10 Plays You Shouldn’t Miss in the Early Part of 2026

Arcadia (Old Vic)

Tom Stoppard’s best play (and he wrote a few crackers) is one which not only offers great jokes and chaos theory but is also accessible, and in a good production it will be totally heartbreaking. There have been some superb ones over the years, but Carrie Cracknell has both the lightness of touch and emotional acuity to pull this off and should be helped by a cast which includes the genuinely exciting Isis Hainsworth as Thomasina, Seamus Dillane, Leila Farzad and Prasanna Puwanarajah. Stoppard’s death just a few weeks ago will lend an extra layer of melancholy to a play which constantly considers the human quest to know and which in our current age feels particularly pertinent as it suggests that “when we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone on the empty shore.”
Arcadia plays from 24th January.

Lost Atoms (Lyric Hammersmith)

Falling in love? We’ve all been there. Feeling as if we’ve found the one. Jess and Robbie do, even though they are very different people. But their relationship is built on strong foundations, but are they strong enough to sustain their love? The latest from Frantic Assembly—one of the great companies of the last 30 years—is built from a series of memories as they retrace their love. But while they have a shared history, the pair recall things very differently. Who can be trusted, or is all memory unreliable? The show—written by Anna Jordan—has had some great reviews out of town and suggests a company at the peak of their creative powers.
Lost Atoms plays from 29th January.

Lost Atoms, coming to the Lyric Hammersmith in late January.

Here There Are Blueberries (Theatre Royal Stratford East)

A hit in New York, Here There Are Blueberries, co-written by Moises Kaufman, who many will know from The Laramie Project, with Amanda Gronich, is a detective story, an unnerving one.  A docudrama, it tells the story behind an album of 116 photographs sent to the US Holocaust Museum in the early 2000s featuring Nazi officers and support staff at leisure in Auschwitz in the 1940s. The officers and staff are flirting, eating blueberries and laughing while, out of sight of the camera, thousands are being murdered in the camp. The New York Times described it as precise and intelligent; The New Yorker called it chilling.
Here There Are Blueberries plays from 31st January.

Deep Azure (Shakespeare’s Globe)

Written by Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, who died in 2020, this 2005 play gets its UK premiere in a production by Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu, best known for directing For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy. Like that show, this one has a lyrical bent, taking its inspiration from both Shakespeare and hip-hop as it tells of a woman dealing with the death of her lover at the hands of the police. Boseman wrote the play in response to the death of his friend, Prince Jones, a fellow student at Howard University who was killed by police and whose daughter was eventually awarded damages for wrongful death.
Deep Azure plays from 7th February.

Our Town (Rose)

Thornton Wilder’s hymn to ordinary life, giving us a glimpse into one American town’s daily doings—whether it is the milkman going about his daily round, the doomed paperboy whose life will be snuffed out in the war, the town drunk, mothers making breakfast or a father berating his son—is too often staged as if it is a Christmas card. But as great productions have proved, it is a remarkable and radical play and one which, in a fine revival, has universal resonance. So it’s a fitting choice for Michael Sheen’s new Welsh National Theatre and will feature Sheen himself as the Stage Manager in a production which sees the play through Welsh eyes.
Our Town plays from 26th February.

Romeo and Juliet, coming to the Harold Pinter in March.

Romeo and Juliet (Harold Pinter)

Let’s be truthful: an awful lot of English-language Shakespeare productions are a bit dull. A director who never serves up boring Shakespeare is Robert Icke. He knows that Shakespeare can tell a good story, and he makes sure that he helps, not hinders, that he finds the things that will make audience sit up and move to the edge of their seats. Otherwise, why bother? Better to stay home and watch Netflix. Here he nabs Stranger Things' star Sadie Sink to play Juliet opposite Noah Jupe’s Romeo in a revival which promises to be swift, insightful and sexy. Icke has already cracked this play in a production back in 2012, and now he returns for seconds.
Romeo and Juliet plays from 16th March.

Aether (Jermyn Street)

In Emma Howlett’s quick-witted script for TheatreGoose, an increasingly essential young company, her story is woven with that of women from history whose contributions to how we see and think about the world have largely been lost from sight.  There are the obvious candidates, including the astronomer Vera Rubin and the ancient Egyptian mathematician, Hypatia, but also some more unexpected and intriguing inclusions: the 19th-century teenage medium, Florence Cook, who hoodwinked male scientists, and Adelaide Herrmann, the magician famous for performing the lethal bullet trick. These women’s stories are entwined with that of Sophie in an ingenious staging which reminded me of both Kandinsky and Complicite. This is smart-as-a-whip work from a writer and a company who are no gooses.
Aether plays from 16th March.

Inter Alia (Wyndhams)

Lawyer-turned-playwright Suzie Miller had a huge hit with Prima Facie and follows it up with another legal drama with a woman at its beating heart. Rosamund Pike plays a judge, Jess, juggling professional and family life with impressive energy, but her world threatens to collapse when her teenage son is accused of rape.  Pike is mesmerising, lending real intelligence and no little wit in the process, lifting this from the ordinary to something far more compelling. Worth it for Pike alone.
Inter Alia plays from 19th March.

Inter Alia, coming to the Wyndhams Theatre in March.

John Proctor is the Villain (Royal Court)

A huge hit on Broadway, where it attracted a younger crowd, Kimberley Belflower’s drama reconsiders Arthur Miller’s The Crucible through the lives of a group of female high school students studying the play in rural Georgia under their charismatic male English teacher. Set in 2018 as #MeToo began to bite, it’s a piece of writing which captures the giddiness, jealousies and angst of adolescence as it probes as to whether Miller’s hero, John Proctor, is quite as saintly a figure as he appears.
John Proctor is the Villain plays from 20th March.

1536 (Ambassadors)

Winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn award, Ava Pickett’s play deservedly transfers from the Almeida. Pickett, who is writing a new screenplay about Joan of Arc for Baz Luhrmann, has a knack for offering a contemporary spin on history, upending our perceptions and giving them a feminist twist. Considering the impact of the accusations of adultery against the soon-to-be-beheaded Anne Boleyn on three ordinary Essex women, it is a gossipy and entertaining evening full of dark comedy. Pickett is definitely a writer to watch, and if you want to see another of her plays, Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy, a riff on what happens when Helen returns home, premieres at Stratford East in the autumn.
1536 plays from 2nd May.