London is about to get one of its coolest theatres back. Today, The Yard theatre in Hackney Wick has announced its opening season in its new building – and there are some seriously big names and promising shows on the programme.
Topping that list is Ian McKellen, who will step back onto the stage in his first major theatrical role since he injured himself falling into the front row during the run of Player Kings on the West End in 2024. He’ll star in Lear (opening November 2026), a reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy by award-winning playwright Simon Stephens (whose most recent revivals include Vanya, a radical one-man retelling of Chekhov’s classic play on the West End, which starred Andrew Scott). It’ll be directed by Jay Miller, The Yard’s founder and artistic director.
As for the rest of the programme, things kick off in July with The World is Full of Married Men, the London premiere of Malmö Stadsteater’s adaptation of Jackie Collins’s beloved debut novel, billed as an “outrageously sexy production”. Performed by dolls and set in dollhouses, it feels like a welcome continuation of The Yard’s commitment to platforming boundary-pushing new work.
And speaking of new work, January 2027 will see Sex Education writer Troy Hunter mount his debut play, There’s Something About Adam Black, a comedy about a Grindr aficionado who meets a poetry-writing lad from Yorkshire. There’s also Philosophy of the World by experimental theatre company In Bed With My Brother in July, announced previously as part of the new season, which got rave review at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
Beloved classics get a look-in, too, with a production in September of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, returning 50 years on from its first performance, with new music by Hackney-born grime MC and producer Jammz.
The season ends in March 2027 with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, adapted for The Yard by Holly Robinson and directed by Anna Himali Howard.
The Yard will reopen on the theatre’s 15th anniversary. When it opened in 2011, it was a DIY theatre run by Miller and 50 volunteers in a warehouse that was only supposed to exist for six months. Instead, it became one of the capital’s best-loved producers of forward-thinking theatre, live art, cabaret, dance and drag, and an incubator for work that went on to become BAFTA-winning television shows (Michaela’s Coel’s Chewing Gum) and win Olivier awards (The Glass Menagerie).
“They said it wouldn’t happen. It’s happening,” says artistic director Jay Miller. “Same spirit, this time in a better, bigger theatre.”
The new theatre is designed by London-based Takero Shimazaki Architects (Royal Academy of Dance, Curzon Camden) and is twice the size of the original. Built using reused brick from the original building, it will house a 220-seat curved auditorium and a six-storey natural ventilation chimney – plus a space for the venue’s artist development programme, which will work with young people from primary age onwards.
Tickets to The Yard’s opening season will go on sale to the general public on Thursday May 28 at midday, with a members’ pre-sale starting on Thursday May 21.
