Things to do in London this week

Marianne Elliott’s in-the-round production of Edward Albee’s 1962 masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is so intimate – not to mention intense – that after a while the thrill of Gillian Anderson and her co-star Billy Crudup being a couple of metres away is replaced by a sort of horror, a sense that we are physically in the room for the madness. Miriam Buether’s living room set is both impressively tasteful and ominous. It belongs to George (Crudup) and Martha (Anderson), a history professor at a mid-tier American university, and his wife, who is the daughter of the college’s president. Alone together in the opening scene, they bicker and snipe. But that’s nothing compared to the hell they unleash when George’s new younger colleague Nick (Josh Dylan) and his wife Honey (Phoebe Horn) swing by. This is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? filtered and distilled and thrust in our faces. The sense that we’re not only watching this nightmare but living through it in real time is almost too much to bear.

If Tate’s 2025 programme was big on the 80s, then 2026 is all about The 90s! Following on from a major Tracey Emin retrospective at Tate Modern, its sister gallery Tate Britain will host a blockbuster autumn show about British art, fashion, photography and pop culture in the final decade of the last millennium. It’s curated by none other than former British Vogue editor Edward Enninful OBE. Expect flashy photography from the likes of Juergen Teller, Nick Knight, David Sims and Corrine Day, iconic looks from Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen, and era-defining artworks by Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing, and Yinka Shonibare.

Tucked away in a tatty Victorian courtyard in Stoke Newington, Cloudstreet quietly opened at the tailend of summer, headed up by chefs Georgia Lahiff and Frank Guest. Despite being surrounded by the shady palimpsest of historical British livery, Cloudstreet seems as if you’ve stumbled across a small bistro in a medieval village in the south of France. The restaurant (and kitchen) is sequestered into a brick-lined tiny stable with flaking paint on the walls and hastily erected shelves. Dishes are simple and few and far between, but there’s heart and soul and the freshest of produce in every one. The six daily-changing options (including a dessert and cheese course). The undeniable dish of the day is a fleshy pork tonnato with a honking, hearty sauce and a lightly pickled pile of green beans. There’s nowhere in London we’d rather eat. 

Taking place across The Place, Sadler’s Wells, the Barbican and online, the massive annual contemporary dance festival returns to London this October, bringing groundbreaking artists from South Africa, Brazil, Lebanon, Britain and the Netherlands. Spanning live performance, artist talks, film screenings and more, highlights include Dance is Not for Us at the Barbican Pit, a rare UK performance from Lyon-based Lebanese choreographer Omar Rajeh. Legendary British choreographer Akram Khan will be in conversation with Kevin O’Hare, director of The Royal Ballet alongside English National Ballet lead principal Erina Takahashi and first soloist James Streeter. South African dance artist and recipient of the 2026 Venice Biennale Silver Lion Mamela Nyamza will be in town to put on a brand new work at Sadler’s Wells East. Plus much more across the month. 

Alejandro G Iñárritu’s matryoshka doll of an eco-disaster movie Digger is Tom Cruise’s much-heralded Return To Proper Acting. He stars as the larger-than-life Digger Rockwell, a Texan oilman hoping his personal vet can keep his beloved but disgustingly necrotic cat alive a little longer. He’s buried beneath prosthetics and gives a cartoonish, if thoroughly enjoyable portrayal of alpha-dog machismo and ‘drill, baby drill!’ enthusiasm for the black stuff. The screenplay, by Sabina Berman, Jez Butterworth and Alexander Dinelaris, swiftly presents Digger with the consequences of all his drilling and plundering. It’s uncomfortable, it’s bombastic, but don’t listen to anyone who tells you it isn’t funny.  

When the camera was first invented, it was a wonder of science, able to capture images with an accuracy that had never been seen before. But soon, instead of being seen as a rival to painters and sculptors, photographers began to join them as artists, interested in all the creative possibilities of this new method of image making. Tate Modern’s new group exhibition explores how art photography emerged as a discipline between the 1880s and 1960s, taking an international approach that spans places from Shanghai to Sydney, New York to Cape Town, and Brazil to Singapore.

Your landlord might disagree, but there really is no excuse for boring white walls. Pick up original work from local artists to brighten up your bedroom for as little as £100 at this accessible alternative to (the many) stuffier and more expensive fairs on the London art circuit. Over 150 independent artists will be exhibiting work at the annual event at the Truman Brewery, presented by Saatchi Art. There’ll also be immersive installations, performances, creative workshops, DJs and a fully stocked bar to entertain you. Tunes will be supplied by notorious Ibiza club night Manumission and London based collective Club Lune Bleue. Think of it as art served with a side of party.

This revival of 1924’s Hay Fever starring Richard E Grant is glossy comfort theatre – a frothy number about the eccentric game-playing of the bonkers family, the Blisses. Guesting American Christine Baranski brings a pleasingly doleful turn to matriarch Judith Bliss, who must play hostess (of sorts) when each of the four Bliss family members invites a guest to stay without telling anybody else. Charles Edwards is beautifully hapless as Richard, nominally invited as the guest of acidic daughter Sorrel (Ophelia Lovibond), but actually using it as a front for his designs on her mother. The evening’s best and most original performance: Lucy Karczewski takes overwhelmed flapper Jackie (David’s guest). Big star Grant, is perfectly suited to the role of David Bliss, the self-absorbed novelist who sees everyone around him as grist to his artistic mill.

The American painter Robert Ryman (1930-2019) was a master of minimalism (even though he was reluctant to apply the term to his own work). For decades, he painted his signature white-on-white paintings, urging the viewer to look closely at his brushstrokes in all their tactile glory, and to enjoy the subtlety and nuance of the varied effects he achieved. His works aren't often shown in the UK, and this Barbican exhibition will be their first major airing in over 30 years. There'll be 60 paintings on display spanning his sixty year career, in a contemplative tribute to this influential artist. 

The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most extraordinary examples of medieval craft that we can still see today. It’s 70 metres of cloth that has been intricately hand-stitched with dyed wool yarn to recreate the infamous Battle of Hastings and experts reckon it took a team of skilled embroiders anything from several months to a few years. So, don’t expect to be able to recreate it at the British Museum’s Bayeux-focused medieval making evening. However, you can expect to pick lots of new crafty knowledge. There’ll be workshops to help you with knitted or crocheted pieces you’re already working on, a chance to create your own extravagent medieval inspired headwear, an opportunity to add embroidery to add to collaborative textile collage inspired by the tapestry’s trees and, when you’re all crafted out, a medieval pub quiz with the Weird Medieval Guys. 

The feature debut of Molly Manners, the British filmmaker serves up a barbed coming-of-age satire, diving into the choppy waters of female friendship and rivalry against the backdrop of a girls’ boarding school in Yorkshire. There’s dry wit laced throughout Succession writer Miriam Battye's script, as the adolescent bond of best friends Minna (Galaxie Clear) and Flic (Marni Duggan) is tested by anxiety, ego and jealousy over the course of a school year. Theirs is a toxic codependency: they eat, sleep and breathe together, share the same likes, dislikes and life goals. A glimpse of a Nokia 3210, minimalist threads and needle drops from Shanks & Bigfoot and Belle and Sebastian suggest a 1999-early 2000s setting, with pops of bright colour, tight camerawork and intimate two-shots encapsulating the immature echo chamber Minna and Flic inhabit. It underscores the ignorance of youth and the melancholy of displacement.

Is getting a drink with an ex always a bad idea? If the aim to create the chaos and drama befitting a side-splitting one-act play, well: you might be onto something. Debuting in London after runs in New York and Los Angeles, Douglas Lyons’ Table 17 is dependent on people making bad, often unjustifiable, choices. Decisions are made, and details are revealed that elicit audible boos from the audience. Directed by Tony-winner Zhailon Levingston, Table 17 is unafraid to conjure these big emotions – and big sounds – from its crowd. The show flips from laugh-out-loud hilarity to genuine tragedy in minutes, changing costumes and switching timelines at equal pace. It’s a stylish and exhilarating theatrical experience, jolted forward by three powerful, emotive performances. This is a piece of theatre that’s heartfelt, hilarious, and honestly challenging. 

This revival of Jay Presson Allen’s 1989 Truman Capote monologue was initially staged in the stunning House of the Redeemer in New York, the sort of opulent old Manhattan building of your wildest dreams. How would a London transfer work? A huge part of the joy of the London Tru is how designer Paul Farnsworth has transformed the entire Menier space into a faithful recreation of Capote’s New York apartment. Jesse Tyler Ferguson offers a funny, often very poignant channeling of the Alabama-raised author and socialite. That distinctive voice could so easily fall into parody, but Ferguson brings Capote to life, aided by the fact that the play is set at a very painful time in his life. Rob Ashford’s production is very classy indeed. It’s a very enjoyable tribute, beautifully staged.

Best known for his eye-popping, fantastical fashion photography for titles including British Vogue, i-D, W, Vanity Fair and Another Man, British photographer Tim Walker has spent the past five years photographing the nation’s LGBTQ+ trailblazers in preparation for this major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. His first show in London since the V&A’s acclaimed exhibition in 2019, it will be accompanied by a book featuring contributions from Travis Alabanza, Russell T Davies, Shon Faye, Lisa Power and Joelle Taylor.

Colleen Hoover is Gen Z’s Nicholas Sparks. This erotic psychothriller Verity. Dakota Johnson slips pleasurably back into Fifty Shades of Grey mode as Lowen Ashleigh. A penniless writer, Lowen is offered a financial lifeline when she’s paid big bucks to secretly ghostwrite the next instalments in a bestselling series. Its author, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), has been incapacitated by a mysterious accident. So it’s Verity’s hot, rich husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) who invites Lowen to stay at their remote glass-box mansion in snowy Vermont, where Verity lies mute, immobile and apparently catatonic. Or is she? Mostly a wild and fun ride, director Michael Showalter plays Verity’s somewhat deranged tone just right. 

One of the buzziest late night shows of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Soul Sewage is Sam Eley’s debut hour as Basil Crumbwick – a horny, embittered old man with a papier maché head. Both uncomfortable and hilarious, it’s recreating some of that Fringe magic by being staged about as late as Soho Theatre goes, or at least it is for its initial October run. That’s now sold out, but Eley (and Basil) will be back for another crack at it in January 2027.

London Month Of The Dead’s annual programme returns this spooky season to get you in the mood for Halloween with a programme of more than 60 fascinatingly macabre events investigating our city’s relationship with death. The line-up offers a plethora of ghostly tours that will take you around crypts, cemeteries, undertakers, execution sites and other eerie locations across the city, alongside talks exploring everything from Victorian child bereavement to anthropodermic leather. Highlights of this year’s programme also include a bat skeleton mounting workshop, a magic shadow show in West Norwood Cemetery, a five hour immersive forensics workshop, a screening of eerie classic The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari with live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne, and creepy Halloween festival A Danse Macabre. It doesn’t get more gothic than that! 

Playwright and novelist Partrick Hamilton’s interwar trilogy of novels Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky sketch the energetic jazz clubs or bohemian underground bars that beam against the growth of inner-city poverty in London between the 1920s and 1930s. This adaptation by multi-award-winning dramatist Simon Reade sets itself up to thrill. Ella Dawson (Rosalind Lailey) cleverly plays a quiet and empathetic barmaid who pines after Bob. And best of the bunch is the wily, mysterious and devilishly charming Ernest Eccles (Michael Maloney). There are moments of sheer brilliance: magical jazz dancing, moments of intoxicated rage and touching scenes of youthful discontent. It's a must-see for any theatre-goer who likes to be glum with this cast of broke, drunk, city-dwellers who like to spiral and make all the wrong decisions. 

Charge the steins! You don’t have to travel all the way to Germany for a lederhosen-clad knees-up this Oktoberfest – and you don’t even have to wait until October. Munich’s world-famous beer festival is very much on in London and the celebrations begin in September with big steins of beer, platters of excessively long wurst and loud oompah bands blowing brass like they don’t give a schnitzel. Oktoberfest began over 200 years ago, as a mammoth wedding party for a Bavarian prince and princess. It turned out that beer, bratwurst and all-round silliness were a match made in heaven, so now it's an annual excuse for everyone to cut loose as autumn approaches. Whether you’re after a traditional take on the event or drag queen-led partying, authentic Bavarian beers or east London craft IPAs, you can find the perfect Oktoberfest for you right here in London. You're sure to get a warm willkommen at one of these London Oktoberfest events.