Artwork: Martha Hegarty
Jermyn Street Theatre has announced its 2026 Autumn season, featuring the UK premiere of Simon Stephens’ A Slow Fire and a major revival of Richard Eyre’s adaptation of Ghosts. With just 70 seats and audiences never more than four rows from the action, the season promises intimate, powerful storytelling where, as the theatre says, “Every flinch is felt.”
By Grace Hatchell, writing from a bunker made entirely of Yorkshire puddings and theatrical nerves
Ey Up… some theatres invite you in with chandeliers and velvet and an Irn-Bru. Jermyn Street Theatre? It pulls you down the stairs and sits you so close to the action you can practically hear the characters’ thoughts rattling about.
And honestly? I’m feeling it already.
Because when a theatre proudly tells you “Every flinch is felt. Every whisper is audible,” I don’t know about you, but my little theatre-loving heart starts thudding like a late train through Leeds.
Jermyn Street Theatre has unveiled its 2026 Autumn season and, blimey, there’s no playing safe here.
First up comes the UK premiere of A Slow Fire by Tony and Olivier Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens, running from 20 August to 26 September, with press night on 25 August.
And oh, this one sounds like it crawled straight out of a restless dream.
Originally staged earlier this year by Dublin’s Glass Mask Theatre, A Slow Fire follows Ashton and Reese — two survivors tucked away in a bunker after catastrophe has reshaped the world. They pass time retelling stories from the “before times,” searching for meaning and hope… until a stranger arrives.
Saviour? Storyteller? Or summat far more dangerous?
The production arrives as part thriller, part soul excavation, with Glass Mask Theatre Artistic Director Rex Ryan directing the London premiere.
Simon Stephens himself describes it as “a surreal exploration of the urgency of hope in a time of apocalypse” and says he secretly knew it belonged in the West End.
Well Simon, if ever there were a theatre built for trembling silences and end-of-the-world reckonings, it might just be this one.
Stephens’ writing pedigree, of course, needs little introduction. The playwright behind The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time adaptation, Sea Wall, Punk Rock, Motortown and Heisenberg has spent years peeling back the layers of human behaviour with a scalpel and a poet’s eye.
Then — and I’m clutching my satchel slightly tighter here — comes Ghosts.
Henrik Ibsen’s devastating family drama returns in Richard Eyre’s acclaimed adaptation, running from 8 October to 14 November, with press night on 14 October.
Directed by Carne Deputy Director Kwame Owusu, Ghosts takes us to Norway in 1890, where Helene Alving reunites with her son Oswald during the opening of an orphanage commemorating her late husband. But buried truths don’t stay buried for long.
And that line…
“They don’t die. They don’t vanish. They walk the world again.”
Ooof.
Now there’s a sentence that arrives with muddy boots and refuses to leave.
Ghosts has always been a play about the things families carry — shame, expectation, duty and inherited wounds — and Richard Eyre’s adaptation continues to haunt audiences decades after its first staging.
Eyre, former National Theatre Director and multi-award-winning theatre and film-maker, has called Jermyn Street “the perfect theatre for this intensely wrought play.”
And I can see why.
Because this theatre isn’t about hiding at the back with a packet of wine gums and emotional distance.
This is studio theatre at its most fearless.
Artistic Director Stella Powell-Jones and Co-Artistic Director David Doyle say the season reflects their ambition to create “truly unmissable theatre at studio scale,” bringing together urgent writing and exciting collaborations.
And that spirit runs right through the programme and that spirit? It isn’t hiding backstage. It’s marching straight through the season in muddy boots.
The theatre is currently enjoying sell-out success with The Waves, adapted by Flora Wilson Brown and directed by Júlia Levai, while Wife to James Whelan waits in the wings before autumn arrives with bunker walls, family ghosts and moral earthquakes.
But I keep circling back to that line.
“Every flinch is felt.”
Aye.
That’s what theatre should do sometimes.
Not sit politely behind glass.
Not keep us safe and comfortable.
But lean close enough that we feel the breath, the tension, the crack in somebody’s voice.
And judging by this season, Jermyn Street Theatre intends to make us feel every single second of it.
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