Professor Daisy Fancourt takes the Young Vic Main House for one night on Sunday 27 September 2026, on what the evidence says the arts do to health.
Daisy Fancourt is a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London, and she has spent her career turning a soft claim into a measurable one. The claim is that the arts are good for you. The work is the epidemiology: cohort studies on whether people who go to concerts and galleries live longer, on loneliness and social isolation, on what happens when doctors prescribe a choir instead of a drug. During the pandemic she ran the largest British study of its psychological and social effects.
The findings are more specific than the headline. Frequency matters, participation beats attendance, and the effect sizes are large enough that the health service has started acting on them through social prescribing. The Young Vic has a long record of programming outside the play form on its main stage, but a lecture is still an unusual thing to sell tickets for.
She takes the Young Vic’s Main House for a single night on Sunday 27 September 2026 — one evening, in the middle of the Thelma & Louise run, and the only one-night booking in that room the theatre has announced this season. A theatre giving its main stage to a scientist explaining why theatres work is an unusual thing to programme, and the argument has a direct interest for anyone who spends their year on a calendar like this one.