Things to do in London this weekend

All Points East is taking over Victoria Park for two tinnitus-inducing weekends. The line-up is as eclectic as ever, featuring some seriously hot acts. This weekend sees Gorillaz, Idles, Turnstile, Pusha T and Self Esteem headline. It’s going to be hard to get any better than this.  

Whether or not it’s literally accurate to say that director Simon Godwin and designer Anna Fleischle have come up with a production of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ themed around Wes Anderson’s 2014 opus ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’, then that’s effectively what they’ve done. Here the goings-on in Shakespeare’s archetypal romcom are relocated to an Art Deco hotel in 1930s Italy. It’s a luxuriant meander though ‘Much Ado’. It’s a wrench to leave.

London is home to some brilliant alfresco movie spots, which are popping up all over the city at the moment, everywhere from docks and parks to rooftops and manicured gardens. There’s something for everyone, from Rooftop Film Club’s 360-degree views at Peckham’s Bussey Building to screens by big historic houses. Basically, if there’s space for a screen, someone is putting one up – and we’re here for it. Welcome to the summer of the big-screen extravaganza.

The National Gallery is whacking up a purpose-built art studio in Trafalgar Square for its immersive festival ‘Summer on the Square’. Pop in, whatever your age or artistic finesse, to learn everything from self-portraiture and sculpture to zine-making and collage all led by pro-tutors. And, as it seems to be a prerequisite that all art events must include an immersive spin, some of the gallery’s famous works will be reimagined as large-scale feasts for the senses, including van Gough’s ‘Sunflowers’, Monet’s ‘Water-Lilies, Setting Sun’ and, in what sounds like a more haunting proposition, Hogarth’s ‘The Graham Children’.

One of London’s hippest music festivals returns to Victoria Park – its original home – for the first time since 2017. This year’s event is a bumper one-dayer with a dance-centric line-up led by The Chemical Brothers, Kraftwerk 3D and Peggy Gou. With the likes of Heléna Star, Kareem Ali, Logic100, Tourist, Eliza Rose, Floating Points and Daniel Avery also on the bill, Field Day will turn Vicky Park into a non-stop rave from midday until the 11pm curfew.

The Globe’s artistic director Sean Holmes and the in-house ensemble of actors are like kids in a sweet shop with this amusing, visually inventive, and above all fun take on Shakespeare’s final play. It begins with Rachel Hannah Clarke’s Ariel archly hosing down the front rows of the audience – that’s your tempest for the night – and keeps up the pace from there. As a crowd-pleaser, it’s inventive, compassionate and really just a pure joy.

The most famous classical music concert series on the planet. This year it’s celebrating its 150th anniversary with 84 concerts over 57 days with over 3,000 musicians. This year the event will see the return of international orchestras and feature a large-scale repertoire not heard at the festival since 2019.

This weekend bag tickets to Handel’s lavish 1749 oratorio Solomon performed by The English Concert and the BBC Singers (Friday) and Ethel Smyth’s majestic Mass in D major performed by Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Saturday). 

Edinburgh isn’t the only place with a bursting, brilliant fringe, and indeed as the Scottish capital’s iconic event becomes ever more expensive, the once scrappy outsider Camden Fringe looks ever more like a serious contender. It’s smaller than its Celtic counterpart, but still boasts hundreds of events all over Camden, taking in everything from stand-up sets and experimental theatre to kids’ shows, dance, and even magic. 

This award-winning Australian play is a docu-drama from writer and performer Julia Hales, that combines sharing her – and others’ – experiences of living with Down’s syndrome, combined with a strand about her love of beloved Aussie soap opera 'Home and Away' (we're promised a cameo from Ray Meagher (Alf Stewart). It comes to the Southbank Centre for a clutch of performances this summer. 

Carnaby Street’s fortnight-long summer festival kicks off this week, with creative workshops, giveaways, live musical performances and loads of great offers. Look out for a pop-up on Foubert’s Place hosting free craft workshops, shops gifting freebies and great deals at 14 different bars and restaurants on the street including Dishoom, Shoryu, Mamma Pastrama and Kanada-Ya. 

This is a trim, lean version of the World War Two-set 1949 classic that deliberately forgoes fussy spectacle in favour of corrugated iron backdrops and unfussy staging that lets the sumptuous score and big emotions flow free. It’s a well-judged take on a musical, which while being plenty of fun, lets the sober stuff breathe too. 

Just a few months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Finborough has programmed a double-bill of work by Ukrainian playwrights. Most obscure is Neda Nezhdana: her monologue ‘Pussycat in Memory of Darkness’ is the first performance of her work outside her home country, and follows a woman trying to sell her kittens in the wartorn Donbas of 2014. It also includes the English premiere of ‘Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha’, a surreal play from the country’s most famous living playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit, in which the dead are being recruited to Ukraine’s war effort.

The corpse of the fashion industry is on display at Camden Art Centre. Its bloated and vile and pungent, left here to rot, part-embalmed, by Tenant of Culture (Hendrickje Schimmel to her mum and dad). ToC’s work involves collecting discarded old clothes and repurposing them into new sculptures. In all this dyeing and reshaping and recycling, Tenant of Culture is loudly condemning not just fast fashion, but the more general scourge of waste in society, and the greed that elicits it.

This one-man musical from Jack Holden was one of the first shows to grace the West End after it reopened last year. After bagging an Olivier nod for best new play, it returns for a short run in a bigger theatre. Set in ’80s Soho, with a retro electropop songbook, it’s a tribute to the generation decimated by the Aids crisis.

The corpse of the fashion industry is on display at Camden Art Centre. Its bloated and vile and pungent, left here to rot, part-embalmed, by Tenant of Culture (Hendrickje Schimmel to her mum and dad). ToC’s work involves collecting discarded old clothes and repurposing them into new sculptures. In all this dyeing and reshaping and recycling, Tenant of Culture is loudly condemning not just fast fashion, but the more general scourge of waste in society, and the greed that elicits it.

Disease, poverty, injustice, death and loneliness. It’s been a brutal few years around the world, and the evidence is written across the walls of the Whitechapel Gallery. The London Open is their big triennial open submission show, with thousands of artists’ work whittled down to 45 sculptors, painters and filmmakers, all making art that manages to reflect the stomach-turning tumult we’ve been living through. And it’s amazing. You leave feeling like society might be at its sickest, but art couldn’t be healthier. That’s the thing about living mid-apocalypse: at least the art’s good.

A looped four-second video shows 2.8 million gallons of water flowing over Niagara Falls. In the corner, there’s a huge pile of thousands of mint-green polystyrene packing chips. An abandoned loaf of bread as you walk in is preserved in resin, dozens of souvenir T-shirts are packed as flat and small as they’ll go. Benjamin Cohen’s work is full of playful, punny, clashing narratives, empty promises and visual anticlimaxes. There’s a temptation to read it all as a comment on consumerism. But it’s also just about how materials and substances can tell or hide stories.

The Donmar’s fascinating summer show comes from Dawn King. Set in the near future, where the climate emergency is in full swing, our generation is being put on trial for this by children. But do they really want justice? Or just revenge?

The cast of ‘child’ jurors will be headed up by ‘Heartstopper’ stars Will Gao and Joe Locke. 

American painter Milton Avery (1885-1965) left behind a body of work that isn’t just avant-garde or intellectual, it’s clever, innovative, influential and so full of humour and explosive colour that it will make you feel elation as much as mental stimulation. Everything in this show is so gorgeous, so colourful, so beautiful, so fun. Milton Avery will genuinely, actually, properly, put a smile on your face.

The overarching themes of this dark and troubling group show, curated by Gabi Ngcobo, are ‘loss, threats to the environment, spirituality, labour and silenced histories’, so it’s not exactly a massive cheerer-upper. What it does brilliantly, though, is remind you that global environmental concerns, as articulated by activists and politicians, have a real human face and cost, and that even that articulation remains defined by colonialism. Some of these landscapes may be barren, but far from the show being over, their power and creative impetus seem endlessly fertile. 

Every year, the Serpentine Pavilion heralds the start of summer, and it’s back again for 2022, designed this time by American artist Theaster Gates. But, it isn’t the pavilion of classic idyllic English summers. This is a serious, stark, austere business. 

The ‘Black Chapel’ is an imposing cylindrical building. The inspiration at the heart of the work is the Rothko Chapel, a prayer space in Texas, with art by abstract expressionist master Mark Rothko. Gates’s structure follows a similarly meditative template, creating a space for quiet contemplation, like being inside a giant vase, but in a very very relaxed way.

It might all be serious and contemplative, but it won’t be quiet. Over the course of the summer, the pavilion will host a series of concerts – including performances by jazz drummer Moses Boyd and the London Oratory Choir, who will be doing some Gregorian chanting, apparently – as well as tea ceremonies and clay workshops.