Kiln Theatre is opening its doors and sharing its much anticipated reopening season with the public in its newly refurbished building this September, after having been closed for two years for major refurbishment.
The transformed theatre will feature more seats, better accessibility, improved sightlines, a flexible stage and a welcoming new café on Kilburn High Road – while still offering accessible ticket prices.
The opening season sees a whole range of exciting new work from across the world: with five world premieres, one UK premiere, a musical revival and a large-scale community project.
The theatre opens with Holy Sh!t by Alexis Zegerman, a dark comedy revolving around couple Simone and Sam, who will go to any lengths to get their daughter into the local Church of England school and their friends Juliet and Nick, who reluctantly agree to help them out.
The theatre then stages the adaptation of Zadie Smith’s breakout novel, White Teeth, written for the stage by Stephen Sharkey. There has been a lot of buzz around this play, which is supposed to be a theatrical rollercoaster retelling of the story, featuring original songs. It also sounds like the most ambitious project the theatre has produced, with the cast of 14 just announced. White Teeth is a sprawling, celebratory epic around British identity, history and migration, set in Brent – it feels like there couldn’t be a more appropriate story to tell as part of the theatre’s reopening season.
January sees another world premiere of a co-production with Tamasha and Live Theatre: Approaching Empty by former cab driver and extraordinary storyteller Ishy Din. Inspired by Ishy’s own experience as a taxi driver, the piece is set in the North of England in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s death.
This is followed by the much-anticipated sequel to French writer Florian Zeller’s The Father and The Mother, which both enjoyed highly acclaimed and sold-out runs at the theatre in the past. The final instalment in the trilogy, The Son, is a heart-breaking story of a family disintegrating as a son begins to come undone.
The theatre will also be hosting the first revival in 30 years of Olivier and Tony Award nominated musical Blues in the Night, directed by Susie McKenna and starring the inimitable Sharon D. Clarke and Clive Rowe.
The current season then concludes with Anupama Chandrasekhar’s When the Crows Visit is a tense psychological thriller set in India with mythical, magical overtones all around a mother and son who must confront the ghosts of their past as they become trapped in a scandal.
The theatre celebrates its heritage first as the Foresters’ Hall, then as the Tricycle, and now as Kiln Theatre, and it continues to be proudly located in the community in Kilburn. In this spirit, the theatre will be making A Friendly Society, a community project which shares the untold stories of social care and migration in Brent.
