Yard Theatre

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Philosphy of the World will reopen the Yard Theatre in July 2026. At the beginning of their new show Philosophy of the World, the three members of In Bed with My Brother – that’s Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory – shuffle on sheepishly to announce that they’re now so skint that they’ve been forced to write a commercial show with a linear narrative that will feature absolutely no nudity. This is all a lie (apart from probably the being skint part) and what follows continues the trio’s tradition of coming up with shows that actually sound like middlebrow-awards bait, but are in fact splenetic leftfield punk-rock conflagrations in which they take their tops off. So there was Tricky Second Album, their show ‘about’ the KLF burning a million, that was really a caustic takedown of the exploitative nature of the theatre industry. Most recently, PRIME_TIME at the Barbican was an assault on Jeff Bezos so frenzied that it didn’t concern itself with any sort of contextualisation or scene setting but just consisted of an escalating series of insults and murder fantasies – hating elevated to raw art.  Now they’ve (sort of) set their sights on The Shaggs, one of the all-time great musical oddities. Hailing from smalltown New Hampshire, the sibling trio’s domineering father was told by a fortune teller that his daughters would be in a successful rock band, something he chose to wholeheartedly believe. And so throughout the...

There’s some fairly commercial stuff in the Yard’s comeback season, but there’s also some gloriously uncompromising weirdness, especially at the beginning of the season where In Bed with My Brother’s wild Philosophy of the World is followed by this cuklt Swedish work by Malmö Dockteater. In short, it’s a stage adaptation of Jackie Collins’ debut novel, a racy infidelity potboiler set at the height of the Swinging Sixties. The twist here? The text – translated by Lulu Raczka – is ‘acted out’ by dolls, with the sets dollhouses. 

It wouldn’t take a genius to conclude that 87-year-old Sir Ian McKellen was done with the stage. After an incredibly prolific start to his eighties, he fell off the Noël Coward Theatre stage during a performance of Robert Icke’s 2024 Henry IV mash-up Player Kings and seemed thereafter to be focussing on screen work. Well, as it happens you’ll be able to catch him in Avengers: Doomsday this winter… right about the same time he returns to the stage to lend his star power to the reopening season of the Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick. Not just for a show or two either. Lear is a new adaptation of King Lear, but also – it seems – McKellen’s life and thoughts, by playwright Simon Stephens, Yard boss Jay Miller, with contributions (naturally) from McKellen himself.  What is all this going to look like? Hard to say exactly but it’s probably going to be very cool indeed and sell out more or less instantly and it’ll star Ian McKellen – you’d be not in your perfect mind to miss out.  At time of writing the show was not on sale and precise dates and times were TBC.