Open-air theatre in London

Summer-centric outdoor company Shakespeare in the Squares has hitherto toured only well-known Shakespeare plays on its annual jaunts through London’s leafiest, generally West London-est public squares. But there’s an intriguing break with tradition this year as it turns to ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’, the Bard’s relatively little-known comedy about a virtuous young woman who falls head over heels for a shit of an aristocrat.

The Open Air Theatre is going big on family-friendly shows this summer, with a major new adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s novel. For ages ten-plus.

Musical theatre fans, get ready for outdoor dancing and sing-a-longs with some of the West End's biggest stars: West End Live is back!

The National Theatre’s River Stage returns to the South Bank for a month of outdoor live music, dance, performance, workshops and family fun. Weekend evenings will see a varied programme of entertainment take place in front of the theatre, with special take-over weekends from The Glory, Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, Rambert and the NT itself. 

The final show of Timothy Sheader’s Open Air Theatre reign is a revival of Bock and Stein’s immortal musical following the life of Teyve, a Jewish milkman living in the shtetl in the early twentieth century. You can be sure of a crowdpleaser, with much-loved songs like ‘If I Were A Rich Man’ and ‘Tradition’ all present and correct. 

The unexpected furor over Michelle Terry playing Richard III has somewhat overshadowed the fact that Shakespeare’s Globe has a disabled lead for one of its big productions this summer, in the form of Nadia Nadarajah. The deaf actor has been a regular on the Globe’s stage in recent years, and in 2024 she’ll take on the role of Egyptian queen Cleopatra in Blanche McIntyre’s bilingual English/BSL production of Shakespeare’s great Roman tragedy. 

Sean Holmes’s deft Globe production steers an almost effortless path through ‘The Comedy of Errors’.

The first new play proper to run outdoors at the Globe since ‘Emilia’, actor Anne Odeke’s play tells the extraordinary story of Princess Dinubolu, the first woman of colour to enter a beauty pageant in the UK: way back in 1908, Southend-on-Sea.