101 shows and 60 languages: Voila! Theatre Festival announces 2026 programme

VOILA! THEATRE FESTIVAL is coming to London from the 2nd to 22nd November 2026 Theatre in 60 different languages will take over eight London venues this year, as 450 artists come together for Voila! Theatre Festival’s exhilarating programme of 101 shows and events. Reflecting contemporary flows of cultures, stories and aesthetics, this vibrant celebration of international theatre puts challenge and change firmly in the spotlight. Following its expansion into a multi-venue festival with support from Arts Council England in 2024, Voila! went on to achieve record-breaking ticket sales in 2025. Throughout its programme, Voila! Theatre Festival pursues its welcoming grassroots ethos for both artists and audiences, which is especially important to everyone involved as it grows in scope and ambition.

With a focus on programming work using as many languages as possible, Voila! Theatre Festival hosts three weeks of performances, live streams, workshops, and events, offering a huge range of performances, championing underrepresented artists and focussing on representing stories from any corner of the world.

The programme is panlingual, multidisciplinary and is fully committed to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI).

Host venues are: Barons Court Theatre, Canal Cafe Theatre, Etcetera Theatre, The Playground Theatre, Theatro Technis, The Space Theatre, Upstairs at the Gatehouse and the festival's home and producer, The Cockpit; with each venue a regular launchpad for early career artists working in theatre, platforming their work across the capital.

Also - whilst Theatre Deli was not able to programme any shows directly at their venue this year, they continue to support one Voila show with a development residency programme, which offers financial support, free rehearsal space and mentoring from staff at the organisation to support the project and the artist. This year’s winner is Romeo Lau with their show BLONDIE BLUE EYES, which will be presented at Canal Cafe Theatre.

To encourage as broad an audience as possible, over half the programme will be performed in both English and at least one other language. Most shows remain wholly accessible to English speakers, with subtitles/surtitles provided for those works not performed in English. Key aims are to enable venues to engage more with their non-English-speaking local communities, encourage local people to get more involved in the arts and provide a space for social cohesion, support, and cultural development.

A small selection of the extraordinary array of work on offer:

The Cockpit: The Radical Wedding Engine, part wedding, part performance, a spiral where love, traditions and resistance are served (with actual treats), as a sensory feast - by Ensemble not Found, a London-based theatre collective of five interdisciplinary, first-generation ESEA migrant artists. Legend of Kaliakra, a legend of forty maidens who chose death over slavery, directed by Elica Yovcheva, with poetic texts by Mirela Ivanova (Bulgarian National Theatre “Ivan Vazov”) - the show is presented in Bulgarian with English surtitles.

Barons Court: The habit of getting used to it by Nessuno Collective (Argentina/Chile/Spain). Through a multidisciplinary narrative, the show builds a performance as a collage of everyday life. Receiver of the inaugural Instituto Cervantes x Voila! Grant, supporting Hispanic artists to present their work at Voila!. Lament of the Wandering Head by Taiwan-based Sun Son Theatre transforms a Southeast Asian myth — the flying human head — into an exploration of diaspora, displacement, and identity. Weaving live music, physical movement, and poetic language across Penang Hokkien and Mandarin.

Etcetera: Italian company Batisfera’s critically acclaimed show The Gummy Bears’ Great War - an object theatre show that takes place on a table, with real candies, small lights and few spectators; an existential tragicomedy about our search for meaning. Coming to Voila! Theatre Festival following a successful Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2025, receiving four-star reviews from The Stage and The Telegraph.

The Playground: Much Crazy About Nothing by Lan Maika / Shhh Theatre. A surreal new play set in a world where professional breakup agents are hired to end relationships on behalf of their clients. As one employee begins to question the system they help sustain, the boundary between performance and genuine emotion starts to dissolve.

Theatro Technis: Windows of Displacement, choreographed and performed by Akeim Toussaint Buck, is an autobiographically sourced solo blending dance, song and spoken word to explore personal and global narratives, ancestral memory and the increasingly urgent shifting politics surrounding the movement of people.

The Space: Heaven to Earth Plus, an autobiographical story by a Ukrainian soldier, woven together through music, poetry, and Ukrainian folk songs by Shum Ukrainian Theatre Community (supported by Barbican’s Imagine Fund and Old Diorama Arts Centre).

Upstairs at the Gatehouse: Natasha Markou (London Production Studios) returns to Voila! Theatre Festival following a sell-out run at Voila 2025 with her previous work. Her new show Brewtopia is an intimate two-hander that fuses absurdist tradition with emotional realism to ask: what does it really mean to help someone? Basilitrix by Out of This Crow Productions Ltd, a Polish family folk rock musical about sisterhood, courage, curiosity, and the search for truth.

Fae Fichtner, co-Director of Voila! Theatre Festival says, “As our world changes and we face unprecedented consequences of the climate crisis, political division and the rise of the far right, it is more important than ever that we come together and share our stories. At Voila!, Londoners can meet their neighbours on stage by discovering the stories and perspectives of the people who make this city one of the most multicultural places in the world. You might sit down to watch a show and find yourself transported to the homeland of the person living next door, the corner shop owner down the road or the person who shares your commute. That is the beauty of theatre and the magic of Voila!, and there is perhaps no better city than London to experience it.

Katharina Reinthaller, co-Director of Voila! Theatre Festival says, Every year we are honoured by the variety, quality and number of applications we receive for Voila! Theatre Festival. In a time when arts and creative endeavours are continuously stripped from our everyday lives, it fills us with hope and energy that there are so many fearless theatre makers out there who persist. We are proud to continue to platform work by multilingual artists and champion the work of migrant artists in the UK. More than 250 languages are spoken in the capital, making it one of the most linguistically diverse cities in the world. However, this is not mirrored in the work we usually see on British Stages; there’s still too little diversity and cultural exchange, and we still don’t hear enough variation in accents on stage. Voila continues to bring artists and audiences together, opens up a conversation and puts innovative fringe theatre in the spotlight.

Dave Wybrow, festival producer and Cockpit director, says, “It takes London to make this happen! With eight venues, 450 artists, 101 shows and 60 languages, Voila! is about bringing artists and audiences together across the city, championing risk-taking work and creating space for representation and community connection. We call it panlingual rather than multi-lingual because we don't see language(s) laid out side by side as fixed, separate entities, any more than we 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!”

Voila! Theatre Festival is coming to London from 2nd – 22nd November 2026. For more information visit: https://www.voilafestival.co.uk and LINK TO FULL BROCHURE