Rowan Atkinson’s first West End sketch show in forty years brings Mr Bean, Blackadder and new material written with Richard Curtis, Ben Elton and Howard Goodall to Drury Lane.
Rowan Atkinson opens Rowan Live, his first West End sketch show in 40 years, at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in Covent Garden on Monday 8 February 2027. The season runs to Saturday 13 March.
Born in County Durham in 1955, Atkinson read electrical engineering at Newcastle, then went up to Oxford, where he met the writer Richard Curtis and the composer Howard Goodall. The Oxford Revue at the Edinburgh Fringe first won him national attention in 1976.
Not the Nine O’Clock News followed in 1979 and Blackadder in 1983. Mr Bean, an almost wordless character, arrived in 1990.
Rowan Atkinson in Revue won him an Olivier Award in 1981. He has since returned to the West End in The Nerd, in The Sneeze, and as Fagin in Oliver! at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 2009.
The new show brings back the sketches he and Curtis began with and the characters that grew from them. Curtis, Ben Elton and Goodall have written new material with him.
The theatre opened as the New London Theatre in 1973 and gave Cats its premiere in May 1981. In 2018 it took the name of that show’s choreographer.