A Wonder Room Production
↩ circleandstar.comJoin the mailing listFollow @circleandstartheatre
The Camden FringeOfficial Camden Fringe venue
Hampstead · NW3
3–30 August 2026
The Camden Fringe×Circle & Star

A festival within the festival.

Five companies. One room of fifty-five. A whole month of August.

Every August, London fills with theatre made on its own terms — and a clutch of it comes to Hampstead. These are the companies who chose Circle & Star: world premieres and new work, played to fifty-five seats, every one close. Ticketing runs through the Camden Fringe box office. The room is ours.

See the line-upAbout the Fringe
The month at a glance
5–7 Aug · Train to Cleveland8–9 Aug · Girls’ Night Out19–20 Aug · How Do I Love Thee?22–23 Aug · Mother Tongue26 Aug · Metamorphosis
The line-up · August 2026

Five shows. One room.

Each on its own terms · 55 seats a night
5–7 August
Train to Cleveland — Camden Fringe poster
Nº.1 · Camden FringeTender
Dan Callaway Studio

Train to Clevelandwith John Ruskin

A new play with music

A burnt-out PhD student boards a 1997 train and finds himself sharing the carriage with the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. What begins as an argument about Turner becomes a reckoning — with illness, with love, and with whether beauty can still reach a person who has spent a lifetime trying to earn his worth alone.

Written and performed by Dan Callaway and Joey Nicoletti.

Wed 5 Aug8:00pmThu 6 Aug8:00pmFri 7 Aug8:00pm
90 minAges 14+World premiere
£17Tickets via Camden Fringe
Book at Camden Fringe →
8–9 August
Girls’ Night Out — Camden Fringe poster
Nº.2 · Camden FringeSharp
Hannah Clancy-Hughes

Girls’ Night Out

An Irish comedy

A long-overdue reunion at a too-trendy Dublin restaurant. Old friends, older scores, and a night that goes exactly as wrong as these things do. A chaotic, painfully honest comedy about the people who knew you before you became whoever this is — and what happens when they all sit down at the same table.

Contains strong language and adult themes.

Sat 8 Aug7:30pmSun 9 Aug7:30pm
55 minAges 16+World premiere
£12Tickets via Camden Fringe
Book at Camden Fringe →
19–20 August
How Do I Love Thee? — Camden Fringe poster
Nº.3 · Camden FringeArdent
Aside Hustle

How Do I Love Thee?

A new play

Everyone knows the line — “how do I love thee, let me count the ways” — and almost no one knows the woman who wrote it. Against a controlling father, an illness that kept her confined and a literary world run by men, Elizabeth Barrett Browning refused to be defined by anything but her own words. From London to Italy, this is the journey that changed her life — to write, to love, and to be herself.

New writing from Aside Hustle.

Wed 19 Aug7:30pmThu 20 Aug7:30pm
45 minAges 12+World premiere
£20Tickets via Camden Fringe
Book at Camden Fringe →
22–23 August
Mother Tongue — Camden Fringe poster
Nº.4 · Camden FringeHaunted
Unique Community

Mother Tongue

Visual theatre with live opera

His mother tongue raised him — it gave a lyrical traveller the words to weave his way through the world. Now, in a land where it cannot be understood, its power is fading, and a new voice tries to coax its way in. Two languages fight for room in one mind, and only one can win. Begun as an oral history of Eastern European migration, the play gives the mother tongue a living body and a voice of its own — love, desperation, longing — told through visual theatre and live opera.

Written by Oleh Nonik. Directed by Nadiia Sychuk — the celebrated opera singer from Odesa — with music by Liudmila Malinovskaia. Performed by Oleh Nonik, Nadiia Sychuk, Liudmila Malinovskaia and Becci Perris; dramaturgy by Nataliya Kharina. A Unique Community production.

Sat 22 Aug7:00pmSun 23 Aug7:00pm
55 minAges 12+World premiere
£20Tickets via Camden Fringe
Book at Camden Fringe →
26 August
Metamorphosis — Camden Fringe poster
Nº.5 · Camden FringeVisceral
Cristiana Castello

Metamorphosis

Solo physical theatre

After a lifetime of invisible labour, a dutiful daughter wakes one morning to find herself inexplicably transformed into a repellent insect. Unable to conform, unable to make herself understood, she retreats into the dark of her room — and as her family grapples with the new reality, the façade of love and acceptance crumbles. A ferocious solo reckoning with identity, transformation, and the darkness beneath familial bonds.

A solo physical-theatre adaptation of Kafka — Berkoff-style expressionism, performed by Cristiana Castello.

Wed 26 Aug7:30pm
45 minAges 12+World premiere
£15Tickets via Camden Fringe
Book at Camden Fringe →
About the festival

The Camden Fringe.

For most of August, the Camden Fringe turns north London into a stage — hundreds of shows across dozens of venues, made by companies working without a safety net. It is open, independent and gloriously unfiltered.

This year, Circle & Star joins as a venue — lending its room, its lighting and its fifty-five seats to five companies for their Fringe run. The work is theirs. The welcome is ours.

The Camden Fringe
3–30 August 2026
Our Fringe page →
The room

Circle & Star Theatre

28 Heath Street, Hampstead, London NW3 6TE. Hampstead station, Northern line — thirty seconds from the door. Fifty-five seats. Every one close.

A theatre in its own right — not a room above a pub. A private entrance, West End-quality sound and lighting, and private, secure bathrooms. A belief in theatre and performance runs through everything we do here.

Tickets for every show are booked through the Camden Fringe box office — follow the links above.
In the room

A theatre, not a room above a pub. Your own private entrance, West End-quality sound and lighting, and private, secure bathrooms.

A working theatre. No photography or filming, please — and phones on silent once the lights go down.

Thirty seconds from Hampstead Tube. Northern line, straight to the door.

Fully air-conditioned. Cool and easy, whatever August does outside.