5 must-see shows at Manchester International Festival 2025

Award-winning director and choreographer Jonathan Watkins transforms Christopher Isherwood’s vital portrait of queer love and loss into an original contemporary ballet in collaboration with singer-songwriter John Grant and composer Jasmin Kent Rodgman.

Isherwood’s 1965 masterpiece follows George, a gay, middle-aged professor navigating life in 1960s California following the sudden death of his long-term partner, Jim. The work is widely recognised as a pioneering piece of 20th-century fiction, and the novel was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film by fashion designer Tom Ford, starring Colin Firth.

In this new rework, esteemed former Royal Ballet principal Ed Watson expresses the physicality of George’s exterior life, while John Grant performs the character’s internal monologue.

Internationally acclaimed artist, choreographer and musician Blackhaine presents a new, immersive performance which blends movement and sound to examine both the cast and audience’s sense of belonging and love in a world dominated by despair.

And Now I Know What Love Is delves into the similarities of birth and death through an entrancing collage of music, text and choreography. Drawing inspiration from the rich urban landscapes of North West England, where the artist grew up, audiences are invited to move around the edge of the performance space, encountering one another against a backdrop of psychedelic noise and movement.

Inspired by true events in Black British history, LIBERATION is a poignant and hugely powerful new play from writer Ntombizodwa Nyoni and director Monique Touko, one which asks timeless questions about revolution, freedom, and what it means to be activist.

Centred around the Fifth Pan-African Congress, which took place here in Manchester in 1945, at Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall, the production traces the private lives of those who fought to liberate Africa, introducing the people behind the movement, and explores why their story remains relevant in 2025.

LIBERATION includes composition by Ife Ogunjobi from the Brit Award-winning Ezra Collective.

Part film, part installation, Juliet Ellis creates a dreamlike meditation on the nature of self in A Symphony of Flesh and Bones.

Drawing on the artist’s family history, Ellis deconstructs the relationship between body, mind and self, creating a ‘profound and hallucinatory’ work that provokes universal questions about personas, and asks why we build our bodies as shelters, and how the physical effects of ageing impact these identities that we construct.

The work features pieces of film split across multiple screens, accompanied by a stage performance directly responding to the film’s content. Ellis sits at the centre of these disciplines, conducting the work which features appearances from her father Lloyd, a world champion bodybuilder, and her brother, Anthony, a former cage fighter.

Dutch artist Germaine Kruip promises to transform the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) theatre space into a ‘world of wonder’, merging illusion, sound and performance in A Possibility.

Set in two parts, the piece features new compositions by British composer Emily Howard and American composer Hahn Rowe. The first segment is a distillation of Kruip’s 2014 performance, A Possibility in Abstraction, and sees the stage become a blank canvas where light interacts with shadows, reflections and the exposed architecture of the theatre, casting them as characters in a unique live performance.

In the brand-new second act, Kruip introduces percussionists Youjin Lee, Akane Tominaga, Victor Lodeon, and Gil Hyoungkwon as performers. Brass sculptures, developed by Kruip in collaboration with renowned German manufacturer Thein Brass, become both the set and the instruments for a musical ritual, set to an original score developed by Howard, which blends strings and percussion.