The Licorne Theatre’s family festival celebrates two decades of artistic ambition for audiences who happen to be young
What few know about Cannes, the city that rivals Hollywood when it comes to movie glamour, is that it is also home to a small but vibrant stage theatre scene. And one if its cultural treasures, the Théâtre de la Licorne, marks a quiet milestone this autumn: P’tits Cannes à You, the beloved annual family festival which has become a fixture of the Toussaint holidays, turns twenty.
If that sounds modest in the grand sweep of cultural history, consider what consistent artistic vision actually achieves over time. An entire generation has grown up in these seats, learning early that live theatre could move them in ways no screen would ever manage. The children who attended the first edition in 2005 are well into adulthood by now, quite possibly bringing their own offspring to discover what puppets and poets and acrobats can do when given proper artistic license.
Courtesy CannesWebTV on YouTube
The festival returns October 17–31 with programming that continues to operate from a premise that ought to be self-evident but somehow remains quietly revolutionary: children are intelligent, emotionally sophisticated humans who deserve art that treats them accordingly. No talking vegetables explaining the virtues of sharing. No celebrity voices compensating for thin material. Just artists bringing their full powers to work for audiences who have not yet learned to fake appreciation for mediocrity.
The Ministry of Culture has clearly noticed. The Licorne holds the designation “Scène conventionnée d’intérêt national Art, enfance, jeunesse,” which signals official recognition that something exceptional happens here, something worth protecting as a national cultural asset. Walk into any afternoon performance and the reason becomes immediately apparent. Toddlers sit transfixed by movement and light. Teenagers forget their phones exist for ninety uninterrupted minutes. And parents discover that family culture need not mean surrendering their own intelligence or taste at the door.
“Imagination is a child’s friend. It lulls them to sleep with the bedtime stories their parents tell them at night. It accompanies them daily during their youngest years. With its highly diverse and high-quality programming, the Théâtre de la Licorne serves as a bridge between imagination and reality.”
— David Lisnard, mayor of Cannes and father of three
This Year’s Festival Programme
For two weeks each autumn, the Licorne becomes what every theatre aspires to be: a space where the artificial boundaries between entertainment and art dissolve entirely, where families discover that cultural experiences can challenge you intellectually while delighting you aesthetically, often in the same breath. Among this season’s highlights:
La forêt des larmes (The Forest of Tears) arrives October 19–20 bearing a title that announces its intentions without apology. A forest of tears. The company behind it understands what many artists working for children persistently forget: young people already possess intimate knowledge of sadness, loneliness, and loss. What they lack is merely vocabulary for those emotions. Theatre, at its best, provides that language through immersive poetry that embraces the full range of human experience rather than pretending childhood exists in some protected bubble of manufactured joy.
Comme le vent (Like the Wind) uses acrobatic dance to explore invisible forces on October 26–27. The kind of performance that sends children home asking profound questions about what they have just witnessed while their parents scramble for answers that feel adequate. Good. That is precisely how art should function.
Heureuse qui comme Armelle takes Homer’s Odyssey and filters it through contemporary irreverence on October 22, proving that ancient texts still speak across millennia when handled with intelligence and a sense of play. The Greeks understood narrative structure rather well, after all, and children have changed considerably less than our anxious contemporary parenting culture likes to pretend.
Beyond the Festival
Naturally, the Licorne’s commitment to young audiences extends well beyond these two weeks. The theatre operates year-round on the principle that culture should not wait politely inside a building for audiences to make the pilgrimage. Productions travel directly into Cannes’ pre-schools, schools, and neighborhoods throughout the season.
The 2025–2026 programme brings 31 productions across 57 performances, with 19 dedicated specifically to schools and pre-schools. In April 2026, Herbes folles en République transforms the République quarter itself into a stage, mischievous puppets animating streets and squares in a piece of site-specific theatre that reminds everyone watching that art requires neither proscenium arches nor velvet seats to cast its spell.
The theatre maintains its commitment to nurturing new theatrical writing through a residency programme at the Médiathèque Noailles, providing playwrights with space and time to create work specifically for younger spectators. This season brings three new pieces to the stage, including The Last Library in March, which imagines books as endangered species requiring protection. Given current trends in literacy and attention spans, the premise reads less like speculative fiction and more like uncomfortable documentary from the near future.
Adults are not entirely forgotten: Les Jeudis du Jazz continues at the Théâtre Alexandre III, welcoming families to ten proper jazz concerts throughout the season. These are not simplified children’s concerts with dumbed-down arrangements but built on the premise that musical sophistication remains available to eight-year-olds and seventy-year-olds alike if you simply offer it without apology.
What Two Decades Built
The festival has become a dependable marker of the autumn cultural calendar. What matters most, though, is not the programming itself but what it has quietly achieved. Young people who grew up attending these performances learned early to sit with ambiguity rather than demanding immediate resolution, to trust that theatre could move them in ways they lacked words for, to understand instinctively what live performance offers that no screen can replicate.
Ticket prices tell their own story about municipal priorities. When a city keeps theatre tickets cheaper than cinema tickets year after year, it has made a choice about what culture should cost and who should have access to it.
But the festival’s real achievement extends beyond any single production or season. P’tits Cannes à You has refused to accept that art for young people must somehow be simpler or gentler than art for adults. Cannes has sustained this vision consistently across changing administrations and shifting budgets. Artists continue creating ambitious work that takes young audiences seriously rather than merely programming for them. Families continue showing up season after season, ready to let theatre work its particular magic. And that stubborn insistence, maintained across twenty years, counts as a minor revolution. The gentle kind, perhaps, but the kind that shapes how an entire generation engages with culture for the rest of their lives.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
P’tits Cannes à You Festival
October 17–31, 2025
Tickets
www.cannes.com
Festival Prices
Full: €6 | Reduced: €4
Season Prices
Full: €10 | Reduced: €5
Concessions available
CONTACT DETAILS
Théâtre de la Licorne
25 Av. Francis Tonner
06150 Cannes
Tel: +33 (0)4 97 06 44 90
All photos and images courtesy Mairie de Cannes; lead image courtesy Cannes Web TV on YouTube; all other photos and videos as credited
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