Things to do in London this week

Here at Culture Whisper we were knocked sideways, in the best possible way, by a new staging at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre of a Nobel Prize-winning epic poem by Derek Walcott. Omeros is inspired by Homeric verse and set on his home island of St Lucia (thrillingly, the poet himself was in attendance on the opening night). Tickets are still available for the final two performances on Saturday 7 and Monday 9 June and we urge you to see and hear this beautiful and surprisingly accessible production.

If you're looking for more poetry in London, we’re also enchanted by the Keats Festival , which offers further poetical treats over two weeks starting this Saturday 7 June in homage to the Romantic poet, who penned his first work 200 years ago. Many of the events take place at Keats House in Hampstead and are designed with children in mind.

Storytelling for kids from further afield comes in the form of 1001 Nights at the Unicorn Theatre, a production that transported young audiences in 2013 and will undoubtedly do the same this year. Opens Thursday 5 June. 

As more light shines on young playwright Polly Stenham, National Theatre offshoot The Shed hosts her hotly-anticipated new play Hotel , set in a tropical paradise where deception and double-dealing are the order of the day. Meanwhile the Old Vic welcomes back Kevin Spacey, this time as a performer, with the opening of Clarence Darrow , a one-hander in which he stars as the US human rights lawyer who defended the teacher of evolution at the heart of the famous ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’. Tickets are sold out but we’re hoping savvy CW members will have taken note of our preview, published back in March. 

Film with moral purpose is set to be this year's Beasts of the Southern Wild

For socially engaged film-making of the highest order

the best film to see this week is Fruitvale Station , from first-time director Ryan Coogler. It tells the story of Oscar Grant, a young black man shot dead on his way home by a transit cop while handcuffed face-down on the platform of Fruitvale Station in Oakland. We think it’ll make gruelling but essential viewing. 

Giants of dance – and classical music

On Thursday 5 June, we're heading to Sadler's Wells, where we're excited to see one of contemporary dance's best-loved choreographers, Russell Maliphant, on stage performing his own work Still Current (until Saturday 7 June). Remarkably, tickets also remain available for the Royal Opera House 's most daring production of the year. The Dialogues des Carmélites is an opera by Poulenc based on a novella by Gertrud von Le Fort, which tells the story of a group of Carmelite nuns guillotined during the French Revolution after refusing to renounce their faith. Mob scenes played by a 'community ensemble' of extras, one of whom happens to be a former prisoner, amp up the drama still further. Oh, and Sir Simon Rattle conducts. 

And not strictly speaking this week, but so early next that we'd be failing in our duty not to tell you about it, is what promises to be an exceptional Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert from Wigmore Hall. French pianist Pascal Rogé will play Debussy, Ravel, Satie and Poulenc at 1pm on Monday 9 June, a recital we think will be well worth bunking off work to attend. 

Let's go outside

With this week’s London weather looking dry (-ish) and warm (-ish), we’ve been emboldened to recommend some outdoor, or at least semi-outdoor, events. In the agreeable surroundings of Dulwich Park, the Dulwich Picture Gallery is as usual punching above its weight with another interesting show, Art and Life , devoted to the work of Ben and Winifred Nicholson and their fellow British Modernists.

London Zoo’s Zoo Lates returns on Friday 6 June for the summer season, supplying a somewhat surreal combination of the more grown-up sort of animal allowed up after dark (think tigers, and human over-18s) with street food, pop-up bars, comedy and stilt-walkers. Animal masks are optional but, we feel, to be encouraged, adding as they do to the air of faintly transgressive adult fun.  

The South Bank is one of London’s favourite locations for a spot of summertime passeggiata and this weekend it holds the added appeal of Simon Munnery’s Fylm School . Scruffy alternative comedian Munnery has been plying his trade since the mid-Nineties, slowly but surely building up a reputation as ‘one of the most consistently original and imaginative minds in comedy’ (the Guardian). His ‘fylms’, he promises, ‘take a stab at the void between dead film and live theatre’ – and we’re intrigued. 

We’ll be heading properly out of doors (wish us luck) to experience Field Day, the first big music festival of the summer in London. It kicks off in Victoria Park on Saturday, with a line-up that includes Metronomy, Pixies, Drenge, The Horrors, Jagwar Ma, The Wytches and eccentric, loveable rockers Future Islands (trust us, their painfully sincere frontman Sam Herring gets more compelling with every performance – check out the band’s much-viewed performance on The Late Show with David Letterman if you don’t believe us). 

Competitive, charitable night-time running and walking, topless or otherwise, is now commonplace in London. But night-time cycle racing? We might have known it would be East London who got that particular ball rolling (or more accurately, wheel turning). Yes, the London Nocturne , held on Saturday 7 June, has been going since 2007, but it’s only recently that non-bike nerds have taken notice. This weekend watch cyclists race the marvellously monikered ‘criteriums’ and take in the obligatory street food, born-again Penny Farthings, an ‘expo area’ and other crowd-pleasing delights. 

Live music from the West Coast

Back indoors, tickets to see the 17-year-old force of nature that is Lorde play the 02 Shepherd’s Bush for one night only on Thursday 5 June are now, quelle surprise, sold out. But we have an alternative for you, albeit a rather more mature one. Wooden Shjips are veterans of the psychedelic rock scene all the way from San Francisco, and will be bringing symbolic West Coast sunshine to the Electric Ballroom in Camden should London’s actual weather fail to oblige.   

If you haven’t paid a visit to the Cartoon Museum’s Spitting Image exhibition, now is your last chance to do so. Grotesque, hilarious and undiscriminatingly cynical about politicians of all stripes, they ushered in, for good or ill, the age of modern political satire. 

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