For ten nights this summer, one of Japan’s most inventive theatre makers takes over a London stage. Hideki Noda’s 320°F runs at Sadler’s Wells Theatre from 2 to 11 July 2026, a UK premiere arriving straight from its Tokyo opening at the company’s home theatre. Performed in Japanese with English subtitles, it is the latest production from NODA MAP, the company Noda founded in the early 1990s, staged by a 25-strong ensemble. Spoken aloud, the title is “minus three twenty Fahrenheit”, the temperature at which life sits suspended in cryogenic storage.
If you have followed Noda’s London visits, the pattern is familiar. A Night at the Kabuki sold out at Sadler’s Wells in 2022, Love in Action followed in 2024, and this is the longest run the company has staged at the theatre to date. Tickets start from £15, which for a production of this scale is rare.
Hideki Noda's 320°F at Sadler's Wells, London
What is 320°F about?
It begins at a palaeontology dig. An excavation led by a biotechnology professor turns up the trail of the mythical “Angel’s Bone”, a relic her pharmaceutical sponsor believes could hold the key to youth and longevity. Attention shifts to her assistant, a man who has outlived a 15-year life expectancy thanks to modern medicine and now wants to repay the debt. The bone vibrating in his right arm may be the way to trace the Angel’s Bone, and when it does, it opens a door into his genetic memory, throwing the story back and forth through time, from the modern world to the Middle Ages and into the ancient past.
What follows is a battle of ideas. 320°F is a Faustian descent through myth, memory and other bad ideas, asking whether the desire for more is a creative or a destructive force, and whether science’s drive to enhance humanity might end up damning it. The themes are reproductive medicine, anti-ageing and the human urge to master technology, the same urge that surfaces around nuclear power and AI.
Noda frames it as a dilemma rather than a verdict. “In the field of medicine, there are things that could be improved to save people, but at the same time, there are also things we shouldn’t touch,” he has said. “To live with the dilemma of science technology is a theme of this play.”
That sounds heavy on the page. On stage it rarely is. Noda’s signature is speed, physical comedy and visual transformation, a blend of drama, music and dance delivered at a sprint rather than as a lecture.
Who is Hideki Noda?
Hideki Noda OBE is a playwright, director and actor, and one of the defining figures of postwar Japanese theatre. He founded his first company, Yume no Yuminsha, in 1976 while still a student at Tokyo University, winning the Kishida Drama Award and becoming a figurehead of the country’s youth theatre movement in the 1970s and 80s, once drawing 26,000 people to a single staging of The Ring of the Nibelungs at Tokyo’s Yoyogi National Gymnasium. He set up NODA MAP in the early 1990s after a year studying theatre in London, and his range runs well beyond straight plays into Kabuki and opera.
British audiences have seen his work before: Red Demon at the Young Vic in 2003, The Diver at Soho Theatre in 2008, and The Bee, the first play he wrote in English, which earned a five star review in Time Out. He also belongs to a long line of Japanese theatre that reimagines Western classics: A Night at the Kabuki reset Romeo and Juliet to Queen songs, while Love in Action reframed The Brothers Karamazov against wartime Nagasaki. His work has been staged in 38 cities across 13 countries, and in 2023 he became the first Japanese artist to receive the ISPA Distinguished Artist Award. He appears in 320°F as performer as well as author and director.
The cast
Noda is joined by a company drawn from the upper tier of Japanese stage and screen. The leads include Sadawo Abe, a fixture of Japanese film and comedy, Suzu Hirose, one of the country’s most recognisable young screen actors, and Eri Fukatsu, an award-winning film and stage performer. Veteran actor Isao Hashizume features alongside Koji Ohkura, Shoko Takada, Yuri Kawakami and Satoshi Hashimoto. For UK audiences, seeing this calibre of Japanese talent together on one London stage is the kind of thing that usually requires a flight to Tokyo.
A rare chance to see Noda live in London
Noda’s productions rarely tour, and when they do the London runs tend to sell. This is large scale, fast moving, idea driven theatre, closer to a visual event than a conventional play. The staging does much of the storytelling, through Yukio Horio’s set, Marihiko Hara’s music and Shigehiro Ide’s choreography, so the language barrier sits lighter than you might expect for a subtitled show.
Sadler's Wells, London
320°F tickets, dates and running time at Sadler’s Wells
The run plays 2 to 11 July 2026 at Sadler’s Wells Theatre on Rosebery Avenue, a short walk from Angel station. Performances run Wednesday to Friday at 7:30pm, with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:30pm. The running time is 2 hours 20 minutes with no interval, and the show is suitable for ages 6 and over, performed in Japanese with English surtitles. Prices start from £15. As an independent hire rather than part of the Sadler’s Wells season, some theatre discounts do not apply, so book directly through the venue. The London run is supported by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.
For anyone with an interest in Japanese culture, contemporary theatre or simply ambitious storytelling, 320°F is one of the standout Japanese events in London this summer.
