VAULT Festival 2019 highights

If you want to find the best new theatre, comedy and art, you have to go underground. VAULT Festival returns this month with over 400 events, centred round the vibrant vaults beneath Waterloo Station. Pop-up venues include shipping containers, caravans and escape rooms.

With new writing, theatre, stand-up, song, and cabaret, you’ll find everything from late night parties to shows the kids will love. This is art for and by a diverse array of people.

A performance of Counting Sheep

The entertainment is on the cutting edge of the art world, with several plays fresh from runs at The Edinburgh Fringe. Queens of Sheba, winner of a Stage Edinburgh Award, is a poetic and unflinching look at misogynoir. The Talented Mr Ripley is an audience favourite, and will be rounding off the eight-week festival.

We’ve picked some VAULT Festival 2019 highlights:

Counting Sheep (23 January — 17 March)

Having picked up a Scotsman Fringe First Award in Edinburgh, the return to stage of Counting Sheep is hotly anticipated. Intriguingly billed as "guerrilla folk opera", the show combines music from the Lemon Bucket Orkestra with immersive visuals to relay Mark and Marichka Marczkys’ experience of the 2014 Kiev uprising.

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Blue Planet III (9 — 17 March)

If you’re looking for a show for the whole family, we’d recommend the “hugely entertaining” (Chortle) Blue Planet III. Two interns at the BBC attempt to produce a third instalment of David Attenborough’s iconic documentary series, but must contend with their own ineptitude — and a completely flooded office.

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Desiree Burch (3 February)

A familiar face from Live at the Apollo and The Mash Report, Funny Woman award-winning comic Desiree Burch is performing an hour of comedy in The Vaults for one night only. Other highlights include Taskmaster’s Phil Wang and Elf Lyons’s surreal musical comedy Love Songs to Guinea Pigs.

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Tilda Swinton Answers an Ad on Craigslist (6 — 17 February)

Tom Lenk (remember him from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?) plays Tilda Swinton, who performs an intimate character study on a depressed gay man from Craigslist ahead of her next movie. Deemed “hilarious” and “uplifting” by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, this show sold out in New York, LA and at the Fringe, and is not to be missed.