Alan Cumming’s Inaugural Season at Pitlochry Festival Theatre

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Alan Cumming has unveiled a debut season as Artistic Director for Pitlochry Festival Theatre that reads like a love letter to theatre itself — ambitious in scale, affectionate in memory and defiantly theatrical in taste. Timed to coincide with the company’s 75th anniversary in 2026, the programme stitches together revivals, world premières, Scottish premières and festivals, and signals a new producing partnership with Sonia Friedman Productions that promises to take Pitlochry’s work beyond the Highlands.

Cumming frames the season as both homage and manifesto. “My first season of programmed work as Artistic Director in 2026 also happens to be the 75th anniversary of Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s founding,” he says, invoking John Stewart’s wartime promise to return and build a theatre. “I have found I have a great affinity with John: we both came to Pitlochry and were mesmerised, we both share a belief in dreaming big and the power of positivity and manifestation.” The remark sets the tone: this is programming rooted in personal gratitude and theatrical lineage, yet directed squarely at bold futures.

A season of big names and new voices, this new season opens with a Scottish première that signals Pitlochry’s appetite for spectacle and intimacy in equal measure: Once, staged by the original Broadway creative team led by John Tiffany, with choreography by Steven Hoggett and design by Bob Crowley. The choice of Once, famed for its ensemble storytelling and live-music intimacy, indicates a smart, strategic curtain-raiser, marrying mainstream box-office appeal with genuine craftsmanship, and retains the venue’s penchant for a big, crowd-pleasing, musical gala opener.

That commercial pulse sits alongside a strong investment in new writing. Martin Sherman’s new play I’ll Be Seeing You receives its world première with Cumming himself directing Simon Russell Beale and Fra Fee, a casting coup that pairs heavyweight dramatic gravitas with contemporary musical-theatre star power. “I’ll Be Seeing You” – billed as the story of a young gay playwright tackling the life of Liberace – promises to be both theatrical and culturally resonant.

Douglas Maxwell’s Inexperience arrives as a world première directed by the award-winning Sally Reid, while Frances Ruffelle, Sally George and Cumming’s I Can Die Too, a concert-style play inspired by Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine, under Bill Buckhurst’s direction, suggests an appetite for formally daring, genre-blurring work. Pitlochry’s commissioning slate further includes A History of Paper, reuniting Cumming with Shirley Henderson, and a revival of Iain Heggie’s provocative Wiping My Mother’s Arse.

Projecting theatre as community and conversation, there is a clear throughline in Cumming’s programming: theatre as both communal ritual and critical conversation. The season’s inclusion of CEILIDH, an immersive new musical by Scottish writers Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie and directed by Tony-winner Sam Pinkleton, signals a deliberate embrace of participatory, culturally specific forms. It’s an elegant nod to Scotland’s vernacular celebration, refracted through contemporary theatre-making.

The National Theatre of Scotland’s tour of David Harrower’s adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, directed by Vicky Featherstone, and the co-production with Dundee Rep of the aforementioned Oliver Emanuel and Gareth Williams’ A History of Paper, underline the season’s collaborative ethos. These relationships strengthen regional networks and position Pitlochry not simply as a producing venue, but as a node in a national theatrical infrastructure.

Risk, reinvention and anniversary ambition: this season is unafraid of risk. A new adaptation of King Lear by Finn den Hertog casts Maureen Beattie in the title role, with Forbes Masson also in the company — a casting choice that suggests robust rethinking of gender and presence in canonical work. Cumming’s programming mixes the revisited classic with the newly premiered; the balance feels calibrated to the theatre’s 75-year conversation with its audiences.

Cumming’s own visibility is threaded through many of the season’s pillars — as director, actor and collaborator — which might have read as self-referential in lesser hands. Here, however, his involvement feels like an act of stewardship. “I have invited people here who I admire and love, and who have been part of the theatrical journey that led me to becoming this theatre’s Artistic Director,” he says. That intimacy, the invitation as curatorial stance, animates the season.

Looking outwards, the production partnership with Sonia Friedman Productions hints at a strategic outward gaze: Pitlochry’s work will be developed with an eye to producing on larger scales. The synergy between a storied regional company and an international production house promises to amplify premieres and attract a wider touring and broadcast life for new work. The season closes with a high-profile revival of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, directed by Maria Friedman and featuring Cumming as Henry Higgins, an endnote that combines star wattage and classic musical theatre allure. It is, in other words, a season that travels from intimate experiment to bright-scale revival without losing a sense of political and artistic curiosity.

A New Chapter for the theatre, Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s 2026 season, as presented by its new Artistic Director, is an assertion of confidence: an institution comfortable with its past but restless for its future. Cumming’s voice at turns nostalgic, galvanising and theatrical, guides a programme that foregrounds both the magic of performance and the practical work of producing national theatre. For audiences and artists alike, it promises a year of spirited reinvention and a fitting way to mark seventy-five years of making theatre in the Highlands.

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