EIF 2026 first look: Joyce McMillan on theatre
This year’s EIF theatre programme consists of a bold and complex range of shows, writes Joyce McMillan
The Edinburgh International Festival’s artistic director Nicola Benedetti says that, after recent funding improvements, this is the first time in her four years at the EIF that she has been able to plan a full programme; and in terms of theatre, it certainly looks like it.
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The 2026 theatre programme - which also marks the reopening of the much loved King’s Theatre, after a four-year redevelopment - responds to the festival theme “All Rise”, and to the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, with a bold and complex range of 11 shows from ten countries, some of them directly addressing the condition of 21st century America, others reflecting on wider themes that underlie its current crises.
In the first category comes a thrillingly timely revival of Ivo van Hove’s acclaimed 2008 production, for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, of Angels In America, Tony Kushner’s mighty 1991 two-part epic written in response to the AIDS crisis, and subtitled “a gay fantasia on national themes.” Also at the King’s will be the European premiere of Edinburgh favourite Geoff Sobelle’s Clown Show, which portrays contemporary America as a circus on the brink of chaotic collapse. The Lyceum hosts the Flea Theater of New York, with award-winning writer and director Zora Howard’s 2023 play Hang Time, which uses images of lynching in the US deep south to explore the lives of black American men, then and now; and Bakelite of France’s Hostile, at Church Hill, is a family show that explores the western myth of the cowboy from a completely original angle.
Meanwhile, some of the wider issues are reflected - for example - in Lebanese artists Lina Majdalanie and Rabhi Mroue’s Four Walls And A Roof, inspired by the story of Bertolt Brecht’s wartime exile in America; and in a new relationship between the EIF and its two great postwar sister festivals, Avignon and Holland. Their co-production of Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People - directed by Christiane Jatahy, and starring Oscar-nominated actor and director Wagner Moura - is set in contemporary Brazil; and raises questions about the ideal of integrity in public office that could hardly be more urgent, as we mark the 250th anniversary of the world’s most powerful nation, founded on high civic principle, but struggling - then and now - to live out the meaning of its creed.
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