By Anna Zhila

The 60th Brighton Festival this May is actively dismantling the very structure that has defined its recent past.

To understand the current pivot, one must acknowledge the foundation. When Ian Hunter, the festival’s first artistic director, published his opening manifesto in 1968, he articulated a vision that seems almost dangerously radical today. He proposed a space where the "serious" and the "supposedly frivolous" could coexist without hierarchical distinction. This was not merely theoretical posturing. This was a festival that, in its earliest iterations, placed Laurence Olivier and Yehudi Menuhin on the same bill as Pink Floyd and The Who.

That specific frequency - the deliberate, unapologetic collision of the elite and the popular - has been the festival’s defining characteristic for six decades. It is the reason why, in the 1970s, you could find Arthur Rubinstein performing in the same programme as Ella Fitzgerald. It is the reason why, in the 1980s, the festival literally spilled out of the concert halls, deploying twenty mobile stages across the city, transforming Brighton into a vast, chaotic laboratory for street theatre and public disruption. It has always been a festival that preferred the messy vitality of the street to the sterile comfort of the auditorium.

For the past sixteen years, the festival has operated under a very specific, highly successful model: the Guest Director. Since Anish Kapoor inaugurated the role in 2009, the festival has been shaped by a revolving door of cultural heavyweights - Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, Kae Tempest, David Shrigley. It was a brilliant strategy. It provided each year with a distinct, marketable flavour and guaranteed media attention. But even the best models eventually calcify. The Guest Director model, while yielding incredible programming, inevitably filters the entire festival through a single, dominant personality.

This year, that model has been quietly, firmly dismantled.

The 2026 programme is the first to be entirely shaped by an internal team, led by CEO Lucy Davies and Director of Production Beth Burgess. Davies is a formidable presence in British theatre management, having cut her teeth at the Royal Court and the Young Vic - institutions known for championing difficult, structurally inventive work rather than comfortable revivals. The decision to move away from the celebrity curator and centralise the artistic vision internally is a significant gamble. It removes the immediate PR hook of a famous name. But it also signals a fundamental shift in ambition: the festival is no longer just a platform for curation; it is becoming an engine for creation.

This ambition is most aggressively realised in Kohlhaas, the festival’s central theatrical event and, crucially, the first original production ever commissioned and produced directly by the Brighton Festival itself.

The production is housed in the newly refurbished Brighton Dome Corn Exchange. The source material is Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 novella, Michael Kohlhaas, adapted by Italian dramaturgs Marco Baliani and Remo Rostagno. It is, fundamentally, a story about a man who, when faced with a broken, corrupt justice system, refuses to accept his lot and embarks on a terrifying, escalating campaign of retribution. It is a forensic examination of the exact point where justified protest curdles into fanatical violence.

It takes very little imagination to see why a narrative about the complete collapse of institutional trust might resonate in 2026. We are currently living through an era defined by a pervasive, exhausting suspicion of authority. The social contract feels increasingly fragile, and the mechanics of justice often appear heavily weighted in favour of those who can afford to purchase it. To stage Kohlhaas now is not a historical exercise; it is a direct confrontation with the contemporary political mood.

What makes this production particularly potent is the personnel involved. The English version is directed by Omar Elerian, and the solo performance is delivered by Arinzé Kene.

If those two names ring a bell, it is because they are responsible for Misty, the 2018 theatrical grenade that started at the Bush Theatre before detonating in the West End. Misty was a revelation - a raw, structurally chaotic, deeply personal dismantling of the expectations placed on Black artists by the British theatre establishment. It blurred the lines between gig theatre, spoken word, and direct audience confrontation. It was messy, angry, and entirely necessary.

Reuniting Elerian and Kene for a solo piece about systemic injustice and righteous fury is a masterstroke. One should not expect a polite, period-accurate recitation of Kleist’s text. Given their history, Kohlhaas is likely to be a visceral, highly physical dismantling of the narrative, tearing down the fourth wall and demanding that the audience examine their own complicity in the systems being critiqued. It is exactly the kind of difficult, uncompromising work that a major festival should be producing.

While the theatre programme signals a new internal rigor, the musical offerings remind us of the festival’s historical capacity for securing genuinely significant figures. The presence of Patti Smith for two days is a testament to this. She will perform with her quartet in the Concert Hall, but the more intriguing event is ‘An Evening of Words and Music’ - an exclusive engagement blending poetry, prose, and acoustic performance.

Patti Smith occupies a unique cultural space. She is an architect of the punk movement, yes, but she is also a National Book Award-winning author whose memoirs possess a startling, elegant lyricism. Watching her perform is not an exercise in nostalgia; it is an encounter with a working artist who has consistently refused to separate the visceral energy of rock and roll from the intellectual rigor of literature. She is, in many ways, the human embodiment of the festival’s founding ethos - the serious and the supposedly frivolous existing in the exact same breath.

The musical programme also features the return of Laurie Anderson, arguably one of the most vital performance artists of the last half-century, presenting The Republic of Love. Her inclusion, alongside the pioneering Zamrock Allstars, demonstrates a curation that is not simply chasing contemporary trends, but tracing the lineage of genuine musical innovation.

Looking at the sheer breadth of the 2026 programme - the circus performances from NoFit State, the brutal historical deconstruction of fix+foxy’s Dark Noon - it becomes clear what Davies and Burgess are attempting to build. They are moving the Brighton Festival away from the model of a temporary, imported circus, and towards the reality of a permanent, muscular cultural institution.

By producing their own work, they are taking on financial and artistic risk. They are no longer simply hosting the conversation; they are initiating it.

It is easy to become cynical about the state of the arts in the UK. Funding is scarce, venues are closing, and the pressure to produce ‘safe,’ commercially viable work is immense. In such a climate, a festival that chooses to radically restructure itself, to abandon a proven, celebrity-driven model in favour of producing difficult, politically charged theatre, is something to be taken very seriously.

The 60th Brighton Festival does not feel like a retrospective or a polite celebration of past glories. It feels like a city deliberately sharpening its teeth. It is a reminder that a true arts festival should not be a comfortable escape from the world, but a magnifying glass held up to its most uncomfortable realities. As the crowds descend on the seafront this May, they will find a festival that has finally stopped borrowing other people’s voices and has decided to speak for itself.