This year’s festival will run at a variety of London venues from the 3rd to the 23rd November.
It has now been announced that Voila! Theatre Festival will return for its 12th edition this November, taking over eight London venues for three weeks and featuring a programme of 110 shows and events spanning 70 languages, with 450 artists.
Produced by The Cockpit, the festival has expanded year-on-year, continuing to grow in scope while staying true to its grassroots ethos of championing early-career, international and underrepresented artists. The host venues for the festival includes;: Barons Court Theatre, Etcetera Theatre, Theatre Deli, The Playground Theatre, The Questors Theatre, Theatro Technis, The Space Theatre, and the festival’s home The Cockpit.
With a focus on programming work using as many languages as possible, Voila! Theatre Festival offers a huge range of performances from all over the world; offering performances, scratch nights, live streams, workshops, and events, with a strong focus on multilingual and migrant-led work. The programme is panlingual, multidisciplinary and fully committed to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI).
Among the selection of work on offer at each of the venues is:
- The Cockpit: Mendaki (Eclipse Award winner, by Khai and Faizal), a powerful solo reclaiming Muslim-Malay-Singaporean identity from colonial erasure. Plus The Uncontainable Nausea of Alec Baldwin (TG Works), physical theatre fused with AI, live-streaming and projections, previously selected for the 2025 Biennale College Teatro in Venice, which was curated by Willem Dafoe.
- Barons Court: Absent, an Iraqi story of life under sanctions in 1990s Baghdad, adapted from Betool Khedairi’s bestselling novel (one of the highest-selling books by an Arabic author in English) by translator and playwright Penny Black (who has translated over 40 plays for theatres such as the Royal Court, The Gate, National Theatre, and The Lyric Hammersmith) and directed by Svetlana Dimcovic.
- Etcetera: Hansal & Geetal, an offbeat and body-led performance where tradition meets surprise by Toronto duo Sachin Sharma and Shreya Parashar (Two 2 Mango), weaving Hindi, Urdu and English.
- Theatre Deli: Be Gay, for God’s Sake is a sharp, time-bending queer new-writing drama told with a dose of satirical mischief from East Asian-led company Oh My My, developed on Theatre Deli’s Voila residency scheme.
- The Playground: Naran Ja is a visually playful piece by logica picnic and azza-har, exploring human and non-human encounters and interrogating the hierarchies we tragically uphold to try to make sense of the world.
- The Questors: How to Be a Romantic, a one-person ‘jukebox opera’ remixing classic arias to tell a new story for modern times and reflect on love today.
- Theatro Technis: Never Just I, a solo performance by Cypriot dancer Evie Demetriou which beautifully blends dynamic movement, humour and storytelling to explore womanhood, motherhood and identity.
- The Space: Viddani/Devoted, a musical interactive performance told through Ukrainian folk-singing by Spivanka, supported by Barbican’s Imagine Fund and Old Diorama Arts Centre.
Talking about the festival, Dave Wybrow, festival producer and Cockpit director, says, “We call Voila! a panlingual festival rather than a multi-lingual one because people don’t see language(s) laid out side by side as fixed, separate entities any more than they see ‘cultures’ as ‘things’ – static and cut off from each other. Voila! Theatre Festival is living proof that culture is alive and always moving. And the medium for the movement is language. Language and culture flow, change, hybridise and evolve. We don’t live in nationalities or even cultures; we just live – and meet each other – in language. Voila!”
To find out more visit: https://www.voilafestival.co.uk/