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Talks/ Spoken Word
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Music
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Drama
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Comedy
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Community
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Musical
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Dance
This brand-new festival offer will allow audiences to experience a diverse range of theatre based shows. Over four days the all-inclusive wristband will allow you to drop-in to a variety of performances showcasing work at different stages of development, ranging from readthroughs to complete pieces.
Once you’ve purchased your wristband, you will have access to all festival activities (evening performances and matinees) and seats will be allocated on a first come first serve basis. If you purchase for one show, we highly recommend you check out other performances happening in the building over the course of the festival.
Landmark Loading will feature five East of England based artists currently participating in Landmark’s Seed Commission programme, an artist development opportunity which nurtures local emerging talent, supporting them to develop an original piece of work alongside the Landmark team.
Be one of the first to experience brand new pieces of theatre and support up and coming, local talent at the Key Theatre this November.
Click here to book your wristband
Thursday 12 November
Backstage Tours: 10:30am – 11:30am & 1:30pm – 2:30pm
Tim Casson - Shed Stories: 3pm - 4pm & 6:30pm - 7:30pm
Uniquely blending theatre, movement and documentary, SHED STORIES is a heartwarming performance that brings to life the world of ‘Men’s Sheds’; community groups where people can come together to make, repair and repurpose as well as improve their wellbeing and mental health. Combining real-life interviews with compelling movement, it shines a light on the characterful communities around this growing phenomenon. Funny, thought provoking and uplifting, SHED STORIES shines a light on community, connection and the little things that keep us going – friendship, laughter… and a nice cup of tea.
SHED STORIES is commissioned by Lincoln Arts Centre & Applause Rural Touring, and supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Main Auditorium
Tear It Up Theatre - Battered: 8pm - 9pm
Welcome to The Mermaid’s Pound, where fish, chips and drama are on the menu.
For the young women working behind the counter, it’s business as usual… until their world turns upside down. As tensions rise and friendships are tested, how much will they put up with to keep their jobs?
Full of wit, quick-fire humour and glorious silliness, Battered is a new feminist comedy from Tear It Up Theatre exploring inequality, insecure employment and harassment in the workplace.
Studio
Friday 13 November
Backstage Tours: 11am – 12pm & 2pm – 3pm
Boondog - Lovett: 5:50pm - 7pm & 9:30pm - 10:40pm
THE VILLAIN YOU KNOW, THE STORY YOU DON’T.
Newly-widowed Mrs Lovett needs to find a way to survive. Using skills learned from a whaler father, a courtesan mother and a butcher husband, Eleanor “recalibrates” her life – and her relationship with God. An origin story set before her infamous partnership with Sweeney Todd, we discover what would later lead her to turn pie-maker.
You may think you already know Mrs. Lovett, but this new play explores what made her: the brutal choices and disappointments of a life in poverty. When the difference is life or death, morality becomes a moveable feast – and Eleanor is getting hungry…
Studio
Emma Vieceli - Unfolding: 7:15pm - 9:30pm
Rose is turning forty. Stuck in a dead-end job and living in the shadow of her father’s suicide, she escapes into her letters with Mark, a man on the other side of the world who she’s never met. For nearly thirty years Rose has been braver on paper than in person, but when Mark’s letters suddenly stop, everything changes.
Life-affirming, healing, and featuring the award-winning song It Starts Small, Unfolding is a new and original story engaging in a conversation around mental health and abuse that’s not often seen on musical theatre stages.
Take one step. What’s the best that can happen?
Main Auditorium
Saturday 14 November
Teastain Theatre - Tap Root: 11:30am - 12pm
After a childhood spent incarcerated, he’s keeping his head down. Between waitering at TGI Fridays, avoiding fines on his library card, and cultivating a workplace romance, his head is just about above water. But when an all-too-familiar story hits the headlines, it threatens to bring the life he’s trying to build for himself crashing down.
Will he survive the government’s – and his own – attempt to cover up who he really is? Is there a path back to a normal life after the things he’s done?
Studio
Boundless Theatre x Mad Jacks Theatre - Argo: 1pm - 2pm & 7pm - 8pm
Second Voyage
A verbatim dance-theatre show about transness, ballet and things worth saving.
I was three when I took my first ballet class, and twenty when I stopped dancing. This is me trying to find my way back.
Accompanied by interviews with ballerinas, academics and childhood dance teachers, award-winning theatre makers Sam Smith and Danielle James perform a semi-improvised score. Between variations from The Rite of Spring, choreography they learnt as children, and things they are imagining now, what emerges is an urgent and slippery exploration of transness, ballet, and things worth saving.
ARGO is a show about our bodies, what’s happened to them, what they’ve learned; it’s about mutability and the limits of change; our desires, our aches and pains. Because whilst ballet operates as a fiercely regimented and patriarchal institution, where do the rest of us go? Do we care about the ballet tradition enough to create a radically new way of dancing it?
Audiences are invited to document their experiences as the hour unfolds, reflecting on the performance and their own memories of dancing. ARGO asks communities to constantly build and rebuild the boat of the show. But how many times can one thing change? And how do we reckon with what’s left?
Created and performed by Sam Smith, in collaboration with Danielle James. ARGO was initially developed and presented with NEXT Choreography at Siobhan Davies Studios.
Sam Smith is part of Boundless Theatre’s Accelerator artist development programme for 2026/27, alongside Emily Faye Baldwin, Isaiah James-Mitchell and Néa Ishana Ranganathan. Through Accelerator, Boundless provides funding, mentoring, a creative residency and showcase opportunities. Responding to a creative brief written by the Boundless young Advisory Group, titled Rage, Revolution, Grief, Love, the artists will each develop new work through the programme.
Image Credit: Jemima Yong
With creative support from Autumn Shields and Georgie Lynch-Bailey.
Main Auditorium
Molly Gooch - Seasons: 3pm - 4pm
A one-woman show exploring the issue of domestic abuse in rural areas.
Take a journey through the 4 seasons and experience the unique challenges that these natural changes bring to rural areas and the farming communities that inhabit them.
Come celebrate the countryside and its culture and learn of the dark secrets that are too often hidden behind closed doors.
Written through detailed and meticulous research, rooting the piece in reality, the play aims to resonate with rural and urban audiences alike and raise awareness of the issue of domestic abuse in the countryside.
Seasons was first performed in 2024 in North Devon as part of Landmark Theatres first ever Seed Commission programme. Its creator Molly Gooch is so excited to be bringing this show back to life and joining us in Peterborough for Landmark Loading 2026.
Studio
Jack Palmer - The People In Our Lives (Open Rehearsal) - 5pm - 6pm
Jack Palmer is an actor and writer, who performed a limited five-day run of his one-man show, The People In Our Lives at the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The People In Our Lives tells the story of Jason, who is reflecting on life and love with his regulars (the audience) at the end of a busy night at his pub, The Golden Ball. Whilst the show touches on some serious themes such as family tensions and family bereavements, the show also touches on more positive themes such as friendship and long-lasting love. The final show of the Edinburgh Fringe run of The People In Our Lives is available to stream for free on YouTube.
After graduating from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge with a 2:1 in Drama & Film in July 2023, Jack participated in the Landmark Theatres Ignite Programme (now known as Theatre Producers) throughout 2024 where he attended several theatre workshops in preparation for performing in a play called Love & Information by Caryl Churchill and he subsequently rejoined the programme in early 2026 to perform in a devised piece of theatre called See Me As I Am. During the first stint on the programme, Jack previewed The People In Our Lives as part of a Landmark Theatres Key Night in August 2024 and within two years, the show was performed at the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe Festival with an improved script, a voice cast and an original soundtrack.
As part of the Landmark Loading Festival, Jack is bringing The People In Our Lives back to the Key Theatre for an open performance where audiences will be able to drop in and out at any point over the course of an hour and watch the show and they can rest assured that they’ll be made to feel part of the family at whatever point they choose to drop in.
Swan Room
Syntax Poetry Collective - Bardmaster: 8:30pm - 10:30pm
In a format lovingly inspired by (read: lovingly ripped off from) one of television’s greatest exports, this one-night-only performance will see a team of poets attempt increasingly weird and wacky poetry-related challenges, all for the amusement of the BARDMASTER™️- current Peterborough Poet Laureate (and former school teacher) Hilary Steele.
Assisted by her loyal minion and adjudicator, ‘M.A.D. Scientist of Words’ Sandy Wardrop, this team of local wordsmiths will be set tasks which may include:
● Improvise a love poem to a randomly selected historical figure.
● Perform your most emotional work with a duck quacker in your mouth.
● Create a manifesto for revamping Peterborough City Centre entirely in a series of limericks.
● Create an abstract sculpture of a famous poem exclusively through leftover cardboard.
What may happen on the night is anybody’s guess. But all the information will be on the task
Sunday 15 November
Ryan Gilmartin - The Beautiful Game Workshop: 11:15am - 12:30pm
The Beautiful Game comes to Peterborough!
Do you remember your first FIFA? Relieve the iconic songs and play the classic games.
The 16 player tournament is first come, first served and is a local, not online, open-age tournament.
Swan Room
Ryan Gilmartin - The Sound of Football in the Fens: 1pm - 2pm
Beckis Cooper - Constellations (Open Rehearsal) - 2:45pm - 3:45pm & 5:15pm - 6:15pm
One couple. Multiple possibilities. An infinite universe.
Marianne, a quantum physicist and Roland, a beekeeper, meet at a barbeque. They hit it off, or perhaps they don’t. They go home together, or maybe they go their separate ways. In the multiverse, with every possible future ahead of them, a love of honey could make all the difference.
Called ‘funny, heartbreaking and a sharp, smarty hit’ of a play, this electrifying production is directed by Estella Todisco (The 39 Steps, My Mother Said I Never Should and The Beauty Queen of Leenane for Stamford Arts ; Watershed for Lighthouse) and features actors Thomas Dorman (Joan, ITV, The Regime, HBO and The 39 Steps, Stamford Arts) and Beckis Cooper (the national and international tour of Unversed, From Chawton and Spirit).
Swan Room
The Odd Jobs: A New Musical (Work-in-Progress Sharing): 4pm - 5pm
“I must say, Miss Case seems quite attractive… for a lady.”
— Mr Kidd, Diamonds Are Forever
When an ambitious bid for promotion goes spectacularly wrong, unlikely MI6 post room colleagues (and future Bond villains) Mr Kidd & Mr Wint find themselves accused of treason and on the run. More queer than queer-coded, their partnership is about to be put to the ultimate test, with Spain, freedom and a yacht called Wavedancer tantalisingly within reach.
But a violent storm leads them to Florian Heights, an eccentric Portsmouth boarding house presided over by a formidable landlady with a priceless Fabergé clock and a decidedly unusual adult son. As identities unravel and bodies begin to pile up, Kidd and Wint must decide whether the respectable lives they’ve always wanted are worth more than the unlikely family they might have found.
Written by Off-West End Award winner Jack Reitman and BAFTA Award nominee Raphael Smith, The Odd Jobs is a new musical in development, offering a fresh and irreverent take on the Bond universe.
Starring Guido Garcia Lueches (Jeezus!, UK Tour), Abigail Williams (How The Other Half Loves, The Old Vic), Jack Reitman (RENT, Landmark Theatres) & Harrison Sharpe (Call The Midwife), this work-in-progress sharing of Act 1 is presented as a rehearsed reading, without songs.
Join us for an exclusive first look at a new show in development, where the stakes are deadly, the manners impeccable and absolutely nothing goes according to protocol.
Main Auditorium
Jude Simpson: Anticipating Hindsight (Work In Progress) - 6:30pm - 7:30pm
Poet, entertainer and three-time national slam champion Jude Simpson presents a showcase of witty wordplay, whimsical humour and heartfelt life lessons.
With the aid of a grandmother clock, a proud clutch of parenting fails, and an interactive cake-naming competition, Jude asks whether we can ever predict how we might look back on life, and by doing so, improve our decision-making in the present.
Touching on ageing, teenagehood, underwear and cuppa soup, Jude uses her “charming, sidewise look at life” (Skinny Fest) to challenge the idea that we are helpless in the face of time.
Please note, this is a work-in-progress performance of “Anticipating Hindsight”. The show will be filmed, including some general audience footage. Please see a member of staff if you prefer not to be filmed.
Studio