Things to do in London this weekend

A reincarnation of Zoo Lates (which ended in 2015), Zoo Nights returns to bring ‘after hours’ fun to ZSL London Zoo. Attractions entrial a packed street-food market, live music, an after-hours look at the reptile house in ‘The Secret Life of Reptiles and Amphibians’, and a ‘The Birds and the Bees’ tour where experts will shed some light on animal sex. For the extreme animal enthusiasts out there, you can even opt for a Zoo Nights VIP Sleepover and rest your head in one of the zoo’s nine lodges. Time to unpack that elephant onsie?

If you love the TV show, you’re in for a treat with The Crystal Maze Live Experience! Grab your friends and family for a day to remember, and relive the epic TV show with thoroughly immersive tests of your mental and physical abilities. Follow your professional Maze Master through all the challenges – the more you complete successfully, the more Crystals you win, and the more time you’ll have for the final test in... drumroll...The Crystal Dome. 

Get over 30% off group tickets to The Crystal Maze Live Experience, only through Time Out Offers.

The Horniman Museum and Gardens play host to a hugely diverse roster of events throughout the year, and the Daytimers Festival is no exception. On this Saturday in June, the gardens will be taken over by a bunch of family-friendly activities to celebrate all things South Asia. There’ll be live music and DJ sets from the likes of Jawari, an eclectic music collective and British-Bengali musician Tara Lily plus more. There’ll also be drop-in craft workshops, Chai tasting, food activities and arts and crafts stalls.

Never ending baskets of delicious dim sum. Need we say more? That means tucking into as many dumplings, rolls and buns as you can scoff down, all expertly put together by a Chinatown restaurant celebrating more than ten years of business. Taiwanese pork buns? Check. Pork and prawn soup dumplings? You betcha. ‘Supreme’ crab meat xiao long bao? Of course! And just to make sure you’re all set, Leong’s Legend is further furnishing your palate with a chilled glass of prosecco. Lovely bubbly.

Get 51% off bottomless dim sum at Leong's Legend only through Time Out Offers or get 

Most productions of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ are about life. Jamie Lloyd’s production is about death. Taking place in a gloomy void, Tom Holland and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers’s titular lovers speak in halting, hushed voices, and the action jumps and skips like a half-remembered dream, as if they were looking back on all this from a great distance. It’s deeply compelling. Another one of Shakespeare’s heroes asked what dreams may come in death. This unsettling production feels like the answer.

In a 1978 American football game between the Oakland Raiders and the New England Patriots, Jack Tatum tackled Darryl Stingley so hard it left him paralysed from the neck down. It was an act of ferocious brutality that was captured on camera and replayed, reanalysed, rewatched a billion times over. It’s at the centre of Matthew Barney’s latest film, ‘Secondary’; a quiet, unnerving, uncomfortable exploration of how bodies can be broken, destroyed and remade, and how violence is humanity’s ultimate spectacle.

Have you noticed that everyone’s wearing kilts at the moment? It’s partly down to Glaswegian fashion designer and radical creative Charles Jeffrey, whose fashion brand Loverboy reimagined the textile, creating checked lewks that were more high club night than Highland fling. It’s been 10 years since Loverboy began and this exhibition will go behind-the-scenes, exploring how Jeffrey built the brand from scratch. 

How do you adapt one of the all time great British TV series of the ‘80s for the ‘20s stage? ‘Very respectfully’ is the answer offered by James Graham’s version of Alan Bleasdale’s ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’. It concerns the titular group of male Liverpudlian labourers, who as the play begins have already lost their jobs laying tarmac and are now on the dole, doing off the books work. In 2024, ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ undoubtedly comes across as a period piece, but it has a timeless echo in any straightened times. And it is, simply, a tremendous story about men, masculinity and change. 

To walk into London-based artist Alvaro Barrington’s Duveen commission is to walk into the Grenadian shack he grew up in. The sound of rain hammering on the tin roof echoes around the space as you sit on plastic-covered benches. In the central gallery, a vast silver dancer is draped in fabrics on an enormous steel pan drum. This is Carnival, this is the Afro-Carribean diaspora at its freest, letting loose, dancing, expressing its soul, communing. You’re brought into the frenzy, the dance, the community. Barrington has created a space of joy and togetherness, filled with love and critical anger.

Due to take over north London’s iconic Roundhouse throughout June, The Last Word Festival is back for its brilliant eleventh edition. The fest is one of the best in the UK for championing exciting voices and emerging talent in the world of spoken word, and what better live venue could there be to host it? This year, there’ll be poetry slam heats, where 18-25 year olds can compete for a cash prize, and a session called ‘redacted’ where poems are created by removing words from articles, chapters or magazines, plus much, much more.

More than 130 events across over 40 parks, streets, churches, libraries and pubs are planned for this year’s Wandsworth Arts Fringe. Expect nights of cabaret, live comedy, experimental dance and brand-new theatre. Highlights include CaBiRet, a celebration of bisexuality through music, magic and comedy, a set by Taskmaster star Sophie Duker, and ‘Still Here’, a moving insight into the lives of migrants from Ukraine and Afghanistan. 

Pioneering American feminist, Judy Chicago, has spent decades using her art to call out injustice at the hands of the patriarchy. She’s most well known for smoke-based desert performances and ‘The Dinner Party’, a hugely influential installation celebrating thousands of overlooked women. Both are represented here but this show focuses instead on her drawings and paintings. She has a distinct aesthetic; heady, psychedelic, swirling and geometric all while peddling her vicious, technicolour, satirical attack on the patriarchy, shot through with ecological activism.

Jeremy Herrin’s original 2015 production of Duncan Macmillan’s smash addiction drama is back for 2024 with actor Denise Gough (now not a relative unknown as she was 9 years ago) delivering a phenomenal performance. She is beyond tremendous as Emma, a booze-and-drugs-addled actor who we first meet slurring her way through a performance of ‘The Seagull’ before flaming out at a club night and checking herself into a rehab centre. Gough is magnificent and absurd in equal measure, a performance that’s simultaneously high comedy and high tragedy. After a seven year break – going cold turkey if you will – this is the best sort of relapse.

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 £20 through Time Out offers.

£20 tickets to Frameless immersive art experience only through Time Out offers 

In a warren of concrete bunkers deep beneath the strand, the masters of high end immersive AV art have pulled together some big hits. ‘Reverb’ is a celebration of speakers, drums, beats, songs and noises, of the links between music and art. Four Technics turntables allow you to play looped records by German artist Carsten Nicolai, Jeremy Deller lectures kids on the history of rave, Jenn Nkiru’s traces the history of Detroit techno and Cecilia Bengolea films the convulsive body-popping joy of Jamaican dancehall. It’s a love letter to the power of music, an ear-rattling testament to how sound shapes society, emotion and history. 

Studio Voltaire has brought artists Tom of Finland and Beryl Cook together for a duo show exploring the links between Tom’s hyper-exaggerated homoerotic pornography and Beryl’s titillating seaside British comedy naughtiness. Both artists are brilliant in their own way. Tom pushes macho musculature and hyper-male bravado to an erotic extreme. While Beryl painted the lascivious, joyful hilarity of her native Plymouth, the big characters, the slap and tickle of nights on the tiles in England. It’s brave, fun, gorgeous and silly. 

This year marks 20 years of the London Festival of Architecture, which has spent those two decades sparking conversation and inspiring new ways to engage with our city. This year it’s calling on boroughs, architects and communities to rethink public spaces and put people back at the heart of the city. There are over 450 events on the programme, including talks, workshops, performances, tours, installations and ‘interventions in the public realm’. Plus, the return of Studio Lates gives the chance to go behind the scenes of some of the capital’s leading architectural and design practices. 

From Liz Ascroft’s detailed, 1970s-in-aspic set design to the elaborate coiffure of Basil’s wife, Sybil (Anna-Jane Casey), Caroline Jay Ranger’s production of beloved TV comedy ‘Fawlty Towers’ leans heavily on nostalgia. Ranger has form in turning iconic British TV shows into theatre: she directed ‘Only Fools and Horses The Musical’ a few years ago. We get a greatest hits parade of characters from the TV series’ two seasons and a litany of gags.

Take your tastebuds on a journey to Latin America with Chayote. With a picturesque view of Tower Bridge and St Katherine Docks, this restaurant offers the essence of Mexico, Peru, and Spain with high-end ingredients in every dish to provide an uncompromised culinary experience! Enjoy tortillas made using only Mexican imported corn, topped with only certified prime cuts of meats for delicate textures paired with indigenous to South American chillies in the salsas, mole, and sauces.

Get three courses and a margarita at Chayote for £23, only through Time Out Offers.

The Natural History Museum’s big exhibition for 2024 is this massive new celebration of our avian pals. As you can doubtless glean from the title, ‘Birds: Brilliant & Bizarre’ focuses on the weirder end of the feathered spectrum, from strange-looking birds to exploring the links between pigeons and T-rex to daring you to sniff a stinky seabird egg. 

For decades now, Elton John has been building a world class collection of photography with his partner David Furnish. It’s been shown all over the world, and now it’s the V&A’s turn. The exhibition is rammed full of iconic images by some of the most important names in photography: Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Juergen Teller, William Egglestone and on and on. Like you’d expect from a megastar, it’s pretty dazzling. This show spills out a story about style, fashion, the crippling excesses of success, the endless, head spinning allure of sexuality. It’s because it’s Elton John’s collection that this exhibition works. 

Aussie director Benedict Andrews’s UK reputation is heavily based on his extraordinary 2012 production of Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’, which turned the melancholy masterpiece into a wild fin de siècle romp. Andrews has done it again with another all-time take. Clearly there is something about Chekhov’s large ensembles, bittersweet humour and tales of fading aristocrats that draw out the best in him. The play builds to a queasily brilliant climax, but it’s the journey that’s the joy. You wish it would last forever.

Italian neorealism is one of the most prevalent post-war cinematic movements, and this season is centred around the re-release of Robert Rossellini’s ‘Rome, Open City’ (1945) which is considered the very first example. As with any great film fest, there’ll be insight from some experts, guest speakers will explore the impact various women have had on the movement, in front of and behind the camera, and the entire second half of the season will focus on work from the early ‘50s, with films such as Miracle in Milan and Stromboli. 

It wasn’t unusual for women to paint in the seventeenth century, it was just unusual for them to live off it. But the Tate’s had enough of that bogus, patronising attitude and are hellbent on showing that anything men could do – even really ugly paintings – women could do too.  ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520-1920’ is 400 years of women artists going toe to toe with the men. Society portraiture, allegorical painting, you name it, they could do it. This is art existing on its own terms, art of privacy, independence and innovation, finally able to peek out from the long shadows cast by men.

Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer-winning play is a meaty watch, a pungent, spikey mix of laughs, tears and doomed defiance that centres on a multiracial group of misfits headed by Danny Sapani’s retired NYPD officer Walter. Boozing away his enforced retirement in a palatial but semi-dilapidated apartment in Manhattan, Walter’s career was ended six years ago when a young white officer mistakenly pumped him full of lead; he has spent the intervening years campaigning for heads to roll. What the play ultimately boils down to is a conundrum that’s been sloshing around in drama since at least ‘Antigone’. Walter has been seriously wronged and wants justice. But is it realistic to believe that he’s going to get it? It’s a timeless dilemma that’s been deftly retooled by Guirgis to ask questions about life in contemporary America. It’s a pleasure to spend time amongst Guirgis’s crew of misfits.

Turns out, not only does Harmony Korine make difficult obtuse films, he makes difficult obtuse paintings too. His show at Hauser & Wirth is full of psychedelic, violent, eye-searing paintings of scenes from his latest film, ‘Aggro Dr1ft’. The movie (starring Travis Scott and Jordi Molla) takes you on a dizzying, weird, fully infrared trip into the world of a masked assassin, patrolling deep undergrowth and lavish villas on a mission to kill a demonic crime lord. The paintings are full of that same tropical violence, 8-bit menace and throbbing, silent aggression.

Hayao Miyazaki’s animated masterpiece ‘Spirited Away’ is about a young girl, Chihiro, who enters a fantastical realm entirely populated with wild spirit beings, from an emo dragon-boy to a colossal overgrown baby. Bringing it to the stage is a huge ask technically. If the main challenge facing ‘Spirited Away’ is that a true transposition of the film would have to take your breath away constantly, then for three hours it at least does it frequently. 

There was a lot of love in the last years of Michelangelo Buonarotti’s life. Already hugely successful, the Renaissance master dedicated his final decades to loving his god, his family, his friends, and serving his pope. The proof of that love is all over the walls of this intimate little visual biography of the final years of his life, filled with his drawings and letters and paintings by his followers. We’ve had a lot of Michelangelo drawing shows in recent years, but the drawings in the last room of this show are incredible. They were never meant to be seen, they're frail, weak things, but they’re also an amazing vision of one of history’s greatest painters. 

At Between The Bridges every Sunday this summer, SoLo Craft Fair will host the South Bank Summer Market, with over 60 traders selling a huge variety of bits and bobs from art, jewellery and fashion to kids’ products and more. Everything will have been created by independent designers from across the capital and if you want to try your hand at making something, there’ll be free workshops on site.

The cycle of 13 songs PJ Harvey has written for the National Theatre’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ‘Our Mutual Friend’ slot seamlessly into her body of work and elevate this adaptation of Dickens’s final finished novel. The show is billed as a play with songs: the tune count is a bit low for actual musical status, but nonetheless, Harvey’s songs are integral to the darkly satirical thriller that pivots on the disappearance of John Harmon, who disappeared on the day he returned to collect his inheritance following the death of his wealthy father. This story from the city is something special: Dickens’s late class drama turned into a work both elemental and righteous.

‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ is a musical about three generations of incomers in Sheffield’s iconic – and infamous – brutalist housing estate, Park Hill. It’s a stunning achievement, which takes the popular but very different elements of retro pop music, agitprop and soap opera, melts them in the crucible of 50 years of social trauma and forges something potent, gorgeous and unlike any big-ticket musical we’ve seen before. It has deeply local foundations, based on local songwriter Richard Hawley's music and it was made in Sheffield, at the Crucible Theatre, with meticulous care and attention. It has all the feels – joy, lust, fear, sadness, despair, are crafted into an emotional edifice which stands nearly as tall as the place that inspired it.

Can art save the world? Can it lead to world peace? Nah, probably not, but Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) believed it could. In the 1980s, the giant of post-war American art launched ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, pronounced ‘Rocky’ like his pet turtle), an initiative that saw him travel to countries gripped by war and oppression in an ambitious act of cultural diplomacy. He visited places like Cuba, Chile and the USSR and the results are on display here. As a document of a world gripped by paranoia and tension, of the slow demise of communism, of the birth of neoliberalism, it’s great. 

Britain is littered with symbols of death and exploitation. Public sculptures of controversial historical figures are everywhere, and now they’re in the Serpentine too, because Yinka Shonibare CBE has put them there. The Nigerian-British art megastar has filled the gallery with recreations of statues of Churchill, Kitchener, Queen Victoria and Clive of India. But they’re scaled down, their power diminished, minimised, undermined. And of course, they’re covered in Shonibare’s signature Dutch wax print. This is what Shonibare does: highlight, tear apart and subvert the legacy of British imperialism with directness, colour and wit.

Yes, the presence of soon-to-turn-85 stage and screen legend Ian McKellen tackling Shakespeare’s great character Sir John Falstaff is the big draw in ‘Player Kings’. But Robert Icke’s three hour-40-minute modern-dress take on the two ‘Henry IV’ plays does not pander to its star, and is unwavering in its view that this is the story of two deeply damaged men, linked grimly together. McKellen is naturally excellent as an atypically elderly Falstaff, but it also has a supporting cast to die for See it because it’s a terrific take on one of the greatest plays ever written (plus its decent straight-to-DVD sequel) blessed tremendously original lead performances.

This tiny exhibition is dedicated to the miserable, chaotic, sombre depiction of feverish violence that is the last painting of one of history’s most important artists, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It isn’t in the best state of repair, but it’s still a mesmerisingly beautiful work of art. It’s a maelstrom of movement and brutality and morbidity. It’s incredible. Caravaggio would die not long after finishing this painting, but what a way to go out. Not with a whimper, and not with a bang, but with a scream of blood-drenched anguish.

In a Wakefield hospital in 1980, while Sebastian Coe was running the 1500m wearing the number 254, Jason Wilsher-Mills’s parents were told he had only a few years to live. A bout of chicken pox led to his immune system attacking itself. But, he survived. Years in hospital in recovery awakened a deep creativity in him. This show is the culmination of all that struggle and creativity. There’s a hint of Grayson Perry to this show, mashed with pop culture and grizzly medical terror. Its aim is to make his illness, his trauma, unthreatening, unscary, a way of converting pain and fear into fun and colour.

Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle, which she gigged around New England before scraping the money together to record it as a critically acclaimed 2010 concept album that featured the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on guest vocals as the various mythological heroes and villains. Now, ‘Hadestown’ is a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It’s a musical of beautiful texture and tone and it doesn’t hurt that Mitchell has penned some flat-out brilliant songs. It’s a gloriously improbable triumph.