SAIGON, the restaurant-set production by French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen, runs at the Barbican Theatre from Thursday 11 to Saturday 13 March 2027. Standard tickets start at £24.
SAIGON runs at the Barbican Theatre from Thursday 11 to Saturday 13 March 2027. Three days, and a long evening: the production lasts three hours and 15 minutes, including a 20-minute interval. Standard tickets start at £24.
All of it happens in a restaurant. The set is panoramic, and the room is two places at once — Vietnam in the 1950s and France in the 1990s — so that people who could never have met end up at neighbouring tables. Out of those ordinary arrivals and orders, Caroline Guiela Nguyen builds something far larger: what France and Vietnam did to one another, and what colonial war and departure leave behind a generation later.
Performed in French and Vietnamese with English surtitles, it carries an age guidance of 14+.
Nguyen founded the company Les Hommes Approximatifs and is artistic director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, which produces. She returns to the Barbican after LACRIMA, which ran here in 2025.
The company is Caroline Arrouas and Maud Le Grevellec alternating, Dan Artus, Adeline Guillot and Cécile Coustillac alternating, Thi Trúc Ly Huynh, Hoàng Son Lê, Anne-Marie Ly-Cuong, Phú Hau Nguyen, Maurin Ollés and Matthieu Sampeur alternating, Yen Linh Tham, Anh Tran Nghia and Hiep Tran Nghia. The text is Nguyen's, written with the artistic team. Alice Duchange designed the set and Benjamin Moreau the costumes, with lighting by Jérémie Papin, sound by Antoine Richard and music by Teddy Gauliat-Pitois. Jérémie Scheidler and Manon Worms take dramaturgy and surtitling.
The Barbican presents; the Théâtre National de Strasbourg produces, with Les Hommes Approximatifs, the Odéon – théâtre de l'Europe and the Festival d'Avignon among a long list of co-producers. TimeOut Worldwide called the show “a glorious and heart-wrenching theatrical testament”, and The New York Times wrote that “it makes plain the intimate pain wrought by colonial arrogance, culture clashes and exile”.
Young Barbican tickets, for 16- to 29-year-olds, are £12; under-16s start at £14; and groups of ten or more book at 20% off. SAIGON is one of nine events in the Barbican's spring 2027 theatre and dance season.
