Camden People's Theatre Reveals New Guarantee-Based Pay Model For Artists and Lineup of Shows For The New Autumn Season

Camden People's Theatre has announced its Autumn 2025 season, a boundary-pushing programme of politically urgent new work alongside a landmark shift in how it supports artists financially.

CPT is moving away from the traditional door-split model and instead offering artists guaranteed payments. For this season, every artist or company programmed in CPT's main programme will receive an upfront fee regardless of ticket sales. 

This new approach is both political and practical: CPT sees it as part of its mission to actively reduce the financial precarity faced by marginalised artists, rebalancing risk and responsibility. Whilst acknowledging the financial risks of this new model, CPT believes it will better serve both artists and audiences, and ensure that  the artists have more time and security to focus on the quality of their work. 

The guarantees are underpinned by a mixed-income model: box office income (which the venue plans to boost with increased marketing and audience development efforts), fundraising, and strategic support from aligned partners. CPT is also exploring future income streams such as further cultivating individual donors and forging creative partnerships, but only where these align with its commitment to justice, equity and artist-led work.

CPT hopes to pursue this guarantee-based model long-term - if financially viable - as part of a wider strategic shift. The theatre is reducing the number of shows it programmes, and extending their runs, to give artists more meaningful support, improve press interest and help build momentum for each production.

Importantly, this model does not come at the expense of early-stage or experimental work. CPT will continue to platform scratch performances and work-in-progress nights on Tuesdays, as well as its cabaret and alternative programming on weekends.

This season's programme brings together urgent and inventive voices in theatre. Alongside the new financial model, CPT is renewing its commitment to timely political programming, opening the season with documentary theatre reporting from Gaza, handing Saturday nights over to Trans artists for building takeovers, and ensuring every finished show programmed has a layer of integrated accessibility.

From Living with Drones, an electrifying live journalism piece exploring the lived reality of drone warfare in Gaza, to City for Incurable Women, a surreal and unsettling dive into the history of medical misogyny through the lens of 19th-century psychiatry, these are shows that interrogate power, politics, and personal legacy.

There's also Countess Dracula - a bold and blood-soaked reworking of the vampire myth that collides clowning with menopausal fury and The Foodbank Show, a furious, funny and participatory protest-performance about austerity Britain, complete with free pizza and radical hope.

Rounding out the season is A Court of Paper, a probing, multimedia excavation of Nazis, family complicity and historical memory in the Netherlands, and Barrier(s), a beautifully performed, queer, bilingual love story exploring communication across culture, silence, and sound.

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