Camden People’s Theatre (CPT) today announces its Autumn 2025 season, a boundary-pushing programme of politically urgent new work alongside a landmark shift in how it supports artists financially.
CPT is moving away from the traditional door-split model and instead offering artists guaranteed payments. For this season, every artist or company programmed in CPT’s main programme will receive an upfront fee regardless of ticket sales.
This new approach is both political and practical: CPT sees it as part of its mission to actively reduce the financial precarity faced by marginalised artists, rebalancing risk and responsibility. Whilst acknowledging the financial risks of this new model, CPT believes it will better serve both artists and audiences, and ensure that the artists have more time and security to focus on the quality of their work.
The guarantees are underpinned by a mixed-income model: box office income (which the venue plans to boost with increased marketing and audience development efforts), fundraising, and strategic support from aligned partners. CPT is also exploring future income streams such as further cultivating individual donors and forging creative partnerships, but only where these align with its commitment to justice, equity and artist-led work.
CPT hopes to pursue this guarantee-based model long-term – if financially viable – as part of a wider strategic shift. The theatre is reducing the number of shows it programmes, and extending their runs, to give artists more meaningful support, improve press interest and help build momentum for each production.
Importantly, this model does not come at the expense of early-stage or experimental work. CPT will continue to platform scratch performances and work-in-progress nights on Tuesdays, as well as its cabaret and alternative programming on weekends.
Autumn 2025 Season: A bold, political programme
This season’s programme brings together urgent and inventive voices in theatre. Alongside the new financial model, CPT is renewing its commitment to timely political programming, opening the season with documentary theatre reporting from Gaza, handing Saturday nights over to Trans artists for building takeovers, and ensuring every finished show programmed has a layer of integrated accessibility.
From Living with Drones, an electrifying live journalism piece exploring the lived reality of drone warfare in Gaza, to City for Incurable Women, a surreal and unsettling dive into the history of medical misogyny through the lens of 19th-century psychiatry, these are shows that interrogate power, politics, and personal legacy.
There’s also Countess Dracula – a bold and blood-soaked reworking of the vampire myth that collides clowning with menopausal fury and The Foodbank Show, a furious, funny and participatory protest-performance about austerity Britain, complete with free pizza and radical hope.
Rounding out the season is A Court of Paper, a probing, multimedia excavation of Nazis, family complicity and historical memory in the Netherlands, and Barrier(s), a beautifully performed, queer, bilingual love story exploring communication across culture, silence, and sound.
A Radical Shake-Up Of Artist Payments – A Summary
A move away from door splits towards guaranteed pay.
All companies this season will be paid a guarantee.
The goal is long-term, not just a one-off for this season.
Funding model to support this includes: Ticket sales, fundraising and external support and potentially the exploration of creative partnerships
The model is political as well as practical.
This is not at the expense of scratch or development work, which will still be very much supported.
Strategic shift: fewer shows, longer runs.
AUTUMN 2025 SEASON LISTINGS
・ Living with Drones by Stitched!
16th –18th October |7pm | (3pm Saturday matinee)
A powerful piece blending personal testimony and political analysis with urgent calls to action.
An interactive live journalism show about the devastating and traumatic impacts of Israel’s use of drones in the besieged Gaza strip. By tying together personal narratives and documentation about the on-the-ground reality of this genocide, this show weaves a compelling narrative that asks audiences to engage with violations of humanitarian and international law in Gaza since October 2023.
・ City for Incurable Women by fish in a dress
22nd–25th October | 7pm | (3pm Saturday matinee)
Part-history, part-confession – a surreal, sharp-edged retelling of 19th-century ‘hysteria’ diagnoses and the misogynistic legacies they’ve left behind.
Paris, 1880s. In a psychiatric hospital, female patients performed ‘hysteria’ for the public. The doctors went to extraordinary lengths to prove their theories about the four stages of madness. Today, in the 21st century, the storyteller Kae, begins to explore this history. They trace the echoes to today, feeling them linger in their own body and perhaps gets a little too caught in the story.
・ Countess Dracula by Joanna Holden and OftheJackel
29th October – 1st November | 7pm | 3pm Sat matinee
A raucous reimagining of the Dracula myth, blending clown, menopause, and monstrous comedy to bite back at society’s fear of ageing women.
“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!”
From the forgotten depths something truly awful is coming.
Lurking in the shadows is your worst nightmare.
A parasite,
A monster,
A woman.
This is no ordinary adaptation. Joanna Holden is getting on. The roles are drying up and so is her skin. After too long in the shadows she’s coming to claim what is hers. One of literatures greatest monsters as you’ve never seen it before.
・ The Foodbank Show by Carmen Collective
4th–8th November | 7pm | (3pm Saturday matinee)
Furious, funny and fuelled by radical hope, this eye-opening, thought-provoking theatre experience takes aim at Britain’s broken safety net.
Right now, over three million people use food banks in this country. What the f**k has happened?
Join acclaimed theatre-maker Sam Rees for an evening of anarchic storytelling filled with rage, hope, and radical conversation. Based on over two years of in-depth research, The Food Bank Show is an electrifying exploration of a failing system, the people caught in its web, and those striving to change it. Audience participation isn’t just encouraged; it’s rewarded with sweets!
・ A Court of Paper by Matthew Schwarz and Cecilia Thoden van Velzen
4th–7th November | 9pm | (3pm Thursday matinee)
Two artists dig into their Dutch family histories of Nazi collaboration and resistance, asking how to carry the weight of the past in the present.
In January 2025, the Dutch Central Archive for Special Jurisdiction released 450.000 documents containing the actions of Dutch citizens who collaborated with nazi Germany. After 80 years of silence, this re-entry into the public eye has sparked (inter)national debate, and provokes an entire generation of young Dutch people to decide if they want to know who they are related to.
In A Court of Paper, Cecilia and Matthew dive into the archives and their family histories, containing stories of the collaboration, resistance and oppression, in an attempt to understand the past and make its lessons tangible in the present.
・ Barrier(s) by Eloise Pennycott
Presented by Deafinitely Theatre, Birmingham Rep, CPT & Leeds Playhouse
12th–29th November | 7.30pm | (2pm matinees on Thurs & Sat)
A touching bilingual love story exploring how we connect across language, culture and silence. Directed by Paula Garfield.
Alana and Katie come from different worlds. One is hearing, one is deaf. Together, they navigate the joys and struggles of love, communication and survival in a world that keeps putting up barriers. When the world tries to silence you, how can you hold on to love?
Camden People’s Theatre Autumn Season
16th October – 29th November 2025
https://cptheatre.co.uk/festivals/Autumn2025
