The Front is a new play by Sam Cottington, exploring how history feels, rather than how it was.
When Cordula and Stefan meet, they discover they aren’t like the others. What happens next is pretty extreme, but then they are living through particularly extreme times. There is Belgium, the Western Front at the close of the First World War, an isolated farm house in Bavaria, as the Second World War escalates, and present day Berlin, on the edge of the city. Unfortunately, through it all, they have each other.
Cordula and Stefan are just trying their best to live, because, for reasons unclear to them, they are unable to die.
London Performance Studios presents the premiere of this first iteration of The Front. It has been commissioned and produced by London Performance Studios as part of the Associate Artists Programme.
About
Sam Cottington is an artist, writer, and theatremaker from London. Through interdisciplinary experiments in collage, he often presents ‘reality’ as contradictory and mutable: the product of specific historical and social economies. The texture of experience and the production and trajectory of the theatre, the family, and desiring subjectivities are recurrent in his practice, often culminating in devised interventions which address their formal capacities.
He is an Associate Artist at London Performance Studios. Recent exhibitions and performances have been presented at Kunsthalle Winterthur (2026); SculptureCenter, New York (2025); Louche Ops, Berlin, (2025); Nir Altman, Munich (2024); zaza’, Milan (2023); and Ginny on Frederick, London (2022). Phone Plays, his first collection of plays, was published by Montez Press in collaboration with London Performance Studios (2024). He is a graduate of Monica Baer’s class at Städelschule, Frankfurt (2025), and Goldsmiths, University of London.