The Barbican has published Theatre and Dance: Spring 2027, a nine-event season running from January to May across the Barbican Theatre and The Pit. It opens with three MimeLondon productions and ends with Jamie Hale and CRIPtic Arts reworking Romeo and Juliet.
The Barbican's spring 2027 theatre and dance programme runs from 12 January to 15 May 2027, divided between the main Barbican Theatre and The Pit, the studio on Level -2 of the Silk Street building. Nine events are listed under the season heading Theatre and Dance: Spring 2027, and the shape is familiar: international work that is not booking anywhere else in London, alongside companies the Barbican has presented before and a transfer from a south London producing house.
MimeLondon takes the first month. Modo Grosso, the Belgian company founded by Alexis Rouvre, brings Tout / Rien to The Pit from Tuesday 12 - Saturday 16 January 2027, a 60-minute piece created by Rouvre and performed by Loïc Faure in which chains, pendulums, magnets and volcanic stones are choreographed like dancers. Andrew Dawson follows in the same space from Tuesday 19 - Saturday 23 January 2027 with Absence and Presence, the work he built out of the death of his father, whose body lay undiscovered for ten days in 1985. Dawson made it more than twenty years ago and returns to it here, with video by Dawson and Graham Johnston, music by Joby Talbot and lighting by Steve Smith.
The third MimeLondon title moves up to the Barbican Theatre. Plexus Polaire, the French-Norwegian company whose Moby Dick sold out here in 2025, stage A Doll's House from Wednesday 3 - Saturday 6 February 2027. Artistic director Yngvild Aspeli plays Nora and voices the life-sized puppets who make up the rest of the household, in a reading that takes its cue from the tarantella in Ibsen's second act and fills the stage with spiders. It runs 1 hour 20 minutes without an interval, is performed in English, and carries an age guidance of 14+.
Zoo Co are in The Pit from Monday 8 - Saturday 13 February 2027 with Three Men On A Billboard, their follow-up to the multi-award-winning Perfect Show for Rachel. It takes the 1982 contest in which three men agreed to live on a 30-foot billboard beside a motorway until only one was left standing; the radio station behind it expected a few weeks and got 261 days. Company founders Flo O'Mahony and Fleur Rooth direct live on stage each night from audience suggestions, working with writer Jackson Used. BSL is integrated into every performance and all performances are relaxed.
Boy Blue mark twenty-five years with two events over one weekend. A Night With Boy Blue, the company showcase created and directed by Kenrick 'H2O' Sandy and Michael 'Mikey J' Asante, is in the Barbican Theatre from Friday 19 - Sunday 21 February 2027, running 2 hours 20 minutes with an interval and putting students and professional dancers on the stage together; the Saturday evening performance is BSL-interpreted. The Saturday daytime belongs to BB – Frontline Battle, a 2v2 all-styles competition with guest judges and DJs, running from noon to 5pm on 20 February 2027. Audience tickets are £7; battlers enter in pairs through the Lazey app at £16 a pair and must be 16 or over.
March opens with the transfer. WITNESS, adapted for the stage by Suzann McLean and David Fielding from Alex Wheatle's novella, arrives in The Pit from Thursday 4 - Saturday 6 March 2027 after its run at Theatre Peckham last spring. Cornell, excluded after a fight he did not start, lands in a pupil referral unit and sees something he then has to decide whether to report. It is presented by Theatre Peckham, Words of Colour and the Barbican, runs 1 hour 30 minutes and is guided at 12+.
The largest piece is SAIGON, which Caroline Guiela Nguyen brings to the Barbican Theatre from Thursday 11 - Saturday 13 March 2027. Set in a restaurant in 1950s Vietnam and 1990s France, it runs 3 hours 15 minutes including an interval and is performed in French and Vietnamese with English surtitles. Nguyen founded the company Les Hommes Approximatifs and is artistic director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, which produces; she was last on this stage with LACRIMA in 2025.
The season closes two months later with Jamie Hale and CRIPtic Arts' Romeo and Juliet, in The Pit from Thursday 13 - Saturday 15 May 2027. Juliet is a disabled woman who uses a ventilator to breathe and whose parents have decided there is no life for her outside the house; Romeo is disabled, independent and entirely uninterested in that arrangement. Every performance is BSL-interpreted, captioned, audio-described and relaxed, the fullest access provision anywhere in the season. The production is supported by the Wellcome Trust and forms part of the Cripping Breath research project led by Sheffield University.
Standard tickets in The Pit are £21.50, including a £1.50 transaction fee. In the Barbican Theatre they start at £22 for A Night With Boy Blue and at £24 for A Doll's House and SAIGON. Young Barbican tickets, for 16- to 29-year-olds, are £10 in The Pit and £12 in the theatre, and groups book at 20% off across the season.
