Grimeborn Festival 2026: where daring stories, urgent questions and bold reinventions unfold across intimate stages

Mozart: Don Giovanni - Ensemble OrQuesta at 2025 Grimeborn Festival, Arcola Theatre (Photo: Julian Guidera)

The Grimeborn Festival is back at the Arcola Theatre this summer from 15 July to 5 September with its usual daring mix of new work and classics reinvented. Three double bills and the UK premiere of a new opera by Tuluğ Tırpan ensure that 20th century and contemporary repertoire is well represented, and then there are stripped-down interpretations of classics by Purcell, Handel and Mozart.

A double bill opens the festival with two chamber operas focusing on the climate crisis. Eden 2.0 from librettist Alexia Peniguel and composer William Gardner takes the Garden of Eden as the starting point to ask what if creation could be rebooted, but this time the tree of knowledge was sanctioned and freely accessible? Then Lisa Logan's After my Breath is a chamber opera for solo soprano, drawn from moments in the life of climate activist Greta Thunberg. 

There are two further double bills. That from The Opera Makers features farcical murder mysteries by twentieth century composers Madeleine Dring and Ned Rorem. Dring's The Cupboard is a whodunnit for three voices, whilst Rorem's Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters is a surreal philosophical musing on childhood innocence based on Gertrude Stein. Tearworks Productions pair Schoenberg's intense monodrama Erwartung with Kevin Rodgers’ The Murderous Delusions of Gavrilo K, first premiered in 2025, which explores violence and sanity in a two-act electroacoustic chamber work for four singers.  

Turkish composer Tuluğ Tırpan's docu-opera Lowest of the Low is based on the undercover experience of German investigative journalist Günter Wallraf who was disguised as a Turkish migrant worker in West Germany during the 1980. Arcola Theatre and Yeni Opera's production is the work's UK premiere, directed by Mehmet Ergen.

Ololyga presents a new work by Florence Carruthers Andrews based on Hildegard of Bingen's morality play Ordo Virtutum. Bitter Visions: By Order of Hildegard is a reimagining of Hildegard's work that offers an immersive, meditative experience that fuses medieval plainchant with ambient electronic soundscapes.

Having explored Mozart at previous festivals, Ensemble OrQuesta turns to Purcell with Dido and Aeneas directed by Marcio da Silva (who also sings Aeneas) and with Helen May and Rosemary Carlton Willis alternating Dido and the Sorceress. The company also continues its Mozart journey with a new production of The Magic Flute directed by Marcio da Silva (who also sings Monostatos) blending inventive physical theatre and starkly poetic imagery. Mozart features in Barefoot Opera's stripped-down production of Cosi fan tutte, directed by Jenny Miller,  

Handel's first opera for London, Rinaldo features in a new staging by Ralph Bridle that 'looks beyond the myth to the darker realities beneath the fantasy: captivity, enslavement and the human cost of war.'. Then one of Handel's greatest hits, Giulo Cesare, with New Trinity Baroque conducted by Pedrag Gosta featuring Sandro Rossi as Giulio Cesare and Radoslava Vorgić as Cleopatra.

Full details from the Arcola Theatre's website.