Things to do in London this week

It’s the week before Halloween, which means plenty of spooky, spine-chilling fun is taking place in the capital. There’s plenty of fright-filled shenanigans taking place whether you want to watch horror films on the big screen, join a lantern-lit ghost tour, learn about London’s graveyards, carve pumpkins, or let your synthetic wigs down over themed cocktails.

‘Sunset Boulevard’ goes Mulholland Drive in Jamie Lloyd’s wonderfully weird and audacious take on the Andrew Lloyd Webber hit. The Brit super-director dramatically deploys live video and erstwhile Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger to stunningly bridge the gap between the dark comedy of Billy Wilder’s original 1950 film classic and the more earnest stylings of Webber’s 1993 hit. Scherzinger fully embraces the insecurities of the ageing star Norma Desmond, a one-time silent movie star who has become a recluse in the age of talkies, and as a piece of live theatre, it’s truly awesome stuff. Jamie Lloyd has been one of our best directors for a long time now and this feels like a landmark for him. 

It’s the sixteenth edition of London Literature Festival. Back at the Southbank Centre expect more talks, workshops and installations celebrating prestigious names and exciting new writers from the world of written and spoken words. The likes of Jada Pinkett-Smith, Sir Patrick Stewart, Ed Gamble and Kerry Washington are on the roster of guests. This week look out for live events from Ed Gamble, a Q&A with Little Mix’s Leigh-Anne Pinnock, a talk from Ian Rankin, literary salons and a Black book fair. 

Raven Row has been turned into a Lutz Bacher jukebox, and it’s playing all the hits. The American conceptualist (1943-2019) was a magpie, a thief, a sampler, picking up bits of visual and sonic culture to reassemble, twist, break and make into something new. This retrospective is an incredible portrait of countless things: the city, the body, popular culture, religion, the past and present, here and now, then and there. It’s a portrait of being, of existence, in all its delirious, confusing, confounding messiness.

The cost of trade isn’t just financial. The goods we consume have historically been paid for in blood too, in actual lives. And this human cost of the history of trade is at the heart of this year’s Turbine Hall installation. Ghanaian artist El Anatsui has draped the cavernous space in vast reams of fabric. The first is a huge red and gold sail, a symbol of the transatlantic trade of goods and people. Now look close: that gleaming golden sail is made of bottle caps. It’s a whole circular economy of trade, goods, lives, culture and history, billowing in the Turbine Hall. El Anatsui’s installation is a shimmering, gorgeous, powerful elegy for a half-forgotten past, and for the bittersweet taste of endurance in the face of colonial exploitation. 

Can something as minuscule as a flea really change the course of one family’s history? Well, according to James Fritz’s new dramatisation of the 1889 investigation into thefts at the London Telegraph Offices… maybe. This is a trip of a show that plays out like a twisted Alice in Wonderland fable. And there are reflections of our current moment at every step. Hop on this riotous, quirky ride. 

LEAFF wants you to enjoy east and southeast Asian movies in extreme comfort this year, judging by its pick of venues – the two luxy Odeons in Leicester Square and Cinema at Selfridges. There, you’ll find 11 days of premieres, retrospectives, LGBTQI+ films and a halloween horror special from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, China and across Asia. Look out for a celebration of the ‘Ken Loach of Korea’, Chung Ji-Young.

Sometimes, big, clever art is there to make you feel small and stupid. Or at least insignificant. That’s what the best work of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto does. His retrospective at the Hayward finds him toying with light and dark, reality and fiction, life and death, all to make you go slack-jawed in awe at your pitiful place in the universe. From photography of stuffed animals from the American Museum of Natural History, shot to look real, to endless images of abandoned cinemas to beautiful, meditative images of bodies of water, at his best, Sugimato makes you feel like the universe is huge and you’re insignificant. And that’s the point. 

Twisting bodies and undulating flesh, all smooshing and sploodging into half-abstract semi-chaos: you know what you’re getting with Christina Quarles. The American painter has a distinct visual language. It’s all limbs and skin, contorting and writhing. This new body of work in the huge, swanky new Pilar Corrias space in Mayfair is an explosion of joy, sensuality and summer heat, a bit of warmth just as the weather starts to turn. .

Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined through cutting-edge technology. Marble Arch’s high-tech Frameless gallery houses four unique exhibition spaces with hypnotic visuals reimaging work from the likes of Bosch, Dalí and more, all with an atmospheric score. Now get 90 minutes of eye-popping gallery time for just £19 through Time Out offers.

£19 tickets to Frameless immersive art experience only through Time Out offers 

‘Skateboard’, an exhibition curated and designed by author, designer and skater Johnathan Olivares, is a comprehensive showcasing of the iconic piece of equipment that’s turned a sport into a full-on subculture. Ninety skateboards, along with more than 100 pieces of hardware, wheels and tucks will be on display, showing the evolution of their design from the retro ’50s Californian models to contemporary examples. Look out for Tony Hawk’s first-ever professional model skateboard, and Laura Thornhill’s Logan Earth Ski 1970s pro model (pictured). 

Proving there’s no time limit when it comes to seasonal activities, London’s longest-running ice rink is back in Canary Wharf’s Canada Square Park adding a dose of frosty fun to the business district. The huge 1,200-square-metre arena is open for 18 whole weeks beginning way before the rest of the ice rinks appear around London and lasting long after we’ve packed away the Christmas decorations and broken our New Year’s resolutions. It’s covered with a canopy so you can slip and side even in bad weather and there’s a rinkside bar and themed DJ nights to look out for. Get your skates on!

Richard Cant gives an electric performance in this (largely) one-person play, based on real events, which makes its debut at Wilton’s Music Hall. In 1971, aged 51, Merle Miller – novelist and former editor of Harper’s Magazine – outed himself as gay in a game-changing article in the New York Times. Miller was inspired to write ‘What It Means to be a Homosexual’ in response to a piece by literary critic Joseph Epstein, published the previous year in Harper’s, in which the latter proclaimed: ‘If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the Earth’. This is the starting point for James Corley’s play which is powerfully resonant, laying into politicians who cynically target gay people to win elections. 

A faceless, grey corporate office; patterned carpet tiles, neon strip lights. This is early 2000s corporate America as seen by American artist Avery Singer. But this isn’t just any date in the early 2000s, this is 9/11. This immersive, trippy, beige installation is a meditation on tragedy and collective trauma, on one event which tore apart a country, and shattered Singer’s own youth. She lived down the road from the World Trade Center, her mother worked there. Who she is, what America is, was fundamentally altered by 9/11. You enter the gallery and face a wall of lifts, portals to a seemingly endless array of offices. Inside hang portraits of people impacted by the attack. In the space next door, Singer has created a bookstore filled with 2000s-era thrillers and self-help books. Down an office corridor, you find more paintings. It’s deeply, unsettlingly, brilliantly affecting.

Every day, almost 30 years ago, Marina Carr would walk through wards of mothers and babies at Dublin’s National Maternity Hospital and hunker down in the room they’d provided to write this play. The hospital had commissioned it and the result surely exceeded any expectation. Now Carr’s best-known work, ‘Portia Coughlan’ seems blown in from another plane. Set in the Irish Midlands and using the area’s dialect, it brings incest, domestic abuse, infidelity, sex work and motherhood under its wise eye and creates a world that is equal parts mystical, mythical and crushingly domestic. This is a production brimming with sadness, most of all Carr’s sadness for a nation (a world?) that has so often reduced its women to functions of motherhood. 

Want to spend the evening on the edge of your seat? Directed by Anna Ledwich, Hampstead Theatre’s new play ‘anthropology’  is a thriller following a Silicon Valley software engineer who creates an AI version of her sister when she vanishes on her way home from college. At first, it brings solace, until it starts to reveal new details about her sister’s disappearance… If you’re a ‘Black Mirror’ fan, you’ll be in for a suspenseful evening brought to life by a female-led cast. Plus, we’ve got an exclusive discount on tickets.

Exclusive £10 tickets to ‘anthropology’ at Hampstead Theatre only through Time Out offers

Get ready to see Philip Guston implode. Because over the course of this big retrospective of the American artist’s (1913-1980) work, you watch one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century fall to pieces, collapse in on himself, and then be born anew. It’s amazing. The child of Jewish refugees, he watched racism flourish on the streets of LA at the hands of the KKK and chose to create art of resistance. He painted revolutionary murals in Mexico, portable frescoes for left-wing events and murals for housing projects. Then came big fleshy canvases smudged over with pink and blue and black, like vast bruises. They’re staggering, brilliant paintings, satirical, aggressive, caked in nicotine, paranoia and obsession.

Daisy Collingridge’s world is full of big floppy, wobbly, undulating bodies. They dance across the wall like fleshy fabric friezes, boobs and bellign flapping about. They wrestle and pose in photographs, their heads are covered in varicose veins, their tummies ripple with a million folds. Collingridge’s work usually takes the form of enormous costumes she wears in films and performances. They’re vast exaggerations of negative inner thoughts, all those terrible things you say to yourself in the mirror made flesh. Here, they’ve become 3D wall puppets, textile beings of fat and folds, their guts exposed, their jowls sagging. It’s painfully, uncomfortably relatable.