Rowan Atkinson brings Mr Bean and Blackadder to the West End in 2027

Back on stage after 40 years

Rowan Atkinson is returning to the West End with Rowan Live, a new comedy show in which he plays Mr Bean, Blackadder and other characters from across his career. It runs at the Gillian Lynne Theatre on Drury Lane from Monday 8 February to Saturday 13 March 2027, a short season of 30 performances, and every date is now sold out at the official box office.

LW Theatres, which owns the theatre and runs its box office, describes the show as Atkinson returning to where it all began, the theatre. It will bring some of his best-known sketches and characters to the stage, from the chaos of Mr Bean to the scheming of Blackadder, alongside sketches from Not the Nine O'Clock News and new material written with his long-term collaborators Richard Curtis, Ben Elton and Howard Goodall.

The show was announced on 5 October, as Chris Wiegand reported for The Guardian. It is directed by Raz Shaw. LW Theatres lists it as a comedy recommended for ages 12 and over, with the running time still to be confirmed.

Chris Wiegand reported this first for The Guardian. Checked against LW Theatres: Rowan Live at the Gillian Lynne Theatre.

What Atkinson and Curtis said

Announcing the run, Atkinson said: "It is 40 years since I last did a comedy sketch show in the West End." He said he wanted to perform again the sketches that started his career and Curtis's, the ones in which his best-known characters first appeared, along with some surprise new material written for this show.

Curtis said it had been 50 years since he first saw Atkinson perform on stage, and that it was clear at once they were watching a unique talent. Over the summer the pair began putting the new show together in front of a small audience, and Curtis said the comic accuracy that made Atkinson famous was all still there, The Guardian reported.

The writing team is the one behind much of Atkinson's best-known work. Curtis co-wrote Blackadder and Mr Bean, Ben Elton co-wrote the later Blackadder series with Curtis, and Howard Goodall wrote the Blackadder music. All three are named by LW Theatres as writing new material for Rowan Live.

Where it all began

Atkinson's career began on stage. He wrote and performed comedy shows with Curtis and Goodall while they were students at Oxford University, before television made him famous in the 1980s with the BBC satire Not the Nine O'Clock News and then as Edmund Blackadder in the historical comedy that ran through four series and several eras of British history.

He had a one-man show in the West End in 1981, aged 26, and another five years later, The Guardian reported. That 1986 run is the last time he did a comedy sketch show in the West End, which is why Rowan Live is billed as a return after 40 years.

Mr Bean, the almost silent man-child who made Atkinson a global star on television and film in the 1990s, was worked out on stage in the 1980s before he reached the screen. Atkinson took the character on a live comedy tour, and played him again in front of a worldwide audience at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, playing a single repeated note in Chariots of Fire with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Also in 2012, he appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in We Are Most Amused, a Prince's Trust gala, in a new Blackadder sketch in which Blackadder had become the chief executive of a bank, with Tony Robinson's Baldrick as his gardener. At the same show he revived his routine as a priest who explains how Jesus's miracles led him into a career as a magician. The Guardian noted that the priest's robes appear in the promotional image for Rowan Live, in a dressing-up box of his old costumes.

The sketch comedy he came from

Atkinson's live work grew out of revue, the Oxbridge sketch tradition behind Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python and Not the Nine O'Clock News itself. In the 1970s he toured with Angus Deayton as his straight man, Leo Benedictus wrote for The Guardian in 2013, and a 1991 recording, Rowan Atkinson Live, captured many of those early sketches, co-written with Ben Elton and Richard Curtis.

That recording included some of his best-known stage pieces: a waiter in a tandoori restaurant talking to a table of rowdy diners nobody can see, a schoolmaster taking a register of pupils with rude surnames, and Satan politely welcoming new arrivals to hell. A sketch about being bored in church later became a Mr Bean routine.

Even before Not the Nine O'Clock News reached television at the end of 1979, Atkinson had appeared in that year's Amnesty International concert film, The Secret Policeman's Ball, alongside Peter Cook, Eleanor Bron and Clive James. Ryan Gilbey, writing for The Guardian on Atkinson's 70th birthday in January 2025, picked out his six-minute headteacher monologue from that show as one of the high points of his career.

On screen

Atkinson's film work runs from a brief role opposite Sean Connery in the 1983 Bond film Never Say Never Again to the bumbling vicar in Four Weddings and a Funeral, the voice of Zazu the hornbill in Disney's The Lion King and the gift-wrapping sales assistant in Love Actually.

He played Mr Bean in two feature films, Bean in 1997 and Mr Bean's Holiday in 2007, and the hapless spy Johnny English in three, which The Guardian reported made $480m between them worldwide. The character began in a series of 1990s Barclaycard adverts.

On television he took a serious turn as the detective Jules Maigret in ITV films in 2016, the first of which drew nearly six million viewers, and in 2022 returned to silent slapstick in the Netflix series Man vs Bee.

An actor as well as a comic

Atkinson has also built a career in plays and musicals. In 2009 he played Fagin in Cameron Mackintosh's West End revival of Oliver! at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, a role that brought him an Olivier nomination. In 2013 he starred in Simon Gray's play Quartermaine's Terms in the West End.

Rowan Live is a different kind of show, built on sketches rather than a script, and on his gift for physical comedy. It also comes at a time when West End and touring producers are leaning on much-loved television comedy. The Guardian listed recent stage versions of Fawlty Towers, The Good Life, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and Only Fools and Horses.

The theatre

The Gillian Lynne Theatre, at 166 Drury Lane in Holborn, is one of the LW Theatres group, alongside the Adelphi, the Cambridge Theatre, His Majesty's Theatre, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and the London Palladium. It is currently home to the stage version of My Neighbour Totoro, which ends its run on 3 January 2027, leaving a gap of about five weeks before Rowan Live begins.

The theatre is named after the dancer and choreographer Gillian Lynne, who choreographed Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. It is a short walk from Covent Garden and Holborn Underground stations.

Sold out at £35, listed on resale for hundreds

LW Theatres sold tickets from £35 with no booking fees, plus a £2 restoration levy on every ticket. The theatre's own page now marks every date as sold out.

On the resale side the gap is very wide. On 30 October StubHub listed only a handful of seats across the run. The cheapest listing for Friday 12 February was £500, for Saturday 13 February £852.28, for Monday 15 February £650, for Saturday 20 February £695 and for Thursday 4 March £3,000, plus StubHub booking fees at checkout. Only five of the 30 performances had any listings at all, most of them one or two seats.

Even the cheapest resale seat on 30 October was more than 14 times the lowest box office price. Seats on StubHub are listed by people who bought them and are now reselling, and the sellers set the prices, which is how a theatre ticket that cost from £35 can be listed for hundreds. The box office prices also covered a range of seats, so not every listing compares with a £35 ticket: a seller asking £3,000 may be offering one of the best seats in the house.

With so few seats listed, a single new listing can move the price a long way in either direction. Our prices are checked every hour, and the live picture for each night prints below this story.

The government has announced plans to ban reselling tickets for more than their original price, but those plans are still in a draft bill and are not yet law. Our explainer, The UK ticket resale price cap: where the law stands, sets out where that has got to. NeedATicket does not sell, resell or hold tickets: we track the prices StubHub lists and email you when a price falls to your budget.

What happens next

LW Theatres is the official box office for Rowan Live. No extra performances have been announced, and the run is fixed at 30 shows.

If you want to know when more seats appear on StubHub, or when the price of a night falls, set an alert below. We will email you when new listings appear or when a price drops to the level you choose.

Tickets today

What StubHub lists now, checked hourly. Prices are listing prices; StubHub adds its booking fees at checkout.