The 10 best new London theatre openings in June

It’s June! It’s an evenly-numbered year! That means the LIFT festival is back, bringing a sprinkling of weird, wonderful and challenging international work to London for a month-and-a-bit. It’s well worth taking a punt on a show.

On a more normcore note things are starting to slow down a bit for the summer after a frenetic May, but that doesn’t stop the month ending with two colossal musicals (‘Mean Girls’ and the revival of ‘Starlight Express’). Plus! The return of James Corden.

1. LIFT 2024
The biennial London International Festival of Theatre returns for 2024 with a relatively low key but impressively diverse line-up that will take in everything from a shaggy dog story take on Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ grafted onto a message about Native American land rights in Canada (‘The Land Acknowledgement or As You Like It’, Southbank Centre Jun 5-9, pictured) to the world premiere of ‘Bat Night Market’ (Science Gallery, Jun 10-15) a generically unclassified show exploring the future of food, and also bats, and also bats as food. For full listings head to the LIFT homepage.

Various venues, Jun 5-Jul 27.

2. Mean Girls
Tina Fey’s musical adaptation of her classic early ‘00s high school comedy had a rough-ish time of it on Broadway: it managed a couple of fairly successful years but was then closed by the pandemic and never reopened. It’s probably hoping for a bit more from this West End run, which comes a few months after Fey’s own musical film remake. Confused? Hopefully all should be made clearer when the tale of hysterical cliqueness as a regular American high school opens at the Savoy.

Savoy Theatre, booking to Feb 16 2025. Book tickets here.