Voila! Theatre Festival

VOILÀ! THEATRE FESTIVAL AT THE PLAYGROUND THEATRE

3rd – 21st November 

We’re thrilled to welcome Voila! Europe back to The Playground Theatre this November! This dynamic festival celebrates multilingual, multicultural performances, bringing bold new voices and stories to the stage. Join us for two thrilling weeks of theatre, performance and creative exploration, with a specially curated series of double shows you won’t want to miss.

Ticket Passes Available

To make the most of your festival experience, we’ve created a range of multi-show passes so you can enjoy more for less:

DOUBLE BILL PASSES – £23

Enjoy two fantastic shows in one evening:

• 3rd - 4th NOV: Much Crazy About Nothing + Language of 1965

  5th NOV: Deep, Deep Waters + (M)Others Between Shores 6th NOV: (Un)Shakespearean Nightmares + Deep, Deep Waters

  11th NOV: KOKONA + The Perils of Youth Play 15th NOV: Buds, Revolt! + The Swan, The Werewolf and Gianpiero

FULL FESTIVAL PASS – £105

Want to see it all? The Full Pass gives you access to every show at The Playground Theatre from 8th–16th November.

Please Note:

• Passes are only valid for shows at The Playground Theatre as part of the Voila! Festival.

• Each pass gives access to one performance of each show included in the pass.

• For any questions or accessibility queries, contact us at: boxoffice@theplaygroundtheatre.org.uk

Need help choosing?

Whether you're here for a single night of discovery or planning to dive into the full Voila! experience, our Double and Triple Show Passes offer flexibility, great value and a chance to catch bold, international theatre in one go.

Voila! Theatre Festival Line Up at The Playground Theatre

Much Crazy About Nothing - 3rd-4th NOV

Much Crazy About Nothing is a contemporary dark comedy that explores love, emotional labour, cultural misunderstanding, and the human desire for closure. At the centre of the piece is a professional breakup service that helps people end relationships on their behalf. As the story unfolds, the emotional distance this service depends on begins to collapse, and the characters are pulled into increasingly personal, chaotic, and absurd situations.

Language of 1965 - 3rd-4th NOV

The whole story is about a son going through his father's funeral and embalming process. In the previous timeline, the son (hereafter Cho) finally witnessed and acknowledged that he cannot be a perfect son anymore and there's no good or bad son in their relationship, and vice versa. Family history is not and must not be black and white as it is complicated and involves loads of time.

After Cho's graduation ceremony and arguments with his father, Cho's father had a stroke and went back to Seoul, South Korea to recover. Cho believed he always hated his father but as soon as he sees his weak father who was always strong and big in his perception Cho gets loomed over by emotions he never processed before.

Deep, Deep Waters - 4th & 8th NOV

Deep, Deep Waters is a solo theatre piece about a man shaped by multiple cultures confronts the version of masculinity he was taught to perform - and what it has cost him.

Through memory, direct address, and embodied storytelling, the audience is taken through his upbringing, his relationship to masculinity, and the unspoken rules that have shaped him.

The piece moves between past and present, blending naturalistic moments with direct audience connection, creating an intimate and immediate theatrical experience.

Performed by a single actor with minimal staging, the show relies on voice, physicality, and rhythm to shift between characters, time, and internal states.

(M)Others Between Shores - 5th-6th NOV

(M)Others Between Shores’ is an intimate, movement-led performance ethnography that examines the shocks, shifts and transitions experienced by migrant mothers who have been forced to leave home. It traces the loss and the rebuilding of identity as they navigate caring for their family. Drawing on research-based testimonies, the work transforms lived experience into embodied storytelling through movement, puppetry, and sound.

(Un)Shakespearean Nightmares - 7th-8th NOV

(Un)Shakespearean Nightmares is a fast-paced comedy that reimagines Shakespeare’s world, placing iconic and overlooked characters in a surreal purgatory of endless performance and rebellion. Performed by five multi-rolling actors, the show blends farce, parody, and meta-theatre, drawing on commedia, clowning, and companies like the Reduced Shakespeare Company and Mischief Theatre.

Fed up with their fates, Shakespeare’s characters led by Rosaline

(Romeo's ex) and Viola spark a revolution. As minor characters

demand to rewrite their narratives, Shakespeare descends as a godlike

tyrant to restore order. What follows is a chaotic blend of parody

pitches, sketch-like scenes, and backstage plotting. The climax sees

the characters destroy the Bard’s ego with literary criticism, steal the

quill, and finally reclaim their stories.

The Perils of Youth Play - 10th-11th NOV

In an ancient rotting house an unseen visitor knocks at the front door. So begins an argument between a poisonous crone and her pompous, disgraced son, over who should get up and open it. The play is built on a single, deliberately bad joke, repeated and re‑shaped until it becomes something stranger: a dream‑riff on families, intergenerational trauma, envy, hate, the power of speech, and a haunting meditation on life, death, mothers and sons, consciousness, storytelling, and the theatre itself.

KOKONA - 11th-12th NOV

As if detached from the rest of the world, KOK and KONA are on a journey of exploring their own and each other's bodies; which, peculiarly, feel different and alike at the same time. With only a few clues from what outer society inscribes on bodies like theirs, they set out to understand who and how they should be. Driven by their curiosity and their desire to become one, they dive into playful experimentations about the feminine and masculine, and create space for transformations.

KOKONA is a dance theatre duet experimenting with ideas around body, identity and self-expression. It constructs a world, in which bodies are detached from their materiality, to playfully explore how we would experience different norms and constraints if we hadn’t yet embodied them.

The Swan, the Werewolf and Gianpiero - 12th-15th NOV

A backstage breakup between tango partners spirals into total chaos when Roxana ends her relationship with Mateo five minutes before their performance. Their argument erupts onto the stage, where Gianpiero, an eccentric “artistic genius” of a director (and allegedly a descendant of Julius Caesar), decides to transform the disaster into his greatest masterpiece.

Blessed Forgetful - 13th-14th NOV

Blessed Forgetful is a physically devised performance for three performers, exploring love, memory, and the act of letting go. It asks: what if forgetting could be an act of care?

Originating from a film adaptation of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the work shifts away from text-led storytelling into a non-verbal, movement-based language. Drawing on contemporary physical theatre and improvisation, it reframes “forgetting” not as failure but as relief, particularly for those navigating migration, emotional residue, and digital overload.

A Happy Birthday, Imogen Dutt - 17th-18th NOV

Imogen and Jonah are a neoliberal dream couple. They’ve been together since they were thirteen, when Jonah walked Imogen home from school. A scared teenager in an uncertain world, she has surrendered her agency for comfort. Today she turns 25, and she’s made an ogre of the world, unable to imagine anything else. Jumping across birthdays in her life, we see how Imogen has hardened over time. At tonight’s birthday celebrations, she confronts the coercion at the heart of her relationship. Is tonight the night she’ll finally be able to walk out? More importantly, how is walking out even a possibility if Jonah made the door?

Patisserie Femme - 19th-21st NOV

Patisserie Femme is written by Jessie Diepeveen, and first premiered in South Africa. The show has seen several successful runs across different states (Cape Town, Johannesburg and Stellenbosch), and is a two-time Fleur du Cap nominee for Best New Director and Best Ensemble (2024). With its highly-relevant themes, it has also traveled across schools in the Western Cape, reminding young women that they too have a voice.