Things to do from your home during lockdown

The UK’s museums, galleries and theatres have been closed for weeks, but you can still marvel at their treasures, or see a hit play this week. Cultural institutions are finding ever more inventive ways of sharing their collections and programmes online, so it’s easy to get your arts fix during the lockdown. You could take a virtual stroll around the British Museum in the morning, check out Tate Modern’s Andy Warhol exhibition after lunch, and watch a National Theatre production in the evening. And there are advantages to a virtual day out: it’s free, there are no queues, and you won’t have to compete with other visitors for elbow room!

 

VISIT A VIRTUAL MUSEUM

The British Museum in London is the largest indoor space on Google Street View, and you can drop in to see the wonders in more than 60 of its empty galleries on the website. Or visit the virtual galleries, for a look at objects not on display from the Oceania Collection; or Prints and Drawings, with Old Masters by such famous artists as Michelangelo and Albrecht Dürer (britishmuseum.org). In the short, delightfully geeky Curator’s Corner videos on its YouTube channel, you can learn about Ming porcelain, Iraqi lustreware and the “B-side” of Greek pots. You could while away weeks taking virtual tours on Google’s Arts & Culture hub, which gives you access to some of the world’s most popular museums, including Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, Florence’s Uffizi Gallery and New York’s Guggenheim Museum (artsandculture.google.com).

 

 

STROLL IN THE SISTINE CHAPEL

Visitors to Rome usually have to queue for hours and then shuffle in a scrum of other tourists to gawp at Michelangelo’s sublime ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, but the Vatican Museums’ 360-degree virtual tours let you linger over it, or see Raphael’s Rooms (click on collections then museums at museivaticani.va). If you’re fond of a day out at a stately home, why not enjoy Buckinghamshire’s Waddesdon Manor from the comfort of your sofa? The manor, built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild at the end of the 19th century to house his collection, is crammed with treasures: portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds, furniture made for the French royal family, Sèvres porcelain… (A VR headset is recommended, but not essential.) You can also “walk” around Waddesdon’s gardens and sculpture trail (waddesdon.org).

 

SEE PAINTINGS IN PEACE

The National Gallery’s Titian exhibition, which reunited the Renaissance artist’s fabulously fleshy mythological paintings retelling Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was open for only a week before the enforced closures. Head to its YouTube channel for videos on Titian’s epic Diana paintings, unusual technique and a tutorial by Mary Beard. You can browse the National’s whole collection on its website without blocking anyone else’s view (nationalgallery.org.uk). 

 

The Tate has posted whistlestop tours of its retrospectives on Andy Warhol (Tate Modern) and late-Victorian illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (Tate Britain) on its YouTube channel (and Mark Gatiss’s excellent documentary on Beardsley, Scandal & Beauty, is available on iPlayer). On the Tate’s website, you will find performance art, artist interviews and podcasts (tate.org.uk).  Warwickshire’s Compton Verney has a video tour of its exhibition on German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, best known for his seductive nudes (comptonverney.org.uk).

 

HEAD TO THE BRITISH LIBRARY

Bibliophiles should head to the British Library’s website to pore over treasures including Virginia Woolf’s notebooks and George Orwell’s notes for Nineteen Eighty-Four, and read essays on everything from Beowulf to Harry Potter (bl.uk).

 

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

Theatre lovers can enjoy the Old Vic’s bewitching production of Wise Children, which will be on iPlayer until early June. Director Emma Rice’s dazzling all-singing, all-dancing adaptation of Angela Carter’s bawdy last novel is a carnivalesque love letter to the stage.  The National Theatre is showing a production every Thursday at 7pm on its YouTube channel, available for seven days. From 30 April you’ll

find both versions of Danny Boyle’s moving 2011 production of Frankenstein, in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternate as the obsessive scientist and his lonely creature. Ralph Fiennes and a fiery Sophie Okonedo are also a magnificent, devastating match in Antony & Cleopatra, available from 7 May. The Globe (shakespearesglobe.com) shows a new play every fortnight on YouTube: Romeo & Juliet until 3 May, then a jaunty take on The Two Noble Kinsmen from 4 May.  A free Andrew Lloyd Webber show also lands on YouTube every Friday at 7pm for 48 hours: from 1 May his 1998 50th-birthday tribute concert at the Royal Albert Hall.  The Royal Opera House (roh.org.uk) rolls out a ballet or opera on Fridays on YouTube, available for 30 days. Catch Jonathan Miller’s Cosi fan tutte, Arthur Pita’s thrilling version of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and, from 1 May, Christopher Wheeldon’s enchanting ballet of The Winter’s Tale. 

 

BBC4’s Museums in Quarantine visits the Warhol exhibition (27 April), the Young Rembrandt exhibition at the Ashmolean (28/29 April), Tate Britain (29 April) and the British Museum (30 April): bbc.co.uk/iPlayer