We’re looking forward to a new year with some highlights of exciting things to come from just some of the wonderful people and organisations we work with across the year. Expect fresh takes on the classics, daring new work, and there may even be a chance to sing-along…
Get in touch with us if you’re looking for support in 2025, or to request press kits for anything listed below.
The Merchant of Venice
Lyceum Theatre | 18 January – 15 February 2025
Shakespeare’s perennially contested play about corrosive bigotry and blinding vengeance is poised at the radioactive intersection of race, class and religion in Arin Arbus’s production.
As Arbus observes, “The Merchant of Venice depicts a divided society saturated with hate and inequity. The world boils with anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, classism, and homophobia.”
The show’s uniquely diverse company evoke a deeply stratified Venice. Its connections to our own grievously fractured world are vivid, stark and startling.
Heaven
Southwark Playhouse Borough (The Little) | 5 – 22 February 2025
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh | 25 February – 1 March
The Fringe First-winning, sell-out hit from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2023 makes its first return to the stage, with a London premiere followed by a return to Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre.
HEAVEN is set in the Irish midlands, during the weekend of a local wedding. Mairead and Mal are struggling to keep their marriage together. Perhaps attending a wedding will help, or it might raise questions that are difficult to answer.
Created by Olivier Award and quadruple Fringe First Award winners Fishamble, Heaven is written by Eugene O’Brien, directed by Jim Culleton and stars Andrew Bennett and Janet Moran in two world-class performances.
James Rowland’s Songs of the Heart Trilogy UK Tour
Various Locations including Stratford East, London and Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh | 7 February – 31 May 2025
From Essex to Edinburgh, from village to vaudeville, James will perform his second trilogy of storytelling shows, following life through its journey from youth, to middle age, and to our own mortality: Learning to Fly, Piece of Work, and finally, James Rowland Dies at the End of the Show. Each a remarkable hour of theatre, each a captivating mix of storytelling, comedy and music; and each sees James strain every sinew to keep the audience completely rapt.
Manipulate Festival 2025
Venues across Edinburgh | 12 – 15 February 2025
Manipulate Festival is an annual celebration of excellence in the fields of animated film, puppetry and visual theatre. Manipulate Festival 2025 will see world premieres from exciting Scottish companies Groupwork and an innovative collaboration between Scottish Ensemble and Blind Summit. Animation will see 3 shorts programmes and 2 feature films, including an exciting French double-bill on valentines day.
The Festival will put artists at its heart, with development, works in progress and more. Creating a platform for creative exchange, debate and discussion alongside staging boundary-pushing new work for adult audiences, the Festival has gained recognition nationally and internationally for its innovative curation and unique blend of artforms.
The Land That Never Was
Tron Theatre | 21 February – 2 March 2025 | Edinburgh dates and tickets coming soon
In 1820 Gregor MacGregor sold a country that didn’t exist. In 2025 Liam Rees can’t stop lying to tourists. Part confessional storytelling. Part TED Talk. Mostly bullshit.
The Land That Never Wastells the true story of Gregor MacGregor (yes that is his real name), a Scottish conman who sold a country that literally did not exist. Blending confessional stand-up, storytelling, and a whole lot of bullshit, this is a story about wanting to burn it all down and start again from scratch. It’s a story about a group of strangers who collectively believed in something that doesn’t exist… yet. It’s is a story about us. Written and directed by Liam Rees.
Wild Rose
Lyceum Theatre | 6 March – 5 April 2025
There is only one thing in Rose-Lynn’s life that has ever made sense: country music.
Fresh out of jail for past mistakes, and bursting with incredible raw talent, charisma and cheek, the free-spirited Rose-Lynn dreams of escaping Glasgow to make it as a singer in Nashville.
But her mother Marion has had a bellyful, insisting that she settle down, ditch the fantasy, and focus on raising her two young kids.
Rose-Lynn reluctantly agrees to take a cleaning job and finds an unlikely champion in her new boss, Susannah, bringing her dream closer than ever. Now Rose-Lynn must decide if risking everything will really pave the road to Nashville.
Frankenstein
Stellar Quines | Site specific, Kirkaldy, Fife | Spring 2025
Stellar Quines’ first programme of work from their new homebase of Kircaldy, Fife will kick off with a site-responsive production taking over their new home town. A feminist adaptation of Frankenstein written by Julia Taudevin, it will be directed by Stellar Quines AD Caitlin Skinner and feature a professional cast performing alongside the Young Quines and a new community company recruited from the local area.
Stellar Quines are Scotland’s leading intersectional, feminist theatre company, whose work looks to increase equality for those from marginalised genders, while creating world class, professional theatre to tour across Scotland.
Creative Crawley
Venues across Crawley, Surrey and West Sussex | March and throughout 2025
Creative Crawley, the Crawley arts charity dedicated to supporting and creating a flourishing arts scene in Crawley and beyond, will be returning with another jam packed programme of events, programmes, and initiatives in 2025.
With their full Spring season to be announced, Creative Crawley are delighted to launch their season with exhibition and live performance across the town.
Super Normal Extra Natural (28 to 30 March) sees singers, dancers and Crawley locals take over County Mall Shopping Centre in a unique, intimate and surprising dance spectacle by Requardt&Rosenberg; the creators of experiential performances Future Cargo and DeadClub™
And from 28 March to 6 April, Leap Then Look’s Play Interact Explore turns exhibition into an active, exciting place for people of all ages to play, collaborate and experiment. Everything in the exhibition is designed to be interactive in some way and visitors are encouraged to spend time exploring all the possibilities available: to look in different ways, create sculptures, take photographs, move things around, get in front of the projection, rock, roll, stack and play.
Creative Crawley will also use this moment to test two cultural hubs across the town, exploring what it would look like to have more physical space for the arts in Crawley, as part of a Cultural Hub consultation.
The full season will be announced in January 2025.
Knockengorroch 2025
Galloway, South West Scotland | 22 – 25 May 2025
To be held from 22 – 25th May 2025, in the stunning hills next to the North East tip of the Galloway Forest Park, Scotland’s longest running greenfield festival will welcome back festival favourite artists and exciting new acts from Scotland, the UK and internationally. Knockengorroch has been bringing together communities since its first festival event in 1998, set amongst the unique green and rambling lands of the Carsphairn hills. The upcoming festival’s 2025 theme is survival, of live music festivals, community, language, culture and biodiversity.
The Mountaintop
Lyceum Theatre | 31 May – 21 June 2025
April 3, 1968. Room 306, the Lorraine Motel, Memphis. It’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr’s last night on Earth.
Exhausted from a life on the road, hoarse from testifying day after day, all King wants is a coffee and some cigarettes. Room service arrives in the form of Camae, a motel maid with the face of an angel who smokes, drinks, and curses like a sailor while giving King a run for his money.
This funny, compelling drama imagines the man behind the legend on the eve of his assassination; and sees the public façade and the private turmoil, the family man and the martyr, desperate to finish what he started.
Darkfield
Various dates and locations to be announced
Throughout 2025
Pioneering immersive theatre producers DARKFIELD have a blockbuster 2025 planned, with its critically acclaimed line-up of shipping container-based immersive theatre shows coming to a variety of venues and festivals across the UK and beyond…
