What’s on at Seven Dials this spring
Seven Dials Playhouse is leaning into the strange, the intimate and the unexpected this spring.
Its newly announced 2026 season, Extraordinary Stories, runs from 3 February to 29 March and brings together a wide mix of theatre across the venue’s two spaces. Expect new writing, solo performance, musical comedy and the occasional brush with horror — all rooted in the kinds of stories that tend to surface when life gets messy.
In the main space, The House, the season opens with Brainsluts, a brisk, darkly funny play set during a clinical drug trial, where five strangers discover that boredom can be as revealing as truth serum. Later comes a new staging of David Drake’s landmark solo show The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, revived by Hive North with a clear eye on legacy, activism and the personal cost of the AIDS crisis. The spring closes with The Murmuration of Starlings, a tender, sci-fi-tinged love story unfolding inside the shifting reality of a mind affected by dementia.
Downstairs in The Pen, shorter runs put the spotlight on distinctive comic voices. Hudson Hughes brings At Your Service, a comedy-horror complete with electronic trickery and a coffin on stage. A Stan Is Born returns following a sold-out summer run, celebrating pop divas, obsession and queer fandom with warmth and self-awareness. There’s also a work-in-progress from Olivia McLeod, whose gleefully unhinged comic persona is very much the point.
The programme is rounded out by Peekaboo, a monthly improv night from leapday, hosted by David Elms, mixing established names with emerging performers in an easygoing late-evening slot.
Tickets and full details: https://www.sevendialsplayhouse.co.uk/
Elena Leo is the Arts & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
