MimeLondon

THEATRE RE'S INTERNATIONAL HIT, THE NATURE OF FORGETTING, IS COMING TO HACKNEY EMPIRE

Tom is living with young onset dementia. We meet him as he prepares for his 55th birthday party and past memories come flooding back.

Following more than 200 performances worldwide, Theatre Re brings its explosive, powerful and joyous piece about what is left when memory is gone back to London for its landmark 10th Anniversary Season.

Since its 2017 premiere, The Nature of Forgetting has moved audiences from New York to Seoul, São Paulo to Shanghai, and played to sold-out houses across the US, China and beyond; establishing itself as one of the most powerful theatrical experiences of the past decade.

Developed with Neuroscience Professor Kate Jeffery and the Alzheimer’s Society, The Nature of Forgetting is a life-affirming journey into a weakening mind, where fragmented does not have to mean defeated.

As one of the UK’s leading visual theatre companies, Theatre Re combines original live music with striking visual performance to create deeply moving, non-verbal theatre about universal human challenges and the fragility of life.

★★★★★ ‘Incredible’ GQ Magazine
★★★★★ ‘Exquisitely beautiful and punishingly energetic’ The List
★★★★★ ‘Breathtaking and bold’ Broadway World
'Profoundly moving' BBC Radio 4

Thursday 8 October 2026 7.30pm
Hackney Empire
291 Mare Street,
London E8 1EJ

£15 - £32 (plus £1.50 per ticket online, and over the phone)
Age guidance 8+
Runs approx 1 hour 15 minutes, with no interval
The performance will be BSL Interpreted by Anna Kitson.

Tickets: https://www.hackneyempire.co.uk/events/the-nature-of-forgetting

Watch the trailer: https://youtu.be/4iuoFyzjlnk

The Nature of Forgetting | Hackney Empire Tom is living with young onset dementia. We meet him as he prepares for his 55th birthday party and past memories come flooding back. Following more than 2

And the second show we'll be supporting is

Michael Zandl’s FOOD (Austria/Netherlands)
Southbank Centre's Purcell Room
13-17 January 2027

Like a swarm of locusts devouring all in its path, humanity sweeps across the planet.
Everything is up for grabs, everything is edible, everyone wants more.

Michael Zandl’s circus-theatre company invites you to an extraordinary feast where art can literally taste delicious and scenery is there for the eating. Watch as the boundaries between desire and necessity blur, giving rise to something bizarre, surprising, and hypnotic.

Featuring expert object manipulation, acrobatics, illusion and deadpan humour, everyone gets stuffed in this hilarious, wordless circus reflection on contemporary consumerism.

Trained as an agricultural scientist and circus artist, Austrian born Michael Zandl is based in Holland. His previous show Sawdust Symphony was an Edinburgh hit, described by the Guardian as ‘Looney Tunes meets Pina Bausch' and by Broadway World as ‘wonderfully absurd... leaving spectators in awe’. With FOOD the company makes its London debut.

'It‘s quite possible that I’ve already seen the best show of the season"
Wendy Lubberding, Theaterkrant

Tickets are on sale now:
https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/mimelondon-food/

We're excited to share the first show we're supporting as part of MimeLondon 2027.

Miet Warlop (Belgium)
INHALE DELIRIUM EXHALE
Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall
Sat 23 & Sun 24 Jan 2027
UK Premiere

Art and life blur in this delirious act of creation, destruction, and renewal.

Belgium’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale, visual artist Miet Warlop dramatically combines dance-theatre and live art performance in a hypnotic storm of movement, fabric, and sound. Drawing inspiration from the movement of waves as symbols of change and unpredictability Inhale Delirium Exhale reveals the hidden turbulence of the creative process.

Across a stage flooded with some six thousand metres of silk and cashmere, performers wrestle with waves of gorgeously sensuous material that seem to breathe, tremble, and overwhelm. It’s a world charged with static energy, where chaos meets beauty.

Set to a pulsating score by DEEWEE, Inhale Delirium Exhale unveils as a living painting, plunging into a visual universe that is as immersive as it is overwhelming, exploring the delirium that happens between one breath and the next.

“Miet Warlop turns 4 miles of silk into a stunning spectacle” New York Times

“Warlop is not a choreographer, nor a theatre director, nor a painter, but all of these things together” Il Tempo



photos by Reinout Hiel

Tickets are on sale now:
https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/mimelondon-inhale-delirium-exhale/

Now available to listen to on SoundCloud, here is the audio for the talk given by Mark Evans and Simon Murray as part of MimeLondon 2026 in collaboration with the Society for Theatre Research at St Anne's Church, Soho.

MARK EVANS & SIMON MURRAY LECTURE Reclaiming mime from the condescension of posterity A conversation around the themes, ideas, perceptions, contexts, personalities, histories and controversies enshrined in their recently published book, Mime into Physical Theatre: a UK Cultural History

Such sad news about Iona Kewney, a truly remarkable artist. Her company, Knights of the Invisible, performed Black Regent with on-stage partner, Joseph Quimby, in the Purcell Room in the 2015 festival. She was very special - tempestuous and talented. RIP Iona 🖤

‘Utterly hilarious’: Simon McBurney on how the great clown Philippe Gaulier changed his life The Complicité founder remembers his teacher’s wicked laughter, provocative demands and infinite generosity

A rare recording of an extract from Philippe Gaulier and Pierre Byland’s show,
Les Assiettes from 1972

| RTS

Les Assiettes | RTS Qui n'a jamais rêvé de casser des assiettes? Performance de Pierre Byland et Philippe Gaulier.