Arts Ahead What's On In London 15-21 July

This week's Arts Ahead is brought to you by the letters S, E and the number 15, alongside an ever-encroaching bout of swine flu. How close is your nearest case? Wash your hands while you're out enjoying London's cultural scene, please.

Be There First: London Shows Opening

Opening tonight, you can see Pirate Mackenzie Crook and All-round Thesp Mark Rylance in Jerusalem, a brand new play by Jez Butterworth at the Royal Court Theatre. It's a comedy on the modern dilemmas of contemporary life, we're told.

Also tonight you also can catch The Barber of Seville live on big screens in Trafalgar Square, Canary Wharf and Walthamstow Town Square. It's the last in the BP Sumer Big Screen series, and a rollicking good comedy opera to boot, so it's bound to be fun.

Tomorrow sees the start of The Container at the Young Vic: a group of immigrants smuggle into the UK in the sealed container of the title. The play's staged inside a parked lorry, with space for an audience of 28. We salute their site specific stylings.

Cloud Dance Festival takes place this weekend, from Friday to Sunday. That's three fab-sounding evenings of contemporary dance, film screenings, live music, and a good dollop of odd on the side, at Jackson's Lane Theatre near Highgate Tube.

Fevered Sleep show Brilliant also returns to London this week. It's on at the Young Vic until Saturday: take any spare little londonists, they'll thank you for it. We'd do the "the review's in the title" gag again, but we're not sure how much you enjoyed it last time.

Two art shows take our fancy this week. At the BFI, you can see a compilation of artist Simon Faithfull's various attempts to thwart gravity in the smile-inducingly titled "Gravity Sucks." It opens tomorrow and runs (downwards, we imagine) til September. Over at the Photographer's Gallery, Hungarian modernist André Kertézs's On Reading is a series of portraits of people, err, reading...

Last Chance to See: London Shows Closing

The London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre comes to an end tomorrow.

It's your last chance to catch this run of Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray at Sadlers Wells. It closes on Sunday. And you've only got a few more evenings to catch the last of the gorgeous cast in A Doll's House at the Donmar. We thought it was great.

Also closing is The Winslow Boy at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley. It got good reviews when it opened at the Rose.

Artswise, Baroque 1620-1800 closes at the V&A on Sunday, and Free Range closes on Monday. Enjoy yourselves, but please remember to sneeze into that tissue...