Croydonites Festival 2026: 15 Shows, 4 to 21 Nov, From £10

Croydonites, Croydon’s festival of new theatre, runs from Wednesday 4 to Saturday 21 November 2026, with 15 programme entries across The Front Room in St George’s Walk, Stanley Arts in South Norwood and the Croydon Clocktower. Tickets are on sale now. Most shows cost £15 or £12; the two comedy nights are £15 and the close-up magic sessions £10 or £8. (Croydonites: What’s on; Culture Croydon)

The headline acts are Hannah Maxwell’s Turn Your F*cking Phones Off, which won a Scotsman Fringe First at this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe, James Rowland’s Team Viking in a tenth anniversary edition, and Ollie Horn’s The Most Toast. The festival also premieres a short film made in Croydon town centre with local volunteers.

This year’s festival is a month later than last year’s, which ran from 8 October to 1 November 2025. The festival says that edition had 29 performances in seven Croydon venues and an audience of 3,677. (Croydonites)

The full programme

Every show, with times, venue, price and age guidance as the festival lists them. Where a show has two prices, the festival prints them as “£15 / £12” without saying who qualifies for the lower one; the booking page will show it.

(Croydonites: What’s on)

What the shows are

• Turn Your F*cking Phones Off, Hannah Maxwell. A solo show about doomscrolling and a strange job she once had, told from a payphone. It won a Scotsman Fringe First and was a sell-out at the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe, the festival says. (Croydonites)
• Primal Bog, Rosa Garland. An hour of clowning, slime, lip syncs and live tattooing from the creator of Trash Salad. Over 18s only. (Croydonites)
• Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak, Victoria Melody, directed by Mark Thomas. Storytelling and stand-up about joining a historical re-enactment society after a divorce and finding the 17th-century Diggers, and their modern equivalents. (Croydonites)
• Close-up, Vincent Gambini. Fifteen minutes at a cafe table watching sleight-of-hand magic, with slots from 10am to 4pm on both Saturdays. (Croydonites)
• CroydonBuilds, two double bills of work the festival has helped develop. On 7 November, Mitra Djalili, who played Chloe in series 3 of Ted Lasso, with Wife Support, and Kat McGarr. On 21 November, Amy Gwilliam’s Honest Mother and Anita Wadsworth’s Sex and Other Stories. (7 November; 21 November)
• Dick’s Picks, Dick Denham’s comedy night, in its third year. On 7 November the line-up includes Sally Ann Fellowes, Darnell Jesse, Nalin Dissanayake, Rachel Porter and Sam Eley as Basil Crumbwick, with MC Jen Nolan. On 21 November it is Roger O’Sullivan, Caz Thorne, CK Nath and Katie Norris, with MC Louise Bastock. (7 November; 21 November)
• Man or Bear, written by Sarah Hehir and directed by Ursula Martinez. A darkly comic play built on the viral question of whether you would rather meet a man or a bear alone in the woods. (Croydonites)
• Team Viking, James Rowland. The story of the Viking funeral he gave his best friend, back ten years after its 2016 Edinburgh premiere. (Croydonites)
• The Most Toast, Ollie Horn. An audience show built on finding out who in the room has eaten the most toast. (Croydonites)
• Anatomy of Survival, Frauke Requardt and Vivienne Franzmann. Dance theatre about one row in a cafe, told through 22 eyewitness accounts. This is the one show in Stanley Arts’ Main Hall. (Croydonites)
• A Suffocating Choking Feeling, TomYumSim Theatre. An interactive satire of influencer culture, inspired by the cancer-faking influencer Belle Gibson. (Croydonites)
• CroydonBites, three local artists trying out new work for the first time, including Abi Studley’s They Only Accept Frauds and Coddiwomple Theatre’s Batman Needs A Job. (Croydonites)

The Croydon film premiere

The most Croydon thing in the programme is on Saturday 14 November. Artist Richard DeDomenici has remade the Warsaw chase scenes from the action film Heads of State, starring Idris Elba, John Cena and Priyanka Chopra, which were filmed in Croydon town centre. His shot-for-shot version was filmed with local volunteers on the evening of 11 October in the original locations.

The afternoon starts with a 2pm “Crollywood” walking tour of Croydon film locations, which the festival says include Batman, The Da Vinci Code, Criminal, Black Mirror and Taylor Swift’s Opalite, followed by the premiere at the David Lean Cinema at 3.30pm. DeDomenici has done this twice before for Croydonites: American Assassin, set in Istanbul but filmed on St George’s Walk, in 2018, and All of Us Strangers in Sanderstead in 2024. (Croydonites)

Where the venues are

• The Front Room, 37-39 St George’s Walk, CR0 1YL, in the town centre. Croydon BID calls it an intimate space “hidden behind the lowest of low-key entrances”, so look carefully. It hosts nine of the shows. (Croydon BID venue listing; Croydon BID guide)
• Stanley Arts, 12 South Norwood Hill, SE25 6AB, with shows in the Society Room and the Main Hall. Norwood Junction is the nearest station.
• Croydon Clocktower, Katharine Street, home of the David Lean Cinema and the Clocktower Cafe.

The Front Room and the Clocktower are both a few minutes’ walk from East and West Croydon stations. If you are driving, our parking in Croydon page has the town centre car parks and tariffs, and Croydon roadworks and travel covers closures. Note that trams do not run east of East Croydon until 5 November, covered in our tram closure story.

Booking

All tickets are sold through the festival’s TicketSource box office, linked from each show’s page on croydonites.com. Stanley Arts also lists the shows held there on its own site. For more of what is on in the borough that month, see What’s on in Croydon.