If London’s cultural richness is visible on every high street, why is it still so absent from our stages? Writing for Ikon London, Katharina Reinthaller, co-director of Voila! Theatre Festival, challenges the theatre world to embrace the languages, stories and artists that make this city what it is.
By Katharina Reinthaller
With around 250 languages spoken in the capital, London is one of the most linguistically diverse cities in the world – and we notice this in our everyday lives. My neighbours are from Guyana, Romania and Scotland. My local high street is a wonderful mix of Congolese, Colombian and Polish shops, restaurants and bars. And with this come, of course, the people and their languages, colloquialisms and accents. This is exactly why I love London. Walking the streets, experiencing a mix of sounds, smells and slight chaos.
But if we look at our cultural spaces, specifically theatre, this variety is not reflected in what and who we see on our stages, especially if we look beyond fringe theatre. Where are the accents? The different languages? The various traditions shared?
As co-director of Voila! Theatre Festival – the annual London festival celebrating migrant artists and multilingual performance – our focus has always been to address this lack of diversity in theatre, to counteract isolation and prejudice by sharing stories and moments, and connecting audiences beyond the stage. We share this ethos with a lot of brilliant artists and companies out there who have a similar mission to ours – Projekt Utopia, StoneCrabs Theatre Company and Migrants in Theatre are just a few to name. Theatre is an especially great way to bring people together because it is live, a unique experience, a place where language goes so much further than the spoken word, where understanding is not literal but a sentiment. Theatre is always an immediate, real conversation, which, at a time when media reports only pick up the negative headlines around migration, is crucial.
Big cities like London are constantly on the move, changing, adapting and evolving as different people arrive, leave and settle – just like our festival. Where people from different backgrounds who speak different languages meet, work and live together, tensions will arise and not everything will go smoothly. Outlooks are different, words are misunderstood, wires get crossed. But in exactly these moments, it is important to stay open, friendly and take a step towards each other – be patient with each other, have empathy and keep our minds free from prejudice. Changes, wherever they might happen, are never without challenges – every transformation means an adaptation, a ripple, sometimes a loss. A change can be unpredictable, unforeseeable, a limbo – but also an opportunity.
VOILA! started out as a French-English bilingual festival at the Cockpit in 2012 – sort of by accident. Dave Wybrow (Artistic Director at the Cockpit) happened to programme a handful of shows with French-speaking actors, and Sharlit Deyzac – who became the first official Voila! Theatre Festival Director – had the idea of continuing this spirit as a festival, et voilà! Here we are, 14 years later. Over the years, the festival has seen various iterations: in reaction to the Brexit referendum, Voila! evolved into Voila! Europe, opening its doors to more artists and languages as a counter-reaction.
In 2024, we felt the word Europe wasn’t right anymore for a festival with a global outlook. It was never meant as a geographical or origin definition, but rather as a description of a genre of work by artists who had trained in European theatre schools and were returning to or coming to the UK to share their knowledge and art. Dropping the word Europe emphasised our mission of breaking down definitions and barriers, focusing on being a panlingual festival where languages, cultures and stories exist within each other – connected, infused and transcendent – but still rooted in their own grounds.
This is reflected in the work we have at the festival today – for example, The Radical Wedding Engine, which is part wedding, part performance, by Ensemble not Found, a London-based theatre collective of five interdisciplinary, first-generation ESEA migrant artists, using Cantonese, Taiwanese and English.
Or Binary Lives – Where Fate Takes Us by Italian company Dis Èquilibre, blending visually poetic performance and physical theatre, where a wordless duet turns boredom into play, proving that sometimes the most radical journey is not moving at all. Or Do You Know Where To Go From Here? by Stephanie Renae Lau, a show on which artists from Austria, Australia, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Puerto Rico, the UK and the USA collaborated.
At Voila!, we want migrant communities who have made London their home to see and hear themselves, maybe for the first time, on stage. To hear their language, their accent, their stories. Told and made by artists from within their community. On the other hand, we hope to inspire audiences to take that leap, to see a show by an artist they don’t know, from a country they might not be familiar with, in a language they might not have heard. To learn something new, to share, to come together and experience. And it is this adventurous feeling, this ‘What if…?’ that makes Voila! so deeply connected to London.
For tickets and more information about Voila! Theatre Festival, which opens on 2 November 2026, visit: https://www.voilafestival.co.uk/
