[title]
The Royal Court Theatre today announces a pretty damn spectacular seventieth birthday season, that mixes its traditional new writing with a couple of extremely tasty revivals from its back catalogue.
The really, really big news is the return of Tilda Swinton to the British stage after literally decades away, as she reprises her role in German playwright Manfred Karge’s Man to Man (Sep 5-Oct 24 2026). Set between the wars, the one-woman show concerns Ella Gericke, a German woman who adopts her late husband’s identity in order to hold on to his decently-paying job as a crane operator. Tilda Swinton was just 27 when it debuted at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1987 (it transferred to the Court the following year), and her extraordinary, gender-bending performance cued her up cult big screen career. Following on from this year’s superb Court revival of the original production of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, this is another case of getting the old gang back together – director Stephen Unwin will take the helm for what is literally a reprisal of the original production.
The other big celebrity name is Gary Oldman, who has been absent from the stage for even longer than Swinton – a whopping 37 years. Or he was until earlier in 2025, when he performed, directed and starred in Beckett’s high concept elegy Krapp’s Last Tape at Theatre Royal York. That gets a transfer to the Court (May 8-30 2026), which would be a good get under any circumstance but has a particular resonance at this address – it premiered here in 1958, and was revived there in 2006 as part of the theatre’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, with none other than the great Harold Pinter performing the role of Krapp, an elderly man who listens back to the megalomaniacal rantings of his old self with mounting horror.
Away from the star name revivals, there’s one more obvious jewel in the season crown in the shape of the Court bagging the UK premiere of Kimberley Belflower’s Broadway smash John Proctor is the Villain (Mar 20-Apr 25 2026), a genre-defiant, post-#MeToo riff on The Crucible that was the toast of New York this year. We’re getting Danya Taymor’s Broadway production, although casting is TBA – the US version originally starred Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink – I’d imagine a homegrown cast for this this is more likely but it’s still damn exciting (Broadway production pictured but don’t hold your breath for Sink).
Away from the showstoppers you have a pretty damn exciting regular Royal Court season. The above plays are naturally in the larger Downstairs theatre, as will be Luke Norris’s new hospital-set romantic drama Guess How Much I Love You? (Jan 18-Feb 21 2026), starring Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo and directed by Jeremy Herrin. That opens 2026. Later, Downstairs will host a Lyndsey Turner’s UK premiere production of top US playwright Rajiv Jospeh’s Archduke (Jun 20-Jul 25 2026), about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. The final Downstairs show of the years will be rising star Ryan Calais Cameron’s The Afronauts (Nov 14-Dec 19 2026), which tells the true story of the landlocked African country of Zambia’s attempts to join the actual ’60s space race.
In contrast to all the glittering names Downstairs, the smaller Upstairs theatre will play host to four productions found via the Royal Court‘s open script submission scheme – that is to say the playwrights submitted their scripts to be considered by the theatre, they weren’t commissioned. These will be Jack Nicholls’s The Shitheads (Feb 6-Mar 14 2026, about prehistoric cannibalism); Georgie Dettmer’s Are You Watching? (May 29-Jul 4 2026, about digital voyeurism); Joy Nesbitt’s Blood of my Blood (Oct 1-Nov 7 2026, in which a woman attempts to conjure her ancestors); and Rhys Warrington’s Monument (Dec 3 2026-Jan 23 2027, Welsh community politics). In addition, there will be a co-production with Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theatre: Yousef Sweid and Isabella Sedlak’s Between The River and The Sea (Apr 15-May 9 2026), which is billed as ‘a personal story of family, fear, and imagining a future beyond borders’.
Tickets for all shows in the Royal Court seventieth anniversary season go on sale at noon on Nov 4.
The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2025 and 2026.