Things to come: Theatre to look forward to in 2025

A look ahead at some of the most intriguing new shows of the coming year (plus a few returnees).

Łukasz Twarkowski’s The Employees. Photo: Natalia Kabanow

As promised last week, this week’s edition takes the form of a (very-much-not-comprehensive, but hopefully useful) list of some of the most exciting shows opening in Europe in 2025.

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The sound of silence: The student protests sweeping Serbia

The State – I think Tue Biering, of Danish company Fix+Foxy, creators of Dark Noon, is one of the most exciting theatre makers working today. In what they are describing as their “biggest, most megalomaniacal show to date,” The State will see them exploring social polarisation. In an ambitious project, they hope to explore cohesion within communities - what marks us apart and what binds us together? I’m really fascinated by the mechanism of this project in which audiences don’t buy tickets, but instead subscribe to a membership—just like a streaming service (or like a Substack, I guess). This gains them access to 22 episodes which will take place at various locations across Copenhagen over a six-month period between January and June.

Uncomfortable encounters: Fix+Foxy, the Danish company behind Dark Noon

Dodecalogy – Spanning the period between 1972-1983, Slovenian director Tomi Janežič’s mega-project consists of twelve interconnected theatre productions that can be watched independently or as a part of a single year-long performance. With each of the 12 shows focussing on one year, the work will straddle scale and form, from pieces designed for one audience member at a time to multi-hour epics. 1974 is due to premiere at the Slovenian Mladinsko Theatre in Ljubljana in March, while the Ivan Franko Academic Drama Theater from Ukraine will perform 1975 in Nova Gorica in April. All of the pieces will eventually be performed in Nova Gorica, a border town in Slovenia which is European Capital of Culture this year. I’ve already seen – and loved - 1981, in Novi Sad – and hope to see further chapters over the course of the year.

As time goes by: Tomi Janežič's 1981

No Yoghurt for the Dead – For the sixth edition of NT Gent’s Histoire(s) du Théâtre series, Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues presents a piece inspired by his father, a acclaimed journalist who, in the hospital and nearing the end of his life, started writing a newspaper article about his experiences. This article amounted to little more than a few scribbles in a notebook, which Rodrigues uses at the basis of what sounds like a particularly personal piece. It opens in Ghent on 23^rd January.

Giovanni’s Room – Eline Arbo is the most sensual of directors. (The UV cum scene in her production of The End of Eddy remains etched in my memory). Internationaal Theater Amsterdam’s artistic director – whose production of Annie Ernaux’s The Years will open in the West End at the end of January - now turns her attention to James Baldwin's classic novel, a similarly sensual text about the Parisian liaison between an American and Italian. Performed by the renowned ITA ensemble, it opens in Amsterdam on 19^th January

The Glass Menagerie - Jaz Woodcock-Stewart is one of the most distinctive directors working in the UK, most recently helming Multiple Casualty Incident at London’s Yard Theatre. Her earlier show Civilisation (read the Exeunt review here) won the Jury Prize at the Fast Forward Festival, the festival for young and emerging stage directors, in 2021 which allowed her to create a work for the Dresden Staatsschauspiel. Jason Medea Medley, her adaptation of Medea, subsequently opened there in 2023. Now she makes her Swiss theatre debut with Tennessee Williams’ play at Theater Basel, where it opens on 30^th January

Long Day’s Journey into Night – German theatre has a real thing for Eugene O’Neill’s semi-autobiographical behemoth at the moment. There have been recent productions at Staatsschauspiel Dresden and Staatsschauspiel Nürnberg. Now it’s the turn of Sebastian Nübling to take on the saga of the multiply dysfunctional Tyrone family and ask what does it have to say to us today? Nübling’s recent works include a three-hour experiment in live cinema and an attempt at collective poetry writing performed by a group of young people at the Junges Theater Basel. I’m excited to see how this most kinetic of directors will tackle O’Neill. The premiere is at Deutsches Theater in Berlin on 30^th January.

Mami – After completing his trilogy of shows about death – consisting of three largely wordless pieces, Stretchmarks, Goodbye Lindita and Taverna Miresia: Mario, Bella, Anastasia, Albanian-born Greek director Mario Banushi stated a desire to move away from such dark terrain into the light. He returns with another similarly personal piece about the complexity of the mother-child relationship. It premieres at Onassis Stegi in Athens in February.

More Life – UK theatre company Kandinsky – James Yeatman and Lauren Mooney - make intricate, thinky devised plays. Their past shows include Dinomania, about palaeontology and evolution, The Winston Machine, about World War Two nostalgia, and SHTF, about prepper culture and bunkers for the super-rich, made with the Schauspielhaus Wien. Their work is unfailingly idea-stuffed and their new show looks set to continue in that vein, exploring the potential of technology to offer us immortality (of a kind). It opens in London at the Royal Court’s upstairs space on 12^th February.

White Widow - Iraqi-born Austrian film-maker and screenwriter Kurdwin Ayub, whose films include Moon, which starred Florentina Holzinger as a retired martial artist, makes her theatre debut with what is described as an “utopian erotic adventure” set in the year 2666. It has its world premiere on 14th February at the Volksbühne in Berlin.

The Seagull - Cate Blanchett is set to star as Arkadina in Thomas Ostermeier’s production of Chekhov’s play, with a supporting cast including Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tom Burke and Emma Corrin. Blanchett always makes interesting theatre choices. She was last on stage in the UK with Katie Mitchell’s 2019 production of When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other at the National Theatre – otherwise known as the one with the dildoes that got the Daily Mail in a tizz (here’s Exeunt’s much more level-headed analysis) - and before that in Benedict Andrews’ version of Botho Strauss’ Big and Small. Featuring a new adaptation by Ostermeier and Duncan Macmillan, it opens at the Barbican Centre in London on 6^th March.

Rhinoceros – Omar Elerian, a regular collaborator with Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour - most recently on ECHO - and the man who memorably put Arinze Kene inside a huge orange ball in Misty, is one of the most reliably interesting directors working in the UK. Having directed Ionesco’s The Chairs with Kathryn Hunter and her late husband Marcello Magni a couple of years back, he returns to London’s Almeida Theatre with another Ionesco classic. It opens on 1st April.

Hamlet Hail to the Thief – As a massive Radiohead fan, I am super-intrigued and hyper-excited by this prospect of a mash-up of Hamlet with Radiohead’s 2013 album, co-created by Thom Yorke, Frantic Assembly’s Steven Hoggett and co-director Christine Jones, a regular collaborator of Hoggett’s (they worked together on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child). Yorke has transformed the album into a score that will be performed live during the performance (sadly not by him). Uniting Manchester’s Factory International with the Royal Shakespeare Company, it sounds thrillingly genre-blurring. It plays Aviva Studios in Manchester from 27th April.

Living Apartment Together – Theatre company BERLIN marks its 20th anniversary with a new production about the lives of the residents of an apartment building. The concept for this one is really intriguing. The stories will play out as night falls, projected on the side of an apartment building with audiences experiencing the show via headphones. The show will premiere at NT Gent where director Yves Degryse is part of the leadership team. (I recently had a fascinating chat with Degryse for The Stage about how NT Gent is engaging with AI). It opens on 8^th May in Ghent.

[BLANk] - Alice Birch’s play consists of 100 short scenes which can be performed in any order. The director can pick and choose how they arrange them and how many they include. Birch has described it as “an invitation.” Maria Aberg directed a version at the London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2019 (here’s Exeunt’s review of that production), in a co-production with Clean Break, the UK theatre company which works with women affected by the prison system, with prison being a running theme in many of the scenes. Now Aberg returns to the text, for completely new version at Stockholm’s Dramaten, where it premieres on 8^th May.

Cadela Força Trilogy – Chapter 2: The Brotherhood – Brazilian theatre maker Carolina Bianchi’s The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella was one of the most talked about – and most likely to be labelled ‘controversial’ – shows of the last couple of years. It saw her ingesting a date rape drug on stage and spending a large portion of the show seemingly unconscious. The second part of the trilogy promises to explore the codes and pacts that exist between men that allow a culture of rape and sexual violence to be perpetuated. The world premiere will take place as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts on 25th May.

Art can't heal you: Revisiting Carolina Bianchi's The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella

Delirium – Miet Warlop’s exhilarating, intensely physical One Song – the inspiration for this Exeunt piece on sweat and endurance performance – was also created as part NT Gent’s Histoire(s) du Théâtre series and has been seemingly touring constantly since 2022. Now Warlop returns with a new piece, which is being described as an “ode to imagination.” How do you attempt to stage the imaginative process? It also premieres at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in May.

Play it again: Sweat, repetition and Miet Warlop's One Song

Burgtheater - Elfriede Jelinek’s 1980s satire about Austria’s Nazi past, which centres on the legendary Vienna theatre, has never been performed in Vienna before now. Swiss director Milo Rau uses the play as the basis of an examination of where Austrian society is today in terms of its relationship to fascism – the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria won big in last year’s elections – bringing the play full circle to the Burgtheater itself. Jelinek and Rau have been campaigning together over the past months against the right in Austria. Their collaboration premieres on the Burgtheater main stage in May, a coproduction with the Wiener Festwochen where Rau is artistic director.

Incubator - Oliver Frljić already had a reputation as one European theatre’s chief provocateurs, when his 2017 show The Curse, which condemned the Catholic Church for its failure to deal with child sexual abuse, got him in very hot water in Poland. The now co-artistic director of the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin returns to Slovenia’s Mladinsko Theatre where he made some of his most interesting earlier works, including Damned be the Traitor of His Homeland! (here’s an ancient Postcards from the Gods review of that show) and The Ristić Complex, in which actors literally pissed on a map of Yugoslavia, for a piece that intertwines the deeply personal – the death of his infant sister - and the events in Gaza, using the potent image of the incubator, a machine designed to sustain the life of the most fragile, to link them together. It opens in Ljubljana in May.

Year Without Summer – Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger is currently one of the most in-demand artists in Europe. Her debut opera Sancta, based on Paul Hindemith’s 1921 Sancta Susana , which features semi-naked roller-skating nuns and some very real flesh and blood, made headlines for making audiences nauseous. (There’s a great review of the piece here in Spike magazine). Her previous show Ophelia’s Got Talent – which featured sword-swallowing, cheek-piercing and onstage tattooing - has been one of the hottest tickets at the Volksbühne since in it opened. Her new work, Year Without Summer – a working title – is set in 1816, the coldest summer on record in Europe due to a combination of environmental factors. It was also the year in which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. The prospect of Holzinger knitting Shelley’s novel of reanimation together with imagery of environmental collapse is a tantalising/terrifying one. It opens at the Volksbühne in May.

4.48 Psychosis – There are a lot of fascinating programming choices in David Byrne’s second year as artistic director of the Royal Court. I’ve already mentioned Kandinsky’s More Life and there’s also Manhunt, a new play by Robert Icke, inspired by Roual Moat, the subject of the largest manhunt in modern British history, but nothing quite tops the prospect of this new production of Sarah Kane’s final play which reunites the original cast - Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter - and creative team twenty five years after it was first staged. Tickets are, understandably, already sold out for what sound like an extraordinary act of revisitation. It opens on 18^th June.

Under the Shade of a Tree, I Sat and Wept – This new theatre project from Qendra Multimedia explores the Reconciliation of Blood Feuds Campaign, which took place in the 1990s in Kosovo, a series of public forgiving ceremonies animated at uniting the Albanians of Kosovo during a time of rising nationalism in Yugoslavia. Surviving family members were invited to publicly forgive the killers of their relatives. Playwright Jeton Neziraj aims to explore the performative element of public forgiveness in a documentary project which will see him collaborating with theatres in South Africa – the Market Theatre in Johannesburg - and Rwanda to explore different forms of public reconciliation processes. It opens in Prishtina in the autumn.

Another chance to see…

London audiences finally get an opportunity to see work by one of Europe’s most exciting directors when Łukasz Twarkowski’s The Employees, based on Danish author Olga Ravn’s epic dystopian novel set in the near future on a spaceship carrying humans and robots. Smaller in scale than some of his other shows it’s a chance for Uk audiences to get a taster of the director’s work. It’s at the Southbank Centre between 16^th and 19^thJanuary.

Audiences in Latvia meanwhile have another chance to see Twarkowski’s immense, spellcheck-discombobulating Rotkho, when it returns to the repertoire of the Dailes Theatre in Riga from February 14^th-16th – with English surtitles.

Rimini Protokoll’s most recent show Ever Given, a new piece by Heldgard Haug about the breakdown of systems inspired by the ship that ran aground on an embankment of the Suez Canal blocking global trade routes, returns to the Volkstheater in Vienna between 25^th- 26^th January and again from 1^st-3^rd March.

Premiering in New York last year, Belarus Free Theatre’s new show KS6: Small Forward is inspired by and stars the Belarusian basketball player and activist Katsiaryna Snytsina, a sports star who became a political dissident. Directed by the company’s co-artistic directors, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, it’s at once a personal and explicitly political piece about what it is to be a gay woman in an oppressive regime. It’s at London’s Barbican Centre between 5^th-8^th February.

Cape Verdean choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas is the subject of this year’s Brandhaarden festival giving audiences in Amsterdam the chance to get better acquainted with her work, including Bacchae: Prelude to a Purge, the highlight of last year’s LIFT.

I’ve already banged on quite a bit about Sh!t Theatre’s immensely moving Or What’s Left of Us – you can read my review in The Stage here – there’s another chance to catch it at London’s Soho Theatre in February.

To end where we started, Dark Noon, Fix+Foxy’s idiosyncratic exploration of the mythology of the American West performed by a company of South African actors – the show that basically inspired me to start this newsletter – will be at Finland’s & Espoo Theatre between 27^th March-3^rd April.

Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, or thoughts, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com