Rep Wrapped 2025

Drumroll, please! 🥁With 2025 almost behind us, and our much anticipated Spring 2026 season right around the corner we wanted to take a trip down The Rep’s Memory Lane and remind you of some of the work, on and off stage, that we’re most proud of in 2025!

Let’s take a look back on a great year…

2025 was a very exciting year with the appointment of our new Artistic Director, Joe Murphy, who joined The Rep back in April and announced his highly anticipated debut season in September.

Since joining, Joe has thrown open The Rep doors and met hundreds of Birmingham artists, community members, audiences and businesses at our Town Hall Meetings, as well as inviting hundreds of local actors to The Rep during our open casting call for Joe‘s upcoming 2026 production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

• We’ve had a very busy year at The Rep, with a total of 99 productions (almost triple digits!) across all 3 of our stages (The House, The Studio and The Door) for a total of 492 performances – that’s 56 more performances than last year.
• And, out of these 99 productions, 15 were either produced or co-produced by us here at The Rep. (which is 5 more than last year!)
• We’ve had another year of smashing Box Office records, with Sherlock Holmes and The 12 Days of Christmas garnering the highest grossing first day of sales, with our amazing audiences buying £95.5k worth of tickets in 24 hours.

And that’s not all!

• This year we’ve had a record-breaking 14 sold out productions, with programming from the Global Majority leading the way with Jamaica Love, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Jah Makin It Happen, Tujhe Dekha: Celebrating Timeless Love, COBO: Comedy Shutdown – Black History Month Special, Comedy with SMASHBengali and Real Queens Of Bollywood.
• And later in the year, Prima Facie broke the record of fastest sell-out production, with tickets for all 7 performances selling out within 6 hours of going on public sale!
• And while we’re on the topic of breaking records, our smash-hit co-production of A Thousand Splendid Suns saw audiences show up in their droves from all across the country, leading to us reaching a total of 98% occupancy for the entire run of 24 performances.
  • And after opening with us, A Thousand Splendid Suns ended up with back-to-back sell out runs at both Nottingham Playhouse and Leeds Playhouse. But if you missed out on catching this powerful new production, don’t worry, because we’ll be bringing it back to The Rep in 2027 ahead of a UK tour. (Dates will be announced in early 2026 – so keep an eye out).
• In January, welcomed back The Snowman (both The Rep’s and the West End’s theatre’s longest running Christmas show) to celebrate 32 years of delighting audiences both here, and at the Peacock Theatre in London. 
• And later on in the month, we took last year’s Door Christmas show, The Snowflake on tour to 26 libraries across the West Midlands, and thanks to the kind support of Arts Council England, we were able to subsidise the cost of all tickets on this tour to be free or at low price.
• We also had the pleasure of welcoming back our Patron of Youth and Education, Baroness Floella Benjamin,  who returned in February with the iconic adaptation of her best-selling novel, Coming to England – where we closed out their magnificent tour right where the original production first premiered back in 2022.
• Plus, we welcomed back two proud Brummies and Rep Foundry Alumni, for the premieres of their brand new productions:
  • Community, written by Farrah Chaudhry.
  • Everybody Wants To be Ronaldo, directed by Nyasha Gudo (who also was the Assistant Director for The Boy With Wings later in the year)
• We took our production of Community on a tour across 10 community venues across the West Midlands with the generous support of The Sir Barry Jackson Trust, who facilitated all tickets to be free or at low price.
• During February, we also hosted the premiere of the hard-hitting (or should we say… kicking) production of Good For a Girl before their following Midlands theatre tour, which was written and directed by our Head of Young Rep, Becky Deeks.
• In April, our powerful co-production of A Thousand Splendid Suns saw the return of our previous Artistic Director (2013-2019) Roxana Silbert, as well as fan-favourite, Kerena Jagpal as Laila. She joined the cast directly after the successful run and tour of Community (where her character was also named… Layla).
• We followed this with another exciting book adaptation in June from Wolverhampton author Sathnam Sanghera‘s critically acclaimed novel, Marriage Material which was directed by our very own Associate Director Iqbal Khan.
• The summer also saw the return of our acclaimed Young Rep Festival, for the final year of the trilogy of annual celebrations.  This year named Home and Horizons, the festival saw more than 400 performers (ranging from age 5 – 26) perform across 16 productions.
  • If you missed out on our previous Young Rep festivals, keep an eye out for our exciting programme of theatre performed by emerging talent from the Young Rep and Rep Pathways programmes in our brand new – Rep Rising Festival.
• Our Autumn season saw our co-production of an iconic ITV detective, take over The House stage with Inspector Morse: House of Ghosts. After its successful opening here at The Rep, we sent Morse off on a major UK tour (which you can still catch at a theatre near you until April 2026. Click here to see tour dates.)
• In August we saw the return Rep Foundry Alumni, Nyasha Gudo as Assistant Director; former Rep Associate Director Daniel Bailey as Director; and Midlands legend, Sir Lenny Henry for the adaptation of his hilarious book, The Boy with Wings.
• After the success of The Promise back in 2024 and The Vagina Monologues in The Studio in July, we teamed up once again with Deafinitely Theatre to bring Barrier(s), a powerful love story between a deaf and hearing couple to The Door in October.
• We also brought back our ground-breaking comedy masterclass and showcase, LGBTQTeeHee! for its second year with 12 brand new comedians taking to the rainbow mic.
  • Last year’s showcase was a massive success and this year the trend continued with an OVERWHELMING outpouring of support – selling out weeks before with a waiting list only getting longer and longer!

• And now, we’re ushering in the new year with the World Premiere comedy whodunnit, Sherlock Holmes and The 12 Days of Christmas featuring brand new songs by legendary musical theatre duo Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, in The House.
• And in The Door, Anansi The Spider has been weaving wonderful tales from West Africa and the Caribbean, and will be delighting young audiences here at The Rep until Sun 11 Jan before heading out on a 17 venue tour across the West Midlands from Tue 20 Jan – Sat 7 Feb in a scaled-down version of the production.Find out if Anansi will be crawling into a library near you.

This year, we aimed to support and work with other local arts, culture and hospitality businesses and ventures across Birmingham and the West Midlands to not only promote The Rep, but also to show demonstrate real connection and commitment to our city and the concerns of our city.

Creative Learning

Our acclaimed Creative Learning team really led the charge on community engagement this year – with over 60,000 engagements, working with 25 schools, 16 Early Years settings and 5 universities!

• Working alongside the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, we launched a new workshop on The Mysteries of Ancient Egypt and so far, we have delivered sessions to 5 schools and 200 young people from across the region to learn about Pharaohs and archaeology in an immersive session delivered by facilitators from our Creative Learning team.
• We took over the vaults at The Exchange for an immersive history lesson, where we invited 90 year 5 and 6 students to solve the mystery of the building’s intriguing past as a bank, meeting characters from history along the way.
• We also made sure to nurture interests in Theatre careers through our annually much-anticipated Work Experience Week – where 30 students in Year 9, 10 and 11 were selected to gain insights into how a successful producing theatre works behind the scenes.
• In partnership with Open Theatre, (who’ll be joining in 2026 for Search For The Second Star in Jan) we ran another Work Experience Week in May for young people in Years 11-13 with learning disabilities and/or autism, who enjoy drama and have an interest in working within the Arts.
• Thanks to funding from The Saintbury Trust, The Radcliffe Trust and The Patrick Trust, we were able to bring back Young Rep Backstage, a  fully-funded course that allows young people interested in a career in backstage theatre the chance to learn skills at a Major producing theatre. This year, 65% of participants who completed this course are now employed by The Rep.
• As part of the For / With / By Festival of European Youth Theatre, a few members of Young Rep went all the way to Sweden, where they got the amazing opportunity to take part in workshops that were led by practitioners from different countries and theatres, take part in socials, network and watch a circus show, all hosted by Uppsala Stadsteaterung (Uppsala City Theatre).
• This November, we held our Young Rep Winter Festival where over 400 young people performed!
• Thanks to support from The Jabbs Foundation, we launched a brand new intensive actor training programme, Rep Studio 8, where 8 emerging actors from The Company will be given the opportunity to receive intensive rehearsal and performance opportunities. The lucky 8 have now been selected and will be announced in the new year.
• Our Youth Board had a hugely successful year:
  • The co-chairs now attend meeting with our board of trustees, ensuring their opinions and visions for The Rep reach the top of the organisation.
  • Members of the Board have now joined the National Youth Advisory Board.
  • They’ve held 6 free workshops and 1 open mic night this year for young people.
• Audiences have also loved taking a peek behind the scenes as this year, we ran a total of 43 backstage tours.

Collaborations

We’ve worked hard this year to meet, team up and collaborate with other organisations and business in the Birmingham and West Midlands:

• In September, Joe Murphy held 4 Town-Hall Style meetings here at The Rep where creatives, companies, and community members from across Birmingham and the West Midlands were able to meet Joe and hear all about plans for the The Rep’s future.
• We collaborated with our friends and neighbours at the Birmingham Library on two of our children’s shows, The Boy With Wings and Anansi The Spider.
  • We ran a ‘Design your Own Wings‘ colouring competition and a ‘Colour in a Spider‘ competition which library staff supported within their children’s section.
  • Both competitions received a huge number of very impressive entries, and the winners received free family tickets to see the show.
• For any of our Saturday morning and matinee bookers you may have seen local running club and community group RocUp outside The Rep on their weekly Saturday Social 5KM Run. We’ve been hosting and supporting them over the last few months, partnering in their mission to rise over challenges.
• We collaborated with our friends at Dishoom Birmingham to create a set menu for Marriage Material. They also catered the press night reception for the lucky VIP guest, cast, crew and Rep Staff who were in a attendance.
• We also collaborated with The Grand Hotel, Birmingham to offer a mystery-themed afternoon tea inspired by our very own Christmas crime caper – Sherlock Holmes and The 12 Days of Christmas.
• You also may have noticed that we’ve been changing what drinks we offer on our bar. To support local businesses as well as support environmental sustainability we’ve been making the switch to local West Midlands based drinks.

Fundraising

Our Fundraising Team also had a brilliant year:

• Our Rep Friends Membership continues to grow! This time last year we had around 500 members and in a short 12 months we’ve seen this number grow to 1,700!
  • Did you know? That Becoming a Rep Friend comes with a whole heap of benefits? Be sure to check out the page above to see the full list of benefits of being a Bronze, Silver or Gold Friend!
• We also relaunched our Rep Patrons scheme, enabling our individual supports even more access to our productions, rehearsal room and backstage areas.
  • Like the Rep Friends membership, the Patrons scheme has three levels: Patron, Producing Patron and Artistic Director’s Circle. All with there own specific benefits, such as an invitation to watch a Rep Dress Rehearsal or access to tickets for sold out shows (where possible)
• The Rep held two Prop Shop Sales at our offsite prop store in Hockley earlier this year to raise funds for our Producing and Fundraising teams. These were both massive successes, with one lucky little girl bagging a pair of stilts!
  • We also held our very popular costume sale during this year’s Open Day, where we open the doors of The Rep to the general public to take tours, hear from the departments who work here, get exclusive discounts on shows, and of course, buy the most brilliant costumes to support our Costuming and Wardrobe team!
• In October, we launched Rep Together, our brand new annual fundraising campaign, with the support of Lillie Johnson Charitable Trust, L G Harris Trust and The W E Dunn Charitable Trust. This year, we asked you to help by raising funds to subsidise 5,000 theatre tickets for £5 each to young people under 25 for The Rep’s upcoming production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
  • We managed to raise a total of £13,866 to support 1,109 tickets!
• The Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation donated funding across two years to support two new backstage apprenticeship roles – Theatre Technical Apprentice and Scenic Maker Apprentice – aimed at young people from diverse backgrounds traditionally under-represented in the theatre industry.
  • For both roles we received over 350 applications and have now chosen the two apprentices who’ll be joining the team.

UVB

Our in-house Events and Conference team, Unique Venues Birmingham (UVB) held a whopping 353 events across the year, including:

• Hosting for the third year in row, the GillenMarkets British Open Squash where Diego Elias clinched his first British Open title in front of a sold out auditorium back in June, while Women’s World No.1 Nouran Gohar retained her crown after defeating Nour El Sherbini. And even with the auditorium sold out, the live stream on SQUASHTV had over 200k views!
• As well as hosting the UEFA Football Championships City launch event, where the host city logo was unveiled and it was announced that Villa Park set to host four games as part of the tournament.
• UVB were also shortlisted for:
  • The Famtastic Independent Venue of the Year
  • The Famtastic Unique Venue of the Year
  • The Famtastic Chef of the Year

None of this would have been possible without our brilliant audiences, supporters, funders, participants and communities. We look forward to welcoming you and working with you again this year.

Coming up in 2026…