen in London – the focus is inevitably on younger children of nursery and primary school age, but we aim to cater for all here, from tots to teens. That’s all ages, all budgets and all times of the year – as well as adding new London attractions as they open or return, this list will be switched around seasonally: ice rinks, grottos and pantiomimes are great to take your children to in winter, less so in summer. Of course, there are more than 50 things for children to in London, and we’ve got plenty of ot

Borough is known for having one of the best food markets in the world, but it's also home to some seriously good restaurants as well as its brilliant market. The new Borough Yards development – just next to this historic, edible wonderland – is where you'll find some of the best spots to have a sit-down feast. If you're off to SE1 and your stomach is rumbling, then consult this list so you can hunt down all our favourite spots for a fabulous feed. RECOMMENDED: The best restaurants in London Bridge. Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.

February half-term is here again – oh joy. Usually the coldest and wettest of school holidays, it’s not that promising on paper, but London always rises to the challenge magnificently – of all the half-terms, this is the one that boasts the large number of things for kids to do indoors, with the mighty Imagine Festival at the Southbank Centre probably the biggest annual event in the London kids’ calendar, and plenty more on besides, from a Robot Zoo at the Horniman to the new Ancient Egypt exhibition at the Young V&A. I’m Time Out’s lead kids’ writer – because I have to amuse my own children over the holidays – and here are my top suggestions for the half-term, from brand new exhibitions and plays to your last chance to see a couple of excellent attractions for younger audiences. And remember: this is London, and there’s always loads of things for youngsters to do, from enjoying the city’s many child-friendly museums and galleries that really come into their own when school is out, to taking in one of the many, many children’s theatres that our glorious city and its surrounds have to offer. When is February half-term this year?  This year, London’s February half-term officially falls between Monday February 17 and Friday February 21 (ie they will continuously be off Saturday February 15 to Sunday February 23).  Here’s our roundup of all the best things to do with your children this February half-term. 

Sunday lunch. There’s nothing quite like it. An elemental meal, one that Londoners take incredibly seriously. Debates about what constitutes the ‘perfect’ Sunday roast have been known to last for hours. There is no shortage of top roasts in London. We’ve rounded up the city’s best Sunday meals from a host of homely pubs and restaurants all around town. What makes a good roast? For us, it’s simple; a cosy room is a good start, maybe in a pub with an open fire. Then it comes to the plate – we need perfect roast potatoes, well-cooked lamb, beef or pork and a decent plant-based option too. A Sunday roast is more than just lunch - it’s self-care. From snug neighbourhood staples to more bijou gastropubs, posh hotels, Michelin-star spots, and even a metal bar in Camden, we’ve got something for every taste (if that taste is for comforting mounds of roast meat, lashings of gravy and carbs for days).  A lot of these places get quite busy, by the way. So you’re always advised to book ahead to avoid disappointment.  RECOMMENDED: London's 50 best pubs. Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor, and her Sunday roast order is usually pork belly with extra gravy, extra roasties and a big glass of Pinot Noir. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.

What is immersive theatre? A glib buzzword? A specific description of a specific type of theatre? A phrase that has become so diluted that it’s lost all meaning? Whether you call it immersive, interactive or site-specific, London is bursting with plays and experiences which welcome you into a real-life adventure that you can wander around and play the hero in. I’m Andrzej Łukowski, Time Out’s theatre editor, and let me tell you I have run the immersive gamut, from a show where I had to take my clothes off in a darkened shipping container, to successfully bagging tickets to the six-hour Punchdrunk odyssey there were only ever a couple of hundred tickets released, to quite a lot of theatre productions where the set goes into the audience a bit and apparently that counts as immersive. There is a lot of immersive work in London, some of which is definitely theatre, some of which definitely isn’t, some of which is borderline, some of which is but doesn’t want to say it is because some some people are just horrified of the word ‘theatre’.  This page has been around for a while now and gone through various schools of thought, but the one we’ve settled on for now is that the main list compiles every major show in London that could reasonably be described as ‘immersive theatre’, while the bottom list compiles a few of our favouite immersive shows thet you probably wouldn’t describe as theatre though it is, naturally a blurry line. Whatever the case you can mostly only really decide wh

Kids are expensive. And London is expensive. But taking your kids for a day out in this city doesn’t have to necessitate selling a kidney. With its incredible bounty of free museums, free galleries, gorgeous green spaces and pop-up events, London is one of the best cities in the whole world for free things to do. I’m Andrzej, Time Out’s theatre editor and main kids’ writer, and I have dedicated most of the last decade of my life to trying to parent on a modest budget. And London is truly the place to do it – it is genuinely incredible that our world class museums and art galleries are free. And beyond them is a world of quirkier attractions, from urban farms to gargantuan parks.  So whether you’re looking for inspiration for a budget day out or just want to find something affordable to do with the little ones while you’re in central, please enjoy our top free things to do with kids in London.   RECOMMENDED: 101 fantastic things to do in London with kids.

L.A. covers a mindbogglingly massive volume of land (and for that matter, ocean too). So it’s no surprise that Los Angeles packs in an enormous number of world-class attractions. If you’re a tourist looking out for things to do, you’ll have no problem finding vacation inspiration, from Hollywood tours to a day at one of the city’s best beaches. And locals might very well find ways to fall in love with the city all over again in our extensive list of the best Los Angeles attractions. RECOMMENDED:📽️ The best studio tours in Los Angeles This article includes affiliate links. These links have no influence on our editorial content. For more information, click here.

While it would be pushing it to say Frederick the Great loomed large in my childhood, he probably loomed larger in mine than yours. Aside from the fact my family is Polish – Frederick is well up there on our national shitlist – my dad is a lecturer in eighteenth century European history with a habit of bitching about the Prussian monarch as if he were a hated work colleague. Oliver Cotton’s The Score essentially sets Brian Cox’s grouchy, loveable and deeply devout JS Bach against Stephen Hagan’s capricious atheist Frederick. It’s a fictionalised account of their real 1747 encounter, wherein the Prussian king asked the legendary composer to improvise a fiendishly tricky fugue for him.  While I’m sure Cotton has done his homework, he’s surely betting that the average British audience is unlikely to have any real opinion on Frederick. His play contents itself with an antagonist who is a sort of vague mish mash of biographical exposition, Blackadder-style toff-isms, and bits where Frederick’s warmongering is unsubtly paralleled with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m not saying there’s any need to be totally historically accurate in a work of fiction. But Cotton’s king feels like a half-hearted collection of tyrant tropes rather than a credible character. It’s hard not to see The Score as a distant relative of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, but it’s simply not in the same league in terms of characterisation. Still, we’re here to see Brian Cox’s Bach, and the Succession star gives it hear

If there is an afterlife, pioneering Black playwright and screenwriter Michael Abbensetts is presumably looking down from it in delighted surprise. His play Alterations originally ran at the now defunct 80-seat New End Theatre in Hampstead for a few weeks in 1978. There was a BBC radio adaptation too, but that looked to be it for his drama about Walker, a Windrush immigrant grappling with his dream of opening his own tailor shop in London. And yet here we are in 2025 – almost half a century on – and Alterations’s first ever revival is on the National Theatre’s huge Lyttelton stage, playing to virtually the capacity of the entire New End run on a nightly basis.  This has been made possible by the NT’s Black Plays Archive project, a catalogue documenting works by Black British writers that would simply have been lost to history otherwise. But it’s also the result of a Herculean effort from the creative team to bulk this bittersweet little drama out to Lyttelton scale. Director Lynette Linton adds some epic flourishes to underscore Alterations’s status as a part of a grander narrative about Black British life, while playwright Trish Cooke has been enlisted to expand the script and tweak its more dated moments.  Abbensetts’s greatest legacy is the pioneering Black-led TV soap opera Empire Road (which had two seasons on the BBC in the late ’70s) and the tone of Alterations is distinctly sudsy in places.  Walker (Arinzé Kene) is an ambitious tailor struggling to get his business of

Paul Hendy’s transferring Edinburgh Fringe hit The Last Laugh imagines a backstage meeting between twentieth century comedy legends Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe and Bob Monkhouse. In case there’s any doubt, this is a nakedly nostalgic show aimed squarely at an older audience who actually remember its trio of protagonists being around. But let’s not be overly cynical. If The Last Laugh does play out a lot like a tribute show, with the trio trading improbably exposition heavy banter, then Hendy brings a lot of thought and care to the set up. For starters, there is more to the slightly gauche framing device than meets the eye. To be honest, it’s not hard to guess that this fanboy fantasy meeting isn’t all it seems – I won’t spell it out, but the ominous crackly lights and Cooper’s evident disorientation when he enters the room ought to tip you off to the fact that something is amiss. Okay, it’s mostly just an excuse for a fanboy fantasy meeting, but Hendry is a smart enough writer to make the set-up deeper than random fanfic.  He really is a fan though: not just of Cooper, Morecambe and Monkhouse, but of the generation of comedians that came before them, a few of whom we still remember (George Formby, Arthur Askey), more of whom we don’t (Rob Wilton, Sid Field). With Simon Cartwright’s suave but neurotic Monkhouse in place as a sort of walking joke encyclopaedia, the trio’s influences – and particularly those of bona fide geniuses Cooper (Damian Williams) and Morecambe (Bob Gold

This review is from the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. US writer Brian Watkins is presumably currently somewhat bummed out that his Amazon Prime sci-fi series ‘Outer Range’ recently got cancelled after two seasons. But he can at least take some consolation in the runaway Fringe success of his haunting eco monologue ‘Weather Girl’. The hottest ticket at Summmerhall this year, Watkins’s play is set in a wildfire-ravaged central California. It follows Stacey (Julia McDermott), an outwardly chipper weather presenter on a local news network whose gift for upbeat banter with her colleagues, making the endless hot days sound great to her viewers, and generally being hot and blonde all serve to make her extremely good at her job. But underneath it all she is somebody completely different. Not just a stereotypical hot mess, but filled with a visceral loathing of everything she nominally stands for. She chugs from a sippy cup of Prosecco to get through her days, at best feels nothing for her job and colleagues, and feels a deep rooted unease at the heat that overwhelms her from the moment she gets up at 4am each morning. She goes on a date with some techbro whose name she doesn’t know, aggressively calling him ‘Mark’, crashing his fancy car and leaving him at the scene. As the wildfires grow more intense, her employer insists Stacey not tell the viewers to evacuate lest they be upset. Stacey comes close to breaking point; but she also comes closer to her mother, an enigmatic homeless

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 its v

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 dime

The first new Bridge Theatre production in over two years is a bit like excitedly running off to meet an old friend you haven’t seen in ages and then finding the conversation is… okay but a bit stilted.  Bridge boss Nicholas Hytner is a brilliant director of Shakespeare and Jonathan Bailey is a great stage actor. Hytner’s take on Richard II does nothing to make me think I’m wrong about either of these things. But it falls short of the rigorous textual reinvention of the typical Hytner Shakespeare revival – although he gives it a good try.  There is a clear nod to Succession in Grant Olding’s stringy score, and also in the modern dress production’s prevalent visual of besuited men trading a country away over glasses of expensive scotch.  If Bailey’s doomed king was one of the Roy brothers then I guess he’d be Roman. Richard’s defining characteristic is usually his absolute belief in his own divine right to rule England, which blinds him to the fact he’s really terrible at it. Bailey’s king, however, is a self-loathing fuck-up who at his best presents the air of a smug but inept middle manager: see his botching of the duel between Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke, when his constant changing of his mind over whether to have the men fight to death or not looks incompetent, not simply capricious. And at his worst, well: he honks a load of coke and decides that screw it, he’s going to invade Ireland (we’ve all been there).  The strong suggestion that Bailey’s Richard knows he’s

Playwright Mike Bartlett’s impressively mercurial career has taken in everything from droll sci-fi epics to faux Shakespearean verse satires. Much of his work is dizzyingly grandiose, but within it there’s a definite sub genre of pared-back, small-cast ‘relationship dramas’, notably Cock (about bisexuality) and Bull (bullying). Unicorn is in this tradition, being a stripped back three hander on the topic of polyamory. Polly (Nicola Walker) and Nick (Steven Mangan) are a married couple in a middle aged rut. They both know this, but where he merely acknowledges it with wearily articulate horror, she has been out there flirting with Kate (Erin Doherty), a mature student of hers. Acknowledging the attraction but unwilling to cheat per se, she suggests Nick and Kate have a meeting with a view to bringing her into their marriage. Let’s not get into specifics about how this all pans out. But the first half of the play pretty much ploughs the furrow that you think a play about polygamy by an irony-addicted English playwright might: it’s really a comedy about Polly and Nick’s innate English awkwardness and inability to commit to inviting Kate in. No three-ways please, we’re British. It’s tartly amusing, but also cliche bound. While I’d say Bartlett’s eye for the foibles of middle-aged marriage is second to none, Kate feels mostly unbelievable, a hyper-confident 28-year-old with a total certainty about pretty much everything, who acts as a conveniently knowledgeable guide to Nick and P

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 madness

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 child w

There is, believe it or not, a tangible microgenre of plays about AI personality replicas being downloaded into new human bodies. David Farr’s A Dead Body in Taos and Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime would be good recent examples; Caryl Churchill’s visionary cloning drama A Number feels like the originator of the species. It’s the sort of sci-fi theatre that does well: low budget but unnerving – you don’t need special effects for an actor to play an artificial human. Here’s another one. Under the name Kandinsky Theatre, Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman have devised an eclectic stream of science-rooted theatre shows, many of them for the New Diorama Theatre, new Royal Court boss David Byrne’s old gaff. Now they make their debut at the Court with an occasionally heavy-handed but ultimately moving drama about a woman brought back to life some 50 years after her death. Victor (Marc Elliott) is a scientist, working on bringing the dead back to life (the Frankenstein references are unsubtle but fully acknowledged). At some point in the past, the tech company he works for acquired the brains of a large number of dead people, whose next of kin signed them away to the corporation. Using Futuristic Science That You Don’t Need To Worry About, the brains have been digitally recreated and the personalities of the deceased are implanted into an artificial body, played by Alison Halstead. Most of them are failures: they either have imperfect memories, lack control of the body or, er, Victor

Even if you have literally never wanted to be part of the crew of a spaceship you’ll probably have a fun time at Parabolic Theatre’s Bridge Command, an immersive theatre show slash team-bonding exercise slash LARPer paradise that sees you and your fellow contestants take command of the, uh, bridge of a spaceship and undertake a variety of missions that run the gamut from diplomacy to warfare. Occupying the spot in the Vauxhall arches that formerly hosted renowned gay sauna Chariots, Bridge Command is not a slick, cutting-edge vision of the future, and presumably budgetary limitations are part of this. But that’s fine: it very much has its roots in a wobbly sets golden age of sci-fi, with the earlier iterations of Star Trek looming particularly large. After donning our military jumpsuits, we are ‘teleported’ into the depths of space and onto an Earth battleship that will form our base of operations. There is a background scenario here, wherein humans fled a polluted Earth, found a magic element in the depths of space, went back home to fix Earth, only a load of colonists stayed behind and set up new galactic dominions, and we’re out there looking for more of the magic element. It’s best not to think too hard about it, but at the same time the performers throw themselves into it with impressive conviction - I was particularly delighted when the person operating the teleporter earnestly fielded questions relating to my phobia of teleporters.  Following said teleportation we’re i

A stage adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s dystopian YA classic The Hunger Games has felt like the white whale of the British theatre industry for a decade now. Ten years ago it was announced that a musical adaption of the first instalment of the adventures of Katniss Everdeen et al would be staged at a bespoke revolving theatre in Wembley Park in 2016. That simply never happened, and a 2023 announcement of a (non-musical) stage play written by the great Conor McPherson and directed by Matthew Dunster had been looking dangerously like going the same way - with no venue and no dates initially announced, it drifted past its projected 2024 opening without a squeak. But happy day: it would finally appear to be happening. Dubbed The Hunger Games: On Stage, McPherson’s adaptation is now due to open at the brand new Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre in October. In what may or may not be a coincidence, the 1,200-seater will be a sister venue to Troubadour Wembley Park – the current home of Starlight Express – which is the venue that emerged in lieu of the originally planned revolving Hunger Games theatre. Anyway, enough background: it’s on, it’s scheduled to start its run on Monday October 20, and we’re told the spacious new theatre will have an in-the-round set up (that is to say, the stage will be in the centre of the audience). Beyond that we don’t know a huge amount more than we did two years ago – there is no word on casting yet, though as The Hunger Games is substantially a story a

After the celebrity blowout that was February, March is a quieter month for starry new openings in London… with one exception, as Cate Blanchett makes her return to the UK stage in a ludicrously starry production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, directed by the great German auteur Thomas Ostermeier.  That aside, the biggest news this month is the return of three very different older shows. The RSC’s blockbuster My Neighbour Totoro will finally be hitting the West End after two seasons at the Barbican. The NT’s Gareth Southgate drama Dear England progresses to the proverbial third round as it returns in what we’re promised is a version writer James Graham has tweaked to account for Southgate’s retirement. And up-and-comer playwright Ryan Calais Cameron’s taut Sidney Poitier drama Retrograde becomes his second West End hit following last year’s debut at Kiln Theatre.  Other highlights of the month include the last ever show at the soon-to-close Yard Theatre, a second James Graham play (the man is clearly superhuman), and a musical adaptation of beloved ’90s high school flick Clueless.  Photo: Wessex Grove 1. The Seagull After years of only starring in random avant-garde projects in the UK while saving the ‘classic’ stage roles for the US and Australia, Cate Blanchett finally does the decent thing and heads up a walloping great celebrity Chekhov. With the Aussie legend taking on the role of vain middle-aged actress Arkadina, we can still expect a reasonably leftfield affair thanks to

This year the Bridge Theatre is set to take us into two sets of magical woods: once for a revival for its legendary 2019 production of Shakespeare’s forest-set A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and again for the classic Sondheim musical Into the Woods. First opened in 2017, the Bridge – based at London Bridge – is the brainchild of former National Theatre boss Nicholas Hytner, and its first few years were defined by a mix of big name new writing and freewheeling, semi-immersive Shakespeare productions. The best was undoubtedly 2019’s joyous A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a riotously queer mix of gender bending tomfoolery and ecstatic dance party that ended with the audience boogying with the cast – it was a huge influence on the Hytner’s landmark revival of Guys & Dolls, which has just wrapped up a two year run at the Bridge. It returns mostly recast, with JJ Feild as Oberon, Susannah Fielding as Titania, Emmanuel Akwafo as Bottom and David Moorst returning as Puck. Guys & Dolls was the first musical to be staged at the theatre, but the second isn’t far behind: fresh from their superb Open Air Theatre revival of Fiddler on the Roof, director Jordan Fein and designer Tom Scutt will join forces once again to tackle Stephen Sondheim and Jamie Lapine’s deliciously subversive fairy tale musical Into the Woods. That will run for 20 weeks, starting in December – a decent run but clearly the theatre is not simply being given over to it indefinitely a la Guys & Dolls. Casting is TBA. The pair co

London Theatre Week is actually a fortnight long, and also happens twice a year. So in fact it's more like four weeks. Plus it often extends. Glaringly inaccurate name aside, though, and frankly it’s just great that such a big chunk of the year is given over to London’s biggest theatre ticket sale. The deal is pretty simple. Go to the official London Theatre Week page – Time Out is a partner – between Monday February 17 and Sunday March 2 and you can book participating shows at their special offer rates.  A huge array of shows are covered, and let’s start with the big guns. There are plenty of major West End musicals and shows participating, and there are relatively rare opportunities to bag a discount to the likes of The Lion King and Hamilton. Other heavy hitters like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Tina, Wicked and The Book of Mormon are participants too – to be honest London Theatre Week comes around so frequently that if you can hold out until it comes around (there will probably be another in September FYI) then you probably should when it comes to booking tickets to one of the aforementioned. Then there are the limited run shows that won’t be on in a few months, but that you’re got an opportunity to see now. A great example would be Elektra, starring Brie Larson – the avant-garde Greek tragedy remake hasn’t been everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a fascinating (and short!) show – there are better than 50 percent discounts to see, so if you’re at all curious I'd give it

As far as what I’m going to call ‘capybara scientists’ are aware, the world’s biggest rodent has been knocking around for something like nine million years, which is approximately 30 times longer than homo sapiens. What have capybaras been up to all this while? Just sort of hanging out really, grazing away on the vegetation of Latin America, biding their time until they became the world’s biggest rodent (the cow-sized previous holder of the title was the Uruguayan josephoartigasia, which went extinct a couple of million years ago). Despite their age as a species, and their freakish, almost anachronistic bigness – they are twice as big as the runner-up rodent, the North American beaver – capybaras seem to have basically just gotten on with it. Their survival as a species has been aided by a combination of skittishness and massive teeth, plus the fact that if a predator comes along a herd’s default response is to run into the nearest body of water and simply sit at the bottom of it until the predator gives up (they’re able to hold their breath for around five minutes, which is apparently more than the average leopard’s attention span).  Weirdly, and despite the fundamentally unchanging nature of the species, capybaras are having a bit of a cultural moment right now. It’s quite hard to pinpoint why, but it’s definitely got a lot to do with the internet, and may or may not have been sparked by the class warfare-related memes that resulted from an incident in 2021 where a huge num

After the pandemic derailed her 2020 plans to star in classic musical Hello, Dolly! we had to wait a full four years for stage and screen legend and all round national treasure Imelda Staunton to finally bring it to the West End. But with her role as the elder incarnation of Elizabeth II in The Crown now fully wrapped up and no longer consuming her time, Staunton is returning to the London well under a year after Hello, Dolly! closed, to reunite with its director Dominic Cooke for a revival of the George Bernard Shaw classic Mrs Warren’s Profession. And this time she’s brought family. Staunton’s actor daughter Bessie Carter has been carving out a name for herself mostly on screen, with her most notable role probably that of Prudence in Bridgerton. This year she flexes her West End muscles for the first time, as the real life mother and daughter star as fictional mother and daughter the Warrens in Shaw’s great drama about the generational clash between the very ‘modern’ Vivie, determined to carve out an unconventional career for herself as a lawyer, and her mother Kitty, who believes in profiting from the old, patriarchal order. Photo: Andrew JamesBessie Carter It’s the third show Cooke has directed Staunton in – after Hello, Dolly! and the National Theatre’s sublime Follies – but the first non-musical. Whatever the case, it should be a treat: Staunton is one of those performers so good that pretty much everything she touches turns to gold. Mrs Warren’s Profession is at the

This Easter to early summer you’ll be able to take a step back 3,000 years into the past with the exhibition Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition. We’re promised ‘cutting-edge technology with rich historical narratives’ from the exhibition, which has been touring the globe for some time – apparently 1.8m people have seen it – and now makes its UK debut for 14 weeks only from March 28. Using splashy projections and computer technology, the exhibit will be divided over six galleries, each of which will bring the maximum amount of razzle dazzle to bear on the time of the Pharaohs. Endorsed by the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, you’ll be able to experience such thrills as an immersive movie about the discovery of the tomb, a VR experience taking you ‘into the Egyptian afterlife’ and an AR walk through the Valley of Kings.  Photo: Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition Clearly the whole thing is somewhat lurid – which is exactly why it looks like great fun for families, whose younger members might chafe at the prospect of examining some thousands of years old statuettes for the afternoon (there are in fact some of those) but are bang up for hanging out with a slew of animal-headed deities.  The show will run at ImmerseLDN, a new venue within the sprawling ExCel Centre in the Docklands that will also play host to a new immersive Elvis show later this year.  Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition is at ImmerseLDN, Mar 28-Jun 29. Tickets are now on sale. The best immersive theatre

It’s always celebrity month in London theatre to some degree, but there’s no denying that February 2025 is bringing the A-listers: Jonathan Bailey, Brie Larson, Tom Hiddleston, Hayley Atwell, Rami Malek, Nicola Walker and Brian Cox will all be treading the boards this month. If celebrity vehicles dominate, they’re far from chintzy, predictable outings, running the gamut from a dance theatre take on Sophocles starring an Oscar-winning US actor to, er, a punk rock take on Sophocles starring an Oscar-winning US actor. You know what I mean. Probably. Photo: Jason Bell 1. Richard II Yes, Shakespeare’s arrogant, fragile king is a great role for Jonathan Bailey to get his teeth into for his first stage outing post-Wicked. But Nicholas Hytner’s production of Richard II is as exciting for where it is as who is in it. It’s the first new show to run at the Bridge Theatre since the hitherto bustling production house was given over indefinitely to Hytner’s landmark production of Guys & Dolls at the start of 2023. Bailey is a superb actor and Hytner is pretty damn close to infallible as a director of Shakespeare, but in some way the most exciting thing about this show is that we’re finally getting the Bridge back, and can presumably look forward to several more shows there this year. Bridge Theatre, Feb 10-May 10. Book tickets here. Photo: Empire Street Productions 2. Elektra Marvel star Brie Larson is an incredibly striking lead for the first London revival of the Sophocles mummy-iss

One side of the massive rehearsal studio that sits on top of London’s newest theatre is simply a huge window. Out of it, the view is dominated by the hulking mass of the London Stadium and, if you look a little to the left, the eccentric red spire of the ArcelorMittal Orbit pierces a cloud. Although most of us are familiar with the rapid changes that Stratford has undergone in the last decade-and-a-half, there’s still something dizzying about standing in a building that didn’t exist five years ago, looking at a view that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Top Brit choreographer Vicki Igbokwe-Ozoagu recalls that she was out in Stratford when she heard London had won the bid for the 2012 Olympics, the catalyst for the regeneration of this corner of the capital. Now she’s part of its legacy.  When venerable Angel-based dance theatre Sadler’s Wells tapped her to create a work to open its brand new theatre Sadler’s Wells East, it turns out she had already just come up with the perfect thing. Our Mighty Groove is a playful, pulsing homage to club culture, ‘inspired by a time where I was baptised metaphorically in a New York underground house club – I walked in feeling really shy and basically left feeling like Janet Jackson.’ Photograph: Andrzej Lukowski for Time Out I saw a 20-minute excerpt of the show when visiting Sadler’s Wells East for a pre-opening tour, two days before the new venue opened its doors to the public. It was terrific, a rare dance piece that literally made me want to

A Minecraft Movie is the imminent comedy film adaptation of Minecraft, aka the most popular computer game of all time. Reviews aren’t out yet, but certainly last year’s first trailer was, er, ‘divisive’, with some commentators clearly horrified by the mix of live actors and retina-searing CGI that seemed to address the somewhat insane question of what the computer game’s trademark block aesthetic would look like ‘in real life’. The question of whether it’s any cop or not is, however, another article for another day. The joy of a film this scale is that you get cool spin-off promotional stuff, and long story short a full-fledged immersive Minecraft experience is coming to London this April, the same day as the movie’s release. Entitled Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue, the show will see you enter seven biome-themed rooms in order to rescue a village from attack by a zombie horde, and stop those bitten by zombies from transforming into new ones before the time runs out. Obviously it’s easy for me to write that down, harder to exactly explain what it involves. The show is designed by a production company called Supply + Demand, whose CEO describes Village Rescue as an ‘entirely new form of in-person experience at the crossroads of game design, experiential storytelling, and high-tech multimedia’. Photo: Minecraft Experience Again, this isn’t entirely helpful, but fortunately the show has already run in Dallas, Texas and it seems the basic deal is that you wander through d

Globe boss Michelle Terry has been upfront about the fact that the outdoor summer programming at the recreated Bankside theatre has been fairly safe in the post-pandemic years. The need to get bums on seats (or standing in the yard) has led to a heavy-on-the-bangers last four summers of programming that has left Shakespeare’s obscurities mostly relegated to the smaller indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. There are a couple of blockbuster classics in the 2025 outdoor programme, announced today (February 4). But it’s also the wildest open air Globe bill in years, with a couple of proper Shakespearean obscurities and the first ever outdoor revival of a classic play not by the big man Willy S. The season kicks off two days after the Bard’s birthday on April 25 with associate director Sean Holmes helming an intriguing Wild West-set take on Romeo & Juliet (Apr 25-Aug 2) that’ll star up-and-coming youngsters Abdul Sessay and Lola Shalam as the star cross’d lovers. The next play in the season will be Ola Ince’s take on Arthur Miller’s witch hunt allegory classic The Crucible (May 8-Jul 12) which is, remarkably, the first time a classic play not by Shakespeare has been revived outside at the Globe, where the bill has typically been the Bard plus a bit of new writing. Michelle Terry has shown a willingness to programme canonical European classics indoors, with Ibsen and Chekhov having recently made their debuts, but I believe Miller would be the first major US dramatist revived at the thea

One of the great things about living in London is that if you hear of an incredible US theatre show that you’d love to cross the pond to catch but can’t justify the expense then no worries – it’ll inevitably end up here at some point. And transferring faster than most is David Adjmi’s Stereophonic, which last year racked up the most Tony Award nominations for any play in history. Written in collaboration with songwriter Will Butler – previously of Arcade Fire – the drama is about the tense 1976 recording sessions for the new album by a Anglo-American rock band riven by personal conflict and damaged relationships, but on the cusp of making a truly monumental record.  In other words Stereophonic is a fictionalised account of the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and by all accounts it’s wonderful: Time Out New York gave it five stars twice as it worked its way up from the small Playwrights Horizons to the bigger John Golden Theatre on Broadway. TO New York theatre editor Adam Feldman described it as ‘a richly satisfying multitrack production’. Having won five of its 12 Tony nominations Stereophonic closes on Broadway this weekend after a limited engagement, and next it’s coming for us. Three of the original cast members – Andrew R Butler, Eli Gelb and Chris Stack – are confirmed for the Daniel Aukin-directed production. Going straight into the West End, Stereophonic may not hit peak hype over here until the reviews are out – you’re advised to skim the US notices and book in ea