The Best UK Outdoor Performances for Summer 2024

In London, summer never feels truly underway until a visit to Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. Inside one of London’s loveliest rose-filled parks, it’s probably my favourite theatre anywhere, with its picnic areas, restaurant, food stalls and excellent bar serving themed cocktails. The auditorium has no bad seat, and as the sun starts setting, swallows swoop and pigeons settle and coo in the magnificent old trees framing the stage. I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream here as a schoolgirl and remain entranced. Now my daughters are equally spellbound. It’s been a regular annual destination for multiple shows ranging from Jesus Christ Superstar to Romeo and Juliet. This summer The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic tale, finds its ideal magical setting, and from late July the theatre mounts its much-anticipated performance of Fiddler on the Roof.

At Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank, summer highlights include Antony and Cleopatra and the Globe’s own artistic director, Michelle Terry, playing the title role in Richard III. There’s a run of comedies too, including A Comedy of Errors, back by popular demand.  Having seen it on its first run, I can confirm it is, as critics attest, “rib-ticklingly” hilarious.

In Powys, the Willow Globe is one of the country’s most unusual and largest willow constructions, and certainly the only one to be used as a theatre. Based on Shakespeare’s Globe, though a third of its size, the organic green structure merges into its environment during summer months, making it a memorable outdoor treat. It’s staging several re-imagined performances this summer, from The Winter’s Tale to The Wet Mariners theatre troupe’s version of Pericles.

In Cornwall, the spectacular Minack Theatre is just four miles from Land’s End. Carved out of a granite cliff, it juts precariously over thrashing sea and is surrounded by world-famous gardens that are open all year round. Reminiscent of an ancient amphitheatre, it was designed and built in the 1930s by Rowena Cade, who helped stage its first production of The Tempest in 1932. Today Minack offers a mix of performance, storytelling, dance and music. Summer drama includes musical versions of Sense and Sensibility and Young Frankenstein, the 1841 comedy London Assurance, and adaptations of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn.

In Leicester, Kilworth House Theatre has a similarly eclectic mix of jazz, dance, theatre and entertainment, with the outdoor venue offering an irresistibly uplifting adaptation of Singin’ in the Rain by the creative team behind Hairspray. Even better, Kilworth House is a hotel set in a glorious estate, so you can really make a weekend of it even if the weather is terrible.

The National Trust also offers outdoor music, theatre and film events all over the country, with some of its most beautiful stately homes as backdrops: from Henry V at Bodiam Castle to A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Sutton Hoo and The Wind in the Willows at Ickworth.

Opera-goers are spoiled for al fresco choices. In London, Opera Holland Park is staged annually in formal, flowering gardens in front of one of the city’s most historic Jacobean mansions. This season features operas by Ruggero Leoncavallo and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard, and Peter and the Wolf.

Garsington and Grange Park stage operas in the Chiltern Hills and Surrey Hills, respectively. Though both involve venturing inside for the actual performances, the draw is the mingling, dining and drinking in spectacular gardens. At Garsington, operas by Mozart, Verdi and Britten run until late July, finishing with three performances of Andrew Norman’s family-friendly community opera A Trip to the Moon.

Founded in 1998 by Wasfi Kani, Grange Park Opera attracts devoted audiences, partly due to its romantic story. The opera relocated from Hampshire to West Horsley in 2017 when the late Bamber Gascoigne, University Challenge’s much-loved, longstanding quiz master, inherited the estate from his aunt Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe, and gifted it to the West Horsley Place Trust, allowing it to be the opera’s home. The 350-acre estate comprises a 14th-century house and formal gardens with vistas of rippling, golden grasses, wild flowers, herbaceous borders, ancient trees, fountains and box hedging giving way to secret corners. Nature is tamed just enough to allow access to a comfortable cushioned bench or sheltered and shady picnic spot.

The season ends in mid July, so race to buy tickets for Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment or Janáček’s Katya Kabanova.  There’s also a world premiere of Sir David Pountney’s Island of Dreams, a reinvention of Shakespeare’s Tempest with music and libretto composed by Anthony Bolton.

When I briefly lived in Oxfordshire, the arrival of summer was heralded by Giffords Circus, a joy for children and adults alike. Founded in 2000 by Nell and Toti Gifford, the circus provided a welcome portal to a lost, innocent world where magic consists of ducks, dachshunds or ponies doing funny things, alongside acrobatic acts from around the globe and Tweedy, the popular bedraggled clown.

Giffords represents an antidote to the showy glitz of a big, commercial, contemporary circus like Cirque du Soleil. Instead, you’ll find a meadow or village green with a tiny round tent decked with bunting, painted wagons and stalls, and then the ultimate treat — dining at the travelling restaurant at trestle tables adorned with wild flowers in jam jars.

Nell Gifford died in 2019, but the circus has continued. This year’s theme is Avalon, immersing the audience in a world of Arthurian legend and pageantry. Nell Gifford’s niece, Lil Rice, has founded her own troupe, Fool’s Delight Circus. Its offerings include circus dinner shows — a delicious meal and a world-class circus rolled into one.

Finally, for something completely different, there’s Kynren, staged every Saturday till mid-September. When Kynren opened in Bishop Auckland near Durham in 2016, nothing similar had been mounted in Britain previously. It’s based on the celebrated French summer show Puy du Fou, and its founder’s son helped adapt the British show. A seven-and-a-half-acre stage with 8,000 seats and an artificial bridged lake is the setting for a re-enactment of England’s history.

The show is a conglomerate of snapshots to celebrate moments that have defined our nation across 2,000 years, and embraces the Roman invasion, King Arthur’s knights, the Battle of Hastings, Henry VIII, Charles I’s execution, the industrial revolution and Sir Winston Churchill’s call to arms during World War Two. It is run by 12,000 volunteers, known as ‘archers’, and is heart-warming and engaging precisely because it is a little rough and ready, and delightfully homespun. I took my 12-year-old daughter to one of the first ever shows and she loved watching key moments from her history lessons come alive as the moon rose on the extraordinary scenes before us.

Britain might have a short summer, but we do know how to make the most of our great outdoors, combining world-class culture with beautiful landscapes and gardens for unforgettable al fresco experiences.