Things to do in London this weekend

On Friday, the Paris will host what promises to be an epic Olympics opening ceremony along the Seine, before two weeks of world-class sporting competitions. If you’ve failed to snag tickets, don’t worry – London is a dab hand at showing sporting antics on the big screen, and plenty of locations will be popping up across the city where you can (hopefully) bask in the sun and catch everything from diving to curling. Here’s our pick of the best. 

Explore the ultimate pasta experience at NOTTO Pasta Bar in Piccadilly or Covent Garden. Founded by one of Britain's most acclaimed chefs, Phil Howard, this restaurant was born out of his love for all things pasta, which is why everything is made fresh daily from the very best ingredients. Try dishes that offer a rustic yet luxurious charm, from the Rigatoni cacio e pepe to the Pappardelle with a slow-cooked short rib of beef. Enjoy this seasonal menu with one of two house cocktails; will you go for a refreshing white peach Bellini or a Raspberry Sour.

Save over a tenner on three courses and a cocktail at Six by Nico, only through Time Out Offers. 

FKABAM’s tattooed ruler Lee Tiernan might resemble a one-man Dirty Sanchez x The Bear crossover episode, but under the inky skin and camo print throbs the brain and heart of an elite chef. It’s obvious in every dish: Tiernan and his team want every ingredient to count and every mouthful to mean something. The restaurant’s devoted fanbase know the drill: one tasting menu, four courses for two people, £59 each. The dishes change every few weeks, but the lack of choice is alluring, not limiting. If it’s on the menu, it’s been perfected. Like genetically enhanced super soldiers, FKABAM’s dishes are the result of hundreds of hours of experimentation, innovation and refinement. If you like bold combinations, wild ideas and exquisite cooking you will love this hectic meat-mad fun box. 

Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart's midlife musical romcom is a goofy love letter to Dolly, a widow who takes a train to Yonkers, fixes everyone else’s romantic problems and eventually her own. And ‘wow, wow, wow, fellas, look at the old girl now, fellas!’ - Imelda Staunton is making herself gloriously seen and heard in Dominic Cooke's lavish revival of ‘Hello, Dolly!’. Cooke's show is a big old-fashioned bells and whistles production with impressive hoofing choreography and the rare pleasure of a real orchestra. It’s a terrific old-fashioned show which audiences love, and it knows it. 

Famed for his contribution to the pop art movement of the ‘60s, painter, stage designer, and photographer David Hockney takes us on a personal journey through 60 years of his art in a fascinating immersive exhibition. Using large-scale laser projection and a cutting-edge immersive audio system in a remarkable new eight-metre-tall space in King’s Cross, the English artist shows us the world through his eyes, with commentary on his process, and a specially composed score by Nico Muhly.

Get £19 tickets to David Hockney’s ‘Bigger & Closer’ at Lightroom, only through Time Out Offers.

South Facing might still be a fledgling festival compared to some of the other events on the calendar, now only in its third year, but it's continuing a lineage of over 150 years at Crystal Palace Bowl. The venue has played host to some of music’s most legendary names, from Elton John and Bob Marley to Vera Lynn and the Sex Pistols. South Facing brings the same level of thrilling eclecticism with its line-ups, hosting its bill in a space that feels intimate. There’s a diverse mix of headliners for its 2024 run, including disco icon Grace Jones, indie auteurs Future Islands, dancehall legend Popcaan, hip-hop pioneers The Roots, amapiano trailblazers Major League DJz, London jazz luminary Yussef Dayes, pop queen Jess Glynne, and reggae royalty Damian Marley.

On Saturday, Trafalgar Square will turn pink and blue as London Trans+ Pride celebrates its sixth year. The event is a vital coming together for trans people in the city, giving space to resist the encroaching threats on trans rights around the world, and come together to celebrate the community in the capital. So bring a sign, cover yourself in glitter and join the parade, which will wend its way through central London, culminating at Hyde Park Corner’s Wellington Arch.

One of London’s biggest dance music festivals is back to take over Boston Manor Park. If previous years are anything to go by, you can expect a careful balance of massive names and hotly-tipped up-and-comers across the weekend. This year you've got a stacked selection of house and techno juggernauts like Richie Hawtin, DVS1 b2b DJ Nobu, LSDXOXO Hot Since 82 and Kölsch live. They come alongside the likes of Barry Can't Swim, The Blessed Madonna, Honey Dijon, Joy Anonymous and The Martinez Brothers. Basically, it's the holy grail of raves.

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 

With their second feature I Saw the TV Glow, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun delivers a memorable, strange and satisfying teen horror-mystery. Owing much to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and plenty, if slightly less, to the wilder, weirder imagery of Twin Peaks, it’s a rare film that wears its influences on its sleeve while still feeling totally fresh. Schoenbrun, a trans, non-binary filmmaker, describes the film as being about ‘the egg crack’: the moment a person realises they’re trans after years of uncertainty and self-examination. It’s a vividly personal work, full of tough memories translated into neon nightmares. 

In American director Gordon Greenberg’s charming production of Joseph Stein and Stephen Schwartz’s 1989 musical there’s a lot more to ‘The Baker’s Wife’ than ‘Meadowlark’, its best-known song. For one thing, there’s a whole village in 1930s Provence seemingly addicted to bread. They’re practically salivating by the time the new baker, Amiable (Clive Rowe), arrives. This is followed by gossip about how much younger his wife, Genevieve (Lucie Jones) is. She quickly catches the eye of local heartthrob Dominique (Joaquin Pedro Valdes) and scandal among the sleepy café tables ensues. This particular show benefits from director-of-musicals extraordinaire Greenberg’s in-depth familiarity with it. Crucially, he understands that romance is only one strand of the story and that perhaps the most important ‘character’ is the village itself.

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.

With its peppy cast, streamlined story and about a bazillion pixels’ worth of VFX cyclones to sweep you back in your seat, Lee Isaac Chung’s all-action film is a fun and refreshingly old-school night at the pictures. Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones is a reined-in but sparky lead as meteorologist Kate Cooper, a Midwesterner with a groundhog’s ability to sniff out looming weather systems. And there are plenty of them – Twisters unleashes tornado after tornado; a visual effects splurge. Twisters gives you more than your money’s worth in mayhem. 

Fuerza Bruta, the Diqui James-led company, have returned to the Roundhouse for the first time in over a decade with ‘Aven’, billed as ‘the happiest show on Earth’. It’s essentially a series of spectacular setpieces with no plot, set to Gaby Kerpel’s pounding electronic score, staged largely around, and often above, the all-standing audience. The theatrical highs are fairly obvious: a gaggle of acrobatic performers running around the sides of a giant smoke-spitting globe; a man appearing to ‘swim’ through a huge tube filled with a vortex of confetti; at the climax a gigantic inflatable whale – controlled by two performers – swimming majestically through the Roundhouse’s towering vaults. It’s pretty much irresistible entertainment to anyone with a pulse.

Simon McBurney’s legendary theatre company Complicité basically has two modes: clever but fairly narratively conventional takes on difficult-to-stage classics, and brain-melting experimental odysseys that’ll rewire your cerebellum. Their 1999 play ‘Mnemonic’ - reimagined and redevised for 2024 - is very much in the latter camp. Does a play that explores the parallels between the act of memory, the act of migration, the act of ancestry and the act of storytelling sound intrinsically thrilling to you? It doesn’t to me. But it truly is. It starts slow, but it builds into something luminous and huge and almost beyond comprehension. Its last few minutes feel like staring overwhelmed at the secrets of creation.

Fancy a jaunt to the seaside but can’t be bothered with the trek outside of London? Head to Walthamstow’s Big Penny Social to soak up the vibes of a classic British beach resort instead. Every weekend until early September, the courtyard of the UK’s largest beer hall will be transformed into ‘Walthamstow-on-Sea’, a lovely little sandy cove where you can soak up some rays on a deck chair, hang out in your own private beach hut, sip draught beers and frozen cocktails served up by the beach bar, and treat yourself to some classic seaside snacks including fish and chips, soft serve and penny sweets. 

If you genuinely know nothing about Jeremy O Harris’s Broadway smash ‘Slave Play’ then maybe consider reading up after seeing it, because the original intent was audiences went in blind. The show apparently begins as a period drama set on a plantation in the antebellum US South. There, three different sexual scenarios unfurl, each in its way shocking, but a slew of minor anachronisms builds to the big reveal that it’s actually the present day and we’re watching a radical sex therapy course for interracial couples in which the Black partner has lost their libido. It’s a lot. And there’s a lot more to this intimate, tender, brave, repellant and gut-wrenching production.

Sex, gore and sacrilege; Penny Slinger knows how to tell a surreal story. The LA-based, London-born artist has been at the forefront of feminist art since the 1970s, and this gothically atmospheric exhibition pushes her ideas deeper into the weird, repressed psyche of society than ever before. It’s based on a book of collages that was meant to come out in the ’70s and full of clever black and white collages and double exposures. It’s a traumatic psychedelic trip through English values, a Hammer Horror-esque journey into sexual repression and gender oppression in middle-England: a plea for freedom in a stuffy, unjust society.

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 

It’s all material to Lonnie Holley, everything. Past traumas, trash found on a creek bed, shared histories, scrap metal, the news, old padlocks. All of it can be twisted into new shapes by him. Since the 1970s, he’s been at the forefront of a loose movement of Black American artists from the Deep South exploring the legacies of slavery and everyday injustice that shape their society. The recent work here continues his ongoing fascination with imbuing the scraps of life with meaning and narrative. Holley can tell stories that need telling. He reconstitutes and reconfigures the world around him, and the results feel powerful, necessary and often beautiful.

Polish-born, London-based artist Goshka Macuga has filled Bloomberg’s gallery with vast gleaming stalactites and stalagmites. They erupt from the floor, drip from the ceiling, glistening in pinks and browns and purples and blues. They look like ceramics, but they’re resin-coated foam, dominating the space with their bodily, physical, penile presences. There’s a lot of gloopy geological ceramic-y art out there, but it’s Macuga’s ideas that make this work. The cave as a concept symbolises safety, a metaphorical, prehistoric womb for humanity to crawl back to. 

‘It is an extraordinary experience to live as though life were punishment for being Black,’ says South African photographer Ernest Cole (1940-1990). An extraordinary experience that he captured the brutal daily reality of in the 1960s. His photographs, smuggled out of South Africa and published as a book decades ago, were among the first public documents of apartheid shared in the west. They tell a horrifying story of repression, aggression and cultural suppression. It’s a special body of work, because the story he’s telling needed to be told, and he tells it with a shocking honesty that’s devastatingly powerful.

I’ll tell you what’s fetch: Tina Fey’s writing. With the original ‘Mean Girls’ film 20 years old, the ‘Mean Girls’ stage musical has finally arrived in London and it’s very, very funny. It’s because Fey has straight up rewritten lots of the jokes and she’s done a spectacular job, her characters riffing away merrily on everything from air fryers and Ozempic to the Dali Lama's tongue-sucking incident. There’s an effortless funniness to her acerbic, surreal, pop-culture-infused dialogue, a real sense of ‘oh yeah, Tina Fey is a genius isn’t she?’ Unfortunately, she isn’t a songwriting genius, which is where this show comes unstuck. But you’re in for a fun night at the theatre.

Think clowning is limited to circus big tops? The London Clown Festival will make you think again, showcasing the best of the city’s contemporary clowns. The bulk of the shows will take place at Soho Theatre, where you can max out on physical comedy and buffoonery. Later in the run, it will move to Betsey Trotwood for a special immersive event, ‘London Clown Tarot: The Fools Journey’, before heading to Jacksons Lane Theatre for more exhilarating tomfoolery. Red noses optional. 

2023 was the year of Barbie mania, but 2024 is the year of the Barbie exhibition. The most famous doll in the world will be touching down in west London for a major Design Museum exhibition showcasing her evolution from 1959 to the present day. Thanks to a partnership with Mattel Inc., a bounty of rare Barbie items from the Californian archives will be on display alongside other iconic memorabilia. Expect a fabulous foray into all things pink.

In his most serious role to date, James Corden plays Alec in ‘The Constituent’, a fraying Afghan War veteran struggling with the disintegration of the normie life he built for himself after leaving the army. Now he’s going through the family courts in an effort to regain access to his children and his great hope is Monica (Anna Maxwell Martin), his hardworking local MP. Corden is both amusing and unsettling as Alec, and Maxwell Martin is terrific as Monica who wants to do right by her community. It’s a thoughtful, probing drama about damaged masculinity and the morality of British institutions. Plus, there’s simply no world in which 90 minutes in the company of Anna Maxwell Martin is a bad thing.

The current war in Ukraine isn’t the country’s first major conflict. Stuck between east and west, Ukraine has been fought over and pulled apart for centuries. And throughout all that vicious, bloody turmoil, Ukrainians made art. The early twentieth century with its countless conflicts saw the birth of countless modernist movements, and here at the RA are embryonic forms of lots of them. Futurism, cubism, constructivism, and on and on, with almost all the works sourced from two Ukrainian museums. The show is good because it shows how art offers a way out. Art here is a path towards liberation, towards self-determination, towards self-expression in a world of state repression and national conflict. 

This BFI’s summer season is dedicated to films that make you grimace. The film institute has put together a brilliantly toe-curling programme including David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’, screened with an extended intro by curator Kimberley Sheehan, ‘The Lost Weekend’, a 1945 venture into alcoholism, and Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Requiem for a Dream’, a study of drug addiction. 

It’s a hard heart that can leave Francis Alÿs’s Barbican exhibition without being a little broken by it. The Belgian artist – best known for films where he performs walking actions, pushing a block of ice until it melts, kicking a flaming ball through a desolate border town – has taken himself out of the work, and turned his eye on children. The work is meant to be an archive of children's games, of the vital importance of play. But there's an unignorable context. You can’t walk through this show without now thinking of children in Gaza, Xinjiang, Ukraine, Sudan; children having their childhoods stolen, their play taken from them, their joy erased. Children learning that to become an adult is to learn to fight, and to lose innocence in the process.

Artists spent centuries making art about light, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that anyone really thought to make art with light. British artist Anthony McCall was one of the first, creating pioneering films that used projectors to trace shapes in the air, somehow seeming to turn nothingness solid. Now he’s at Tate Modern, taking over the galleries that until recently were home to the blockbuster Yayoi Kusama ‘Infinity Mirror Rooms’. It’s a tough immersive act to follow, but this quiet immersion in geometric movement does it nicely. 

Modern-day revivals of musicals from the genre’s so-called ‘Golden Age’ can be challenging – caught up, as they often are, in the sexism of their time. ‘Kiss Me, Kate’, which debuted in 1948, is a particularly acute example. But it’s to big shot American director Bartlett Sher’s credit that this major new revival is heavily laced with irony. As Petruchio, Fred (Adrian Dunbar, swapping ‘Line of Duty’ for the chorus line) can’t get his whip (don’t ask) to work and looks stupid; in the climactic scenes, Lilli (played by bona fide Broadway star Stephanie Block) sings ‘I Am Ashamed’ with the kind of knowing wink you could probably see from space. This is all amplified by Michael Yeargan’s gorgeously elaborate set. This is a lush, wittily spectacular production. 

Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan uncovers hidden Black histories – histories ignored, forgotten, erased by dominant white western narratives – and gives them new life. This show opens with chaotic collages that meld together images of colonialism, scientific diagrams and important figures in Black history and culminates in ‘The Encyclopaedia of Invisibility’, a staggeringly ambitious research project preserving missing histories and lost stories. Strachan is constantly drawing links between African history, slavery, religion, jazz and hip hop, ancient Egypt, space exploration. It’s dizzying, complex, ungraspable, because that’s what history is.

Back in the 1950s, influential British street photographer Roger Mayne looked at the world that we bring children into and despaired. His images of brutally deprived Southam Street near Notting Hill capture children playing, living in a London of squalor, filth, poverty and division. His photos are stark, high contrast, quick, dramatic, bare. There’s so much joy and playfulness in this misery, and all captured with incredible compositional nous.

Punchdrunk are back with momentous new show ‘Viola’s Room’. It’s the company’s first major show to not require the wearing of masks and it’s also smaller in scale than anything the company has done for years: once it starts properly it’s just 45 minutes long, for a maximum audience of six people (though there are numerous performances throughout the day), with no live actors. Based on Barry Pain’s dark 1901 short story ‘The Moon Slave’ it has an actual text – a true rarity for the company – which has been adapted by Booker Prize-shortlisted Brit novelist Daisy Johnson and recorded by Helena Bonham-Carter. ‘Viola’s Room’ is unquestionably something different for Punch Drunk. It might be short, but in those 45 minutes you’ll live a haunted lifetime.

You can contain the whole history of a nation in a tarpaulin. At least, Rheim Alkadhi can. The artist, who grew up in Iraq, uses the sturdy plastic material to recount endless stories of colonial exploitation, capitalist greed and ecological disaster in his ICA show. The tarpaulins are grimy, dirty things, rust-stained, oil-stained, each one a painting composed by time, by everyday use, by the material’s own history, by the country’s history. The final part of the show is an archival look at the modern history of Iraq. It’s all interesting and Alkadhi’s point is a powerful one.

The National Theatre’s River Stage wraps up a month of outdoor live music, dance, performance, workshops and family fun on the South Bank with one final weekend of free alfresco entertainment. Having hosted The Glory, Greenwich + Docklands International Festival and Rambert so far, it’s now the NT’s turn to take centre stage, and the famous theatre has programmed some killer shows for the occasion, including the Diane Chorley’s only live date this year. Expect character comedy, infectious music, queer cabaret and a whole host of special guests, as the comedian brings her legendary 80s club The Flick to town. There’ll also be appearances from musical legends Flo and Joan, hit comedians Reuben Kay and Catherine Cohen, and absolutely loads more. Check out the National Theatre website for more info

Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama has been melding photography with digital printing and painting techniques for decades, creating a collection of instantly recognisable ‘gynoid’ female robots with perfect metal carapaces, pouting cyborg lips and ample robo-bosoms. There’s a sculpture of one of his golden gynoids in the middle of the gallery. There’s Joan of Arc, Marilyn Monroe, that mermaid, but also a ludicrously sexual Cleopatra and a naked zebra-woman hybrid. It’s painfully randy, throbbing with ridiculous sci-fi turgidity. It’s essentially sexy robots, and in its own lewd way, it’s kind of brilliant.

This wildly fun show ingeniously yokes the breathlessness of the true crime podcast genre to the big emotions of a musical. True crime afficionados Kathy (Bronté Barbé) and Stella (Rebekah Hinds) live in Hull and escape from their lives by recording a murder podcast in Kathy’s mum’s basement, discussing the lurid cases they find on Wikipedia. One day, Kathy and Stella’s true-crime idol comes to town… only to be murdered and they decide to turn detective nd Floyd also give us an affectionately wry snapshot of the clamour of internet-era fandom. Beneath the stupidly catchy songs, this is a story about two people navigating a friendship through change and an affectionately wry snapshot of the clamour of internet-era fandom. Kathy and Stella's exploits will absolutely slay you.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

‘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.

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.

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.

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?