As Camden People's Theatre turns 30, its new artistic director Rio Matchett picks five shows that helped give the pint-sized theatre a reputation for nurturing big talents.
Camden People's Theatre champions bold, inventive theatre that embraces the world's complexities.
With a deep commitment to supporting new work and artistic risk-taking, we nurture a broad range of theatre-makers, with a focus on those often marginalised or underrepresented in the industry. Our approach supports these artists to build sustainable careers while creating new work responding to today's most urgent issues. As a civic space, we bring artists, audiences, and communities together to have meaningful conversations that promote empathy, collaboration and shared ownership of the future.
Over 30 years, CPT has worked with, and helped launch the careers of, ground-breaking artists including Fevered Sleep, Chris Thorpe, Emily Lim (who now runs the National Theatre's Public Acts programme), Scottee, Common Wealth and many, many others. Here are five of the biggest shows to come out of the theatre.
1. Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons by Sam Steiner
In 2014, CPT struck up a relationship with the National Student Drama Festival, working to create a pipeline for unconventional artists and theatre makers. The following year, we picked Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons by Sam Steiner, a linguistically radical new play about communication, power and love — and took it from the NSDF festival to CPT for its first London run. It was a huge hit, selling out and returning for a run in 2016, before being revived in the West End in 2023, starring TV favourites Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner. Later in 2023, the Royal Ballet produced a dance adaptation of Lemons called The Limit, with great reviews. Lemons appears on the theatre studies curriculum of multiple universities and drama schools, renowned for its political and formally inventive use of language, combined with its lasting humanity.
2. BULLISH by Milk Presents
Milk Presents brought one of their earliest productions, A Real Man’s Guide to Sainthood to Camden with our support and later performed here with their award-winning take on Joan of Arc, JOAN. Off the back of that success we wanted to develop our relationship with this exciting young company. In 2017, Milk Presents were the recipients of our Home Run commission, awarding them a £4,000 commission with rehearsal space and tailored support, taking a project from work-in-progress stage to a three-week London run of a full production, co-produced by CPT. The show they made, BULLISH, was a genderqueer reimagining of Greek myth that inspired us to build a whole festival around it; Come As You Are celebrated queer, trans and non-binary stories. Milk Presents have gone on to become a leading company in the field of queer performance.
3. Queens of Sheba by Nouveau Riche
The playwright and theatre-maker Ryan Calais Cameron applied to and was selected for our Starting Blocks artist support programme in 2018, with a new project called Queens of Sheba, about the intersections of misogyny and racial discrimination — aka 'misogynoir'. Ryan and his company, who became known as Nouveau Riche that same year, worked with our support for 10 weeks towards the first, in-progress sharings of Queens of Sheba (with a script by Jessica L Hagan) in March at CPT.
Recognising the quality and urgency of this work, we programmed a short run of Queens of Sheba in autumn 2018, which sold out. On the back of this premiere, the show was picked up by the Underbelly/New Diorama Untapped Awards, and taken to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, where it made waves. In January 2023, Queens of Sheba transferred to New York as part of the prestigious Under the Radar festival.
4. Sh!t Actually by Sh!t Theatre
Over the years CPT has provided a launchpad for many amazing artists. One company who immediately spring to mind are the award-winning, critically-acclaimed and rudely named, Sh!t Theatre. Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole, with the duo's late, long-term director Adam Brace, who made up Sh!t Theatre, were associate artists at CPT for five years. They have won countless awards, from Scotsman Fringe firsts to the Critics' Circle Award in Adelaide. In 2019 they performed Sh!t Actually as part of our winter season — a hilarious, two-woman remake of Love Actually. It became our fastest-ever selling show and five years later they returned with another sell-out run for Christmas 2024.
5. The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale by Haley McGee
Haley McGee's second ever show, The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale, was supported through our Starting Blocks programme in 2017. We helped to support the show from its inception, before it went on a global tour and became a critically acclaimed book. Haley has gone from strength to strength since then, with her solo show, Age Is A Feeling, nominated for an Olivier Award in 2023. She is now an internationally acclaimed actor, writer, solo performer, improviser and VoiceOver artist. Her solo shows have toured to 35 venues in 11 countries, winning awards including Best Production at United Solo, NYC (the world's largest solo show festival). It's amazing for us to see the careers that the artists we support go on to have, and goes to show that we've managed to get pretty good at picking great artists to back!
See the next big thing at Camden People's Theatre
