The simple 'black box' of a theatre space offers both the containment and discipline of its physical dimension and the infinite scope of its blank canvas. Our job is to transform its neutrality into an arena where anything can happen, a magic window on human experience, the Café at the End of the Universe.

Cafe Reason’s first theatre performance was Echo in 1998, at the Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, and we staged six more major shows there over the following 13 years (Erosion, Guess-Station, The ‘If’ Path, Precarious Footing, Orpheus, and Matrix). Then with new opportunities and inspiration, we took The Heart’s Desire to the Old Fire Station in 2014, subsequently returning to the Pegasus with Dolls’ House in 2016. For our 20th-anniversary show, Limina, we went back to Freud Café-Bar, where it had all begun in 1997.

You can find out more about all these shows via the menu on the left.

Some of our more recent productions and projects are listed under the ‘New Work’ section. This includes our last full-scale show — Tipping Point — about ecological crisis, which we choreographed for two very different venues, neither of them conventional theatre spaces.