Things to do in London this week

It’s one of those Fringe successes people dream of mimicking. Since debuting in Edinburgh in 2014, Duncan Macmillan Every Brilliant Thing – co-written with its original star Jonny Donahoe – has earned rave reviews and performed all across the globe. Now it’s on the West End. Over the course of its three-month stint, Donahoe, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins and Minnie Driver will all take the lead role, but we see Lenny Henry. Dressed in a colourful patterned shirt, he sends smiles soaring across the crowd from the outset. The conversation about mental health has moved on since 2014. Nevertheless, the play’s message still lands today. For all its sorrow, the play gleams with hope. It is a truly brilliant thing.

Enter the oddly inviting, tunnel-like space that is now the second London outpost of the very delicious Speedboat Bar. One of London’s best Thai restaurants, nothing has been lost in translation when it comes to Speedboat Bar 2.0. The Bangkok-inspired flavours still hit hard, with the seriously spicy chicken salad with green mango kerabu a must-order, alongside a compelling crispy pork with creamy black pepper curry, as well as a whole sea bream in addictive makrut lime sauce. Much like at the Rupert Street original, no order is complete with a plate of chicken skins with zaep seasoning. Open until 1am on Friday and Saturday nights (and midnight during the week), it’s also a great bet for a late-night feed-up. 

Now in its fourth year, South Facing might still be a fledgling festival compared to some of the other events on the calendar, but it continues a long and impressive legacy of live music events at the Crystal Palace Bowl. It’s confirmed a diverse mix of events for its 2025 run, including hip-hop legend Busta Rhymes – joined by Redman, Big Daddy Kane, Chali 2na and more; multi-platinum Dutch dance duo Tinlicker; Basement Jaxx; as well as Flackstock, Mogwai & Lankum and Morcheeba.

‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’. The Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani’s new commission for Somerset House takes the sleep of reason as its starting point. In the grand Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court, she has installed a ten-metre-tall blue figure, who lays supine, gently breathing with closed eyes. We’re told that this ethereal, childlike giant has slept through ‘warnings of present and imminent catastrophes, political and social disaster and environmental collapse.’ Art with a message often risks being didactic, prioritising its statement over its aesthetic experience. Here, though, is a deft balance of content and form: a nuanced message, contained within immediately impressive and accessible art.

If you fancy switching things up a bit and find yourself near Borough, why not roll up your sleeves at Comptoir Bakery's London Bridge workshop space? Choose from sessions where you’ll learn to craft buttery croissants and pain au chocolat, the cult-favourite Brionuts, or delicate tartelettes. Expert bakers—trained under culinary legends—will guide you through every step, from mixing the dough to perfecting the fillings. You’ll also nab a slick £20 apron to keep and plenty of fresh pastries to take home. Starting at just £69 per person or £118 for two, with over 30% off, it’s a delicious way to spend a few hours.

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If laughter is the best medicine, this gut-twisting tale of vanishing kids from American comedian-turned-horror auteur Zach Cregger comes with its own built-in cure. Put simply, if Weapons wasn’t the best horror movie of the year – pipping even the mighty Sinners – it would probably be the best comedy. The last 30 minutes alone is hands down the most satisfying final reel I’ve winced through – and corpsed at – in absolutely ages, a whirlwind of laughs and scares that ties up the movie’s knotty narrative in a singular fashion.

Jean-Francois Millet was an artist of the people. Born to a farming family, he spent his life painting rural workers and the conditions of their labour. This exhibition, marking the 150th anniversary of his death, presents an impressive array of his work, which went on to inspire Vincent van Gogh among other artists. Heads down and backs bent, there is a melancholic, weathered beauty to Millet’s characters.

In the Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space, two Iranian-Canadian artists are having fun with language. Sculpture, video and found objects all find their place in this playful exhibition that juxtaposes words and images to show us the precarity of truth and meaning in today’s world. From a hyper-realistic sculpture to a repurposed electric motorway sign, Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi find many ways to combine the quotidian with the uncanny.

Keen to see some live music this summer but disinclined to fork out hundreds on London festival tickets? King’s Cross’s Summer Sounds festival is the perfect solution. Coal Drops Yard is putting on the tenth anniversary of its free outdoor gig series. Visitors can catch an eclectic programme of gigs encompassing everything from classical and folk music to jazz and indie rock over the eleven-day festival. Highlights include a Bob Marley tribute gig from double MOBO Award-winning saxophonist YolanDa Brown (Friday August 15), while families can check out a host of free workshops and activities at Family Sundays. 

Spend a morning immersed in the year’s most powerful photography at the World Press Photo Exhibition 2025, now open at the MPB Gallery in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Fresh from a record-breaking 2024 tour that drew over 3 million visitors across 66 cities, this world-leading showcase brings together the year’s most striking photojournalism and documentary work. Each image, chosen by an international jury of top industry professionals, captures defining moments from across the globe — from political upheavals and environmental crises to human resilience and joy. With 20% off tickets, this is your chance to see the stories that shaped the world, all in one unforgettable exhibition.

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This new play by American writer Doug Wright comes to the Barbican from Broadway heralded by a 2023 Tony Award for star Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) and is about someone you’ve likely never heard of. Oscar Levant was a pianist – best known for playing George Gershwin’s music – and a humourist, who popped up in a handful of films including An American in Paris. This play re-imagines the events surrounding his chaotic appearance as a guest on The Tonight Show in 1958. It's fragmentary and frantic – culminating in a truly virtuosic piano performance by a spotlit Hayes, who looks agonisingly at his own hands as if they belong to a stranger. It’s hauntingly powerful and the apex of this funny and devastating play.  

Freakier Friday is a sequel that makes barely a lick of sense but is infectious, ridiculous fun and feels like a trip back to simpler times. The 2003 original had Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as Anna and Tess, a bickering mother and daughter who undergo a body swap and learn to understand each other. Two decades years later, Tess is a renowned therapist who psychobabbles any conflict into submission. Anna is now a music exec, mum to a rebellious teenager and due to marry sweet chef Eric. After the female family members visit a dodgy ‘psychic’ at Anna’s bachelorette party, the teens and adults switch bodies and have to figure out their differences in order to swap back. There are almost endless holes you could pick in its logic and storytelling, but it gives you few reasons to want to. This Friday’s freakier, but it’s kind of… funner too.

Edinburgh isn't the only place with a bursting, brilliant fringe, and indeed, as the Scottish capital’s iconic annual event becomes ever more expensive, the once scrappy outsider Camden Fringe looks ever more like a serious alternative for the London-based. Returning for its nineteenth edition, it’s smaller than Edinburgh by a long shot, but still boasts hundreds of events all over Camden, taking in everything from the expected stand-up sets and experimental theatre to kids’ shows, dance, and even magic. Runs tend to be for a night or two rather than the entire month, and prices are bargain basement by London standards: many shows are less than a tenner, none are much more than that. 

Another year, another spectacular line-up of classical music. In 2025, the orchestral extravaganza will feature 86 concerts across eight weeks, with over 3,000 artists taking to the stage, with the majority of the action taking place inside the grand surroundings of London’s Royal Albert Hall. This week, look out for an all-night prom running from 11pm to 7am featuring cellist Anastasia Kobekina, pianist Hayato Sumino and Norwegian ensemble Barokksolistene, a The Planets and Star Wars prom with music from John Williams’ Star Wars score and Holst’s The Planets and Edward Gardner conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra. 

Looking for a wholesome, creative night out that doesn’t involve a hangover (unless you BYOB)? Token Studio in Tower Bridge offers relaxed, hands-on ceramics classes where you can spin, shape and decorate your own pottery piece. Whether you fancy throwing a pot on the wheel (£32) or painting a pre-made mug or plate (£23), it’s the perfect mix of fun, mindful and surprisingly therapeutic. And to top it all off, you can sip while you sculpt as it’s BYOB and super chill.

Enjoy your Token Studio session from just £23, only with Time Out Offers. 

Fresh from winning a Best Documentary Oscar for 20 Days in Mariupol, a fly-on-the-shattered-wall depiction of the brutal 2022 siege by Putin’s invading army, the insanely brave Ukrainian filmmaker-reporter Mstyslav Chernov has picked up his camera and found somewhere even more dangerous to go: a pencil-thin strip of blasted forest just outside the destroyed village of Andriivka in eastern Ukraine. The fields on both sides are sewn with landmines, making the task of capturing the village a forest crawl of hidden Russian bunkers, random shellfire and sudden death. Its vérité view of combat is intense and confronting. What makes it so impactful is the first-person nature of the footage – suddenly, the tools of modern warfare have become filmmaking tools too. It’s a groundbreaking view of the horror and pity of war, I can’t remember a cinematic experience quite like it. It’s devastating and extraordinary.

It’s to the credit of Suzie Miller that she cares so much about the issues explored in her smash Prima Facie that she’s come up with a follow-up. Inter Alia is another play about high-achieving female members of the legal profession, and Rosamund Pike treads the boards for the first time in years in the full-scale female role at its centre. It’s a breathless performance from Pike, who crests and surges from neuroticism to icy confidence as high court judge Jessica frenziedly girl bossing as she juggles her extremely high-powered job with a busy social life and being a mum to vulnerable teen Harry (Jasper Talbot). Like Prima Facie, Inter Alia concerns rape and the difficulty in securing a conviction for it. Miller is very good at exploring the ambiguity of rape cases. Inter Alia hits home thoughtfully and forcefully.

You’ve probably heard of ‘Instagram face’. This summer, Somerset House is dedicating a whole exhibition to things like the internet’s inclination for everyone to look exactly the same. In Virtural Beauty, Somerset House will explore the impact of digital technologies on how we define beauty today. The show will display more than 20 artworks from the 'Post-Internet' era, an art movement concerned with the influence of the internet on art and culture. It will feature sculpture, photography, installation, video and performance art, with highlights including ORLAN’s Omniprésence (1993), a groundbreaking performance in which the artist live-streamed her own facial aesthetic surgery, and AI-generated portraits by Minnie Atairu, Ben Cullen Williams, and Isamaya Ffrench. 

Emily Kam Kngwarray, an Anmatyerr artist from the Sandover region in the Northern Territory of Australia, didn’t start making art until she was 70. Her prolific and vibrant output during the ensuing decade paved the way for Aboriginal artists, women artists and Australian artists – and is the subject of this, her first major solo exhibition in Europe. Expect monumental canvases adorned with batik and acrylic patterns whose networks of dots and lines are almost immersive.

Hidden somewhere between a theme park, an escape room and a real-life video game, Phantom Peak isn’t just your average day out. This open-world adventure based in Canada Water invites you to explore a fictional steampunk town at your own pace, chatting to quirky characters, uncovering mysteries and slowly piecing together your own story.

With 11 unique trails, a rotating calendar of seasonal storylines, and a cast of live actors guiding your experience, no two visits are ever the same.

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