The panlingual fringe festival will bring together 450 artists for three weeks of performances, live streams, workshops and events, championing underrepresented artists and stories from across the world.
Following its expansion into a multi-venue festival with support from Arts Council England in 2024, Voila! achieved record-breaking ticket sales in 2025 and returns this year with work across Barons Court Theatre, Canal Cafe Theatre, Etcetera Theatre, The Playground Theatre, Theatro Technis, The Space Theatre, Upstairs at the Gatehouse and festival home and producer The Cockpit.
More than half of this year’s programme will be performed in both English and at least one other language, while subtitles or surtitles will be provided for productions not performed in English.
Highlights include The Radical Wedding Engine at The Cockpit, described as part wedding and part performance, from Ensemble not Found, a London-based collective of five interdisciplinary, first-generation ESEA migrant artists.
The venue will also host Legend of Kaliakra, telling the legend of forty maidens who chose death over slavery. Directed by Elica Yovcheva, it will be performed in Bulgarian with English surtitles.
At Barons Court Theatre, Nessuno Collective’s The Habit of Getting Used to It arrives as the recipient of the inaugural Instituto Cervantes x Voila! Grant, while Taiwan-based Sun Son Theatre’s Lament of the Wandering Head uses the Southeast Asian myth of the flying human head to explore diaspora, displacement and identity.
Italian company Batisfera will bring The Gummy Bears’ Great War to Etcetera Theatre following a successful run at the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The object theatre show, performed on a table using real sweets and small lights, received four-star reviews from The Stage and The Telegraph in Edinburgh.
Elsewhere in the programme, Akeim Toussaint Buck’s autobiographical solo Windows of Displacement will play Theatro Technis, blending dance, song and spoken word to explore personal and global narratives, ancestral memory and the shifting politics surrounding the movement of people.
The Space will host Heaven to Earth Plus, an autobiographical story by a Ukrainian soldier told through music, poetry and Ukrainian folk songs by Shum Ukrainian Theatre Community, while Natasha Markou returns to Voila! following a sell-out run in 2025 with new two-hander Brewtopia at Upstairs at the Gatehouse.
Theatre Deli will also continue to support one Voila! production through its development residency programme, with this year’s recipient Romeo Lau presenting BLONDIE BLUE EYES at Canal Cafe Theatre.
Fae Fichtner, co-director of Voila! Theatre Festival, said: “As our world changes and we face unprecedented consequences of the climate crisis, political division and the rise of the far right, it is more important than ever that we come together and share our stories.
“At Voila!, Londoners can meet their neighbours on stage by discovering the stories and perspectives of the people who make this city one of the most multicultural places in the world.”
Co-director Katharina Reinthaller added: “We are proud to continue to platform work by multilingual artists and champion the work of migrant artists in the UK.
“More than 250 languages are spoken in the capital, making it one of the most linguistically diverse cities in the world. However, this is not mirrored in the work we usually see on British stages; there’s still too little diversity and cultural exchange, and we still don’t hear enough variation in accents on stage.”
Festival producer and Cockpit director Dave Wybrow said: “With eight venues, 450 artists, 101 shows and 60 languages, Voila! is about bringing artists and audiences together across the city, championing risk-taking work and creating space for representation and community connection.”
Voila! Theatre Festival is programmed through an open call to artists and companies across the world and encourages applications from artists who may not find opportunities in the UK due to accent discrimination, language barriers or aesthetic mismatches with mainstream British theatre.
Voila! Theatre Festival runs from 2–22 November 2026 across eight London venues. For tickets and more information, visit: https://www.voilafestival.co.uk/
