News Articles

Arcola Theatre will stage Alexis Gregory‘s critically-acclaimed, verbatim theatre piece Riot Act over three Sundays in June, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. The 30 June performance will coincide with the actual anniversary weekend. A breathtaking journey through six decades of queer history, Riot Act was created from playwright and performer Alexis …

Arcola to mark 50th anniversary of Stonewall riots with RIOT ACT Read More »

Tennessee Williams is considered one of the foremost playwrights of 20th Century American drama. What is it about his writing that makes him so influential? In rehearsal we constantly marvel at the encyclopedic range of his personal world. His plays touch the many facets of the human condition – love, power, sexuality, loss, internal strife, …

Interview with THE GLASS MENAGERIE director Femi Elufowoju jr Read More »

Final casting is announced for a rare production of D H Lawrence’s The Daughter-in-Law, a searing and unforgettable drama about heartache, inequality and the ties that bind, set in the heat of the 1912 miners’ strike. This groundbreaking play, not published or performed in Lawrence’s lifetime, premiered in a Peter Gill production at the Royal …

Cast announced for The Daughter-in-Law Read More »

In 2015, Sam Potter was awarded a place on the Channel 4 Playwright’s Scheme with Papatango. She spent a year as their Resident Playwright and Hanna is the result of that collaboration. Ahead of its London Premiere, she reveals how the idea for the play was conceived. There are two stories about how plays come …

Playwright Sam Potter on Hanna Read More »

Our sister company, Arcola Energy, is inviting 100 young programmers and engineers aged 8 to 18 to take part in a week-long ‘Hydrogen Hack‘. Using fuel cells and programming, young inventors will use their creativity and engineering skills to hack hardware: making it move faster, longer or to take its first steps as an animate object. The hack …

Arcola Energy to host ‘Hydrogen Hack’ Read More »

Five years ago I was a wandering itinerant folk singer/songwriter/performer/theatrical nut, living on a dime and sleeping on the floor of my best friend’s house. Seven months previously I had taken the somewhat drastic step of quitting my day job to pursue my dream of becoming a full time songwriter. I had saved up some …

Darren Clark on These Trees Are Made of Blood Read More »

Hackney Council has announced that it intends to develop several publicly-owned sites around Arcola, creating a new ‘Dalston Quarter’. They are running a public consultation, which closes this Sunday, to determine the principles which should guide the development. This is an unprecedented opportunity to help shape the future of Dalston, and to secure a place …

Our future in Dalston Read More »

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” So, apparently, said George Bernard Shaw, the playwright and critic who spent a whole lifetime playing: writing plays and working with players to stage them. His drama Candida – lesser-known than his major hits, Pygmalion, Man and Superman or Saint …

Beautiful: Not The Carole King Musical Read More »

3 fantastic new plays are transferring from the Edinburgh Fringe to Arcola Theatre next month, as part of our EH to E8 season. Artistic director and performer Emma D’Arcy and director Thomas Bailey tell us more about Callisto: A Queer Epic which opens 18 October. Briefly, what’s Callisto about? ED: It’s four interweaving LGBTQ love stories from …

En Route: Callisto: A Queer Epic Read More »