Things to do in London this weekend

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

Twisting bodies and undulating flesh, all smooshing and splodging 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.

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. 

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

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. 

‘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!

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 

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. 

Clint Dyer and Roy Williams clearly fell in love with the world they created with 2020’s ‘Death of England’. A monologue about white racism written by two Black playwrights. ‘The Death of England’ shared universe has grown since and now it’s the turn of the women in the series to take centre stage. Carly (Hayley Squires) has taken over the family flower business, and Denise (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) has been sharing the shop, selling patties – an allegory for multiculturalism if ever there was one. But unfortunately, the business has tanked and the shop is about to be taken away from them.

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.

Is ‘Flowers for Mrs Harris’ the feelgood fairytale we need during a cost-of-living crisis? Bronagh Lagan’s revival of Richard Taylor and Rachel Wagstaff’s 2016 musical version of Paul Gallico’s 1958 novella, ‘Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris’, makes a good case for it. Jenna Russell plays the eponymous working-class cleaner, who uncomplainingly improves the lives of a litany of selfish or oblivious clients in 1950s Battersea, before falling in love with a Christian Dior dress in a brochure and visiting the Paris store against all the odds. This show brims over with a kindness that may be more wish fulfilment than reality, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that right now. Soak it up and cheer Mrs Harris along.

Any fans of Hockney, this is your chance to immerse yourself in the Bradford artist’s colourful work. Brand new immersive art and theatre venue Lightbox has blown up and lit up some of his most iconic paintings. Some of the works are adaptations of his digital iPad drawings, others are huge renderings of his massive recent landscape paintings, or classic older Hockney images, all high-res and accompanied by music and projected movements. 

Tickets from £19 to David Hockney’s ‘Bigger & Closer’ at Lightroom

The huge London-wide dance festival will take over the capital this October, with an extremely varied bill of hip-hop, performance art, audio-visual experiences and operetta from boundary-pushing artists from around the world. There’s an epic hip-hop and breaking dance battle at Somerset house, an infectiously rhythmic presentation of South African dance at Sadler's Wells and many more experimental works worth checking out.

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.

Ben Weatherill’s ‘Frank and Percy’ is a largely charming comedy-drama about two elderly dog owners from Yorkshire: Ian McKellen’s Percy, and Frank, played by fellow national treasure Roger Allam. Meeting one day in Hampstead Heath, the duo take to scheduling their walkies together. They’re lonely, apart from their canine pals: the prickly Percy is apparently divorced; Frank is widowed. Idle chats turn into a friendship that largely seems pragmatic until Percy lets slip that his ex was a man. It’s a cracking play, crisply directed. It’s two of our greatest actors flexing their comedy muscles and Yorkshire accents. 

Sound Cafe on Oxford Street plays live music seven days a week. Not only is it consistantly bringing the vibes, it also serves up plenty of delicious food. Now, with this exclusive offer you can take in the musical surroundings while tucking into bottomless chicken wings smothered in your choice of classic Buffalo, sweet & spicy, or BBQ sauce. See how many you can snaffle up in 90 minutes. 

Enjoy bottomless wings and a drink at Sound Cafe for £15 only through Time Out offers. 

You don’t have to travel all the way to Germany for a lederhosen-clad knees-up this Oktoberfest. Munich’s world-famous beer festival is very much on in London with big steins of beer, platters of excessively long wurst and loud oompah bands blowing brass like they don’t give a schnitzel. Whether you’re after a traditional beerhall or raucous table dancing, authentic Bavarian beers or east London craft IPAs, you can find the perfect Oktoberfest for you right here. 

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.

Oh, ‘Miss Saigon’. When the mega-musical premiered on Broadway in 1991 is was met by protests against its yellowface casting and its orientalist depiction of Vietnamese women as either naive, virginal waifs or as prostitutes. Or both, in the case of the main character Kim. Three decades later, and American writer Kimber Lee’s play starts with a naive, virginal waif called Kim… except, we see Lee savagely skewer and then despair at the tired, repetitive colonial depictions of Asians in dramas. It’s as if ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ were a play, the way it becomes self-aware, kaleidoscopic, genre-hopping while searching for an Asian-American existence that’s authentic, rather than shaped by centuries of colonial writing.

Life, what’s it all about eh? Well, according to ‘All Crescendo, No Reward’ it’s just birth, death and a bit of shopping. The disparate works on display are (very) loosely united by a theme of life and rebirth. At the show’s heart is Matt Copson’s laser baby projection. The figure starts all small and adorable and then grows to giant proportions. It discovers the world, plays with a gun, swallows an airplane, and then bursts apart and goes right back to the start. The baby is a selfish creature, it consumes and grows and bloats until its own avarice tears it apart. Hey, that’s life. It’s all the stuff and guff accumulated in the mess of everyday living, a fractured meditation on life’s cyclical futility.

You might think autumn would be a stupid time to open an outdoor sculpture exhibition. And you’d think right. It’s cold, windy, rainy and damp. This is indoor art’s time to shine. But that hasn’t stopped Frieze from returning to Regent’s Park with their annual outdoor sculpture extravaganza. Go get the beanies and brollies, and stop by for free to see colourful creations like Josh Smith’s version of the Grim Reaper, Hank Willis Thomas’s giant Afro comb and Zak Ové’s nine-metre high Afrofuturist sculpture. 

For decades Marina Abramović has put her body on the line to make big, bold, sweeping, direct art about nothing less than life, death, sex and love. She is totally, utterly committed to the art – that’s why it works, even when it gets a bit silly. This long-delayed retrospective at the RA shows her work is still influential, pioneering and moving, and still powerful enough to endure, to forge connections, maybe even to bring you to tears, even if she isn’t present.

Pioneering couturière, and Nazi sympathiser: the V&A’s latest fashion blockbuster tells the story of Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel’s revolutionary designs, and the wartime ventures which still eclipse her legacy. This substantial retrospective is a gentle guide through her whole design journey – the story of a girl from humble beginnings who worked her way up to establishing one of the world’s biggest fashion brands. As well as flouncy dresses, sharp, luxurious Chanel suits and elegant gowns it also deals with some of the trickier questions about her morality, but elegantly chronicles her undeniable, innovative talent.

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. For contemporary viewers, the triumphs offer a faded vision of a lost world. This is the peak of empire, of grandeur and riches and dominance and avarice and cruelty and subjugation, the pinnacle of society before an inevitable fall. 

Sarah Lucas’s art isn’t big, and it isn’t clever. But who says art needs to be either of those things? Maybe, instead, art can be vulgar, puerile, obscene, grotesque and childish, just like Lucas’s. As soon as you walk into this big look back across her career, you meet a mechanical hand tossing off an invisible man, a wax cock on a wooden chair, a wall of tabloid tits, and lists of words for shit and wanking. Not big, not clever, but funny, shocking and, genuinely, deeply insightful. It turns out, the best art is satirical, cynical, vulgar, stupid, funny and absolutely full of knob gags. It’s not big, and it’s not clever, but it’s very, very good.

Kew’s famous Temperate House will be home to massive floral installations and artworks exploring the amazing world of plants and fungi that challenge traditional expectations. Accompanying all the fancy blooms will be Kew scientists, horticulturists and writers talking about queerness and nature and the connections between plants, fungi and LGBTQ+ communities, as well as special after hours events with cabaret, comedians and cocktails. 

Celebrating London’s Magnificent Seven Cemetries, London Month of the Dead is back and ready to spook you to the soul with a bunch of macabre events. The programme is jam-packed with ghostly tours and talks and culminates in a Halloween ball. Look out for torch-lit cemetry walks, spell workshops, a seance and talks on everything from Egyptian funery to the science behind mortality. These events are scarily popular, so book your ticket now. 

If you’re looking for a night out that’s garunteed to give everyone in your party a good time, a good ol’ stint of karoke will do the trick. If you’re looking for the perfect stage, Lucky Voice is letting wannabe Whitneys book out a cosy private pod for two hours and enjoy the state-of-the-art, touchscreen karaoke system that features over 11,000 songs for just £17. A free ‘Ziggy Stardust’ cocktail is included too.

Hire a karaoke room and get a cocktail at Lucky Voice for just £17 only through Time Out offers. 

Pour yourself a cocktail, darling, and get ready for Christopher Luscombe’s revival of Noël Coward’s most pristine comedy. Stuffed full of dinner jackets, ball gowns and childlike quarrels, there’s no attempt to reinvent Coward’s classic comedy of manners. Still, this tale of a couple equally drawn to and repelled by one another, gets the laughs rolling in thick and fast. The stroke of real originality here is the older ages of the two leads. Both Havers and Hodge are in their seventies, but both still look supple as they flail about the stage, bickering, flirting and roaring at each other with real glee.

The basic point of ‘As You Like It’ as a performed play is to make Shakespeare’s rambling forest-set romance as much fun as physically possible in order to distract the audience from how meandering the story is. You need to make it a laugh, and that’s exactly what director Ellen McDougall does with the final outdoor show of the Globe season, a queered-up take that skips over the sadder bits and generally sets its sights on a good time for all. It’s fun! Lots of fun! This is a play that can leave audiences lost in the woods if it’s not done right, but you’ll emerge from these forests with a veritable bounce in your step.

Word about Six by Nico has spread across the country thanks to its novel concept: its ever-evolving six-course tasting menu changes every six weeks each time with a different theme inviting you on a journey of discovery to experience new flavours. Whether you are a food novice or connoisseur, enjoy a carefully curated experience with everything from an amuse-bouche to an indulging dessert. Right now you can tuck into the ‘Once Upon A Time: Chapter II’ menu inspired by fantastical tales.

Get six courses and a glass of prosecco at Six By Nico for £39 only through Time Out offers.

London’s famous Argentinian steak house has an offer you can’t refuse. Tuck into a three-course meal including cuts of some of the world’s best quality steak from premium Black Angus cattle bred at hand-selected farms in the Pampas region of Argentina, along with other contemporary, globally-influenced dishes. They’ll also throw in a glass of fine wine. 

£35 for three courses and a glass of wine at Gaucho only through Time Out offers. 

Superheavyweight actors Bertie Carvel and Patsy Ferran join forces this autumn for ‘Pygmalion’, Bernard Shaw’s most famous play, perhaps best known for its musical adaptation ‘My Fair Lady’. Cavel stars as Henry Higgins, the professor who becomes captivated by Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle (Ferran) and resolves to make a ‘lady’ of her – but gets rather more than he bargained with. Richard Jones directs.  

Release your inner Grayson Perry at this pottery class that lets you get up close and personal with a hunk of silky, soft clay and transform it into something you can be really proud of. Token Studio near Tower Bridge hosts 90 minute potter’s wheel sessions where you can learn clay hand building techniques and paint and already fired piece. The best bit? You can bring your own beer! And if you love what you’ve made, then you can come back two weeks later to collect it for just £10. 

Just £29 for a BYOB Ultimate Pottery Experience only through Time Out offers. 

Ian McKellen’s work rate as he speeds through his eighties is truly formidable. He has in fact already starred in Ben Weatherill’s new comedy, ‘Frank and Percy’, which has played the Theatre Royals Windsor and Bath to solid reviews. And now it’s transferring to London. Directed by Sean Mathias, Weatherill’s play stars McKellen and fellow stage heavyweight Roger Allam as two single men with wildly different temperaments who bond over the love of their dogs, but start to wonder if they’re not feeling something for each other – and wonder if they should be pursuing it at their stage in life.

This month-long annual celebration of the Thames is back with a splash. As ever it’ll bring a mix of art festivals, community events, regattas, river races and environmental activities to various riverside locations. The festival is organised by borough, so you can filter to see which events are happening near you — dive in!

‘Tracing Freud on the Acropolis’ is a small exhibition is about Sigmund’s only journey to Greece. Freud had always dreamed of visiting the Acropolis; it was a place of learning wisdom and intellectual ambition without equal. But once he got there, he felt guilt, pain and regret too. There are no photos of Freud’s trip here, but there are ancient Greek objects he collected. It’s more of a small display than an exhibition, but its ideas – the guilt and discomfort of achieving your goals, the pain of ‘filial piety’ – are deeply triggering. It forces you to consider what your own Acropolis is. 

If we said there was a Kensington health club where you could choose from three massages for just £27 you might think we’d necked too much Christmas sherry, but hey, we’ve done our due diligence and we’re totally not wrong. Hit the London Health Hub and choose from a deep tissue massage, a sports massage or a Swedish massage, and then laugh yourself silly at the fact you’re getting more than 70 percent off. 

Your choice of massage at London Health Club for £27, only through Time Out Offers.

The three huge canvases of Paula Rego’s ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (produced for the National Gallery’s restaurant in 1991 and inspired by the museum’s fifteenth century Carlo Crivelli altarpiece, shown nearby) tell countless complex tales of historic, mythic, saintly women, from Mary Magdalen to figures from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The whole thing is bathed in blue and white, the colours of the tiles on Rego’s childhood home in Portugal. Rego often twisted the world to fit her ideas, and here she’s taken all the hyper-male, phallocentric art of the National Gallery and shifted the perspective. Rego tells untold stories, and shows just how worth telling they are.

The Science Museum’s ‘Power Up’ is here with bank after bank of classic videogames. They’ve made an attempt at education with a wall of consoles from throughout history, from the Amiga to the Xbox, but you can ignore all that if you want and just concentrate on turning your eyes square. Everything here is grouped by theme. There’s a Mario section and a Sonic section, a rhythm action game bit and a VR gaming bit, there’s 16-player Halo and solo Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. There are PC games and handheld consoles, Gamecubes and Megadrives. Want to save Lemmings? Race Micromachines? Fight the Empire? It's all here.

You should be deeply suspicious of anyone who thinks they can neatly sum up a whole continent’s artistic output. But Tate Modern’s ‘A World in Common’ gives it a valiant, vibrant go anyway. It starts with George Osodi’s gorgeous, lavish portraits of Nigerian kings and queens, which sets the tone for the show, because at its best this exhibition acts as a portrait of a continent bearing the indelible scars of colonial wounds. As a document of art as a form of resistance, resilience, rebellion, and ongoing survival, this show is brilliant.

Londoners love a market. It’s that unique combination of eating, chatting and browsing. Lovely stuff. And weekends were made for browsing around them. Here’s our pick of the very best markets in London, from foodie Borough Market to flower-filled Columbia Road.