Well, yes. Not only is the statement a geographical certainty, but there was a time when the Old Vic was considered so off-west-end that wealthy theatre-goers would hire armed escorts to see them safely past the brigands and blackguards of Waterloo Bridge. Now we just have Boris patrolling the realm on his 21-speed steed, deterring potential ne’er-do-wells by ejecting the word “Oik!” like a demented boar. How times change.
No, the Old Vic shouldn’t be excluded for being the overfed hoyden in the off-west-end playground. Let’s not forget those bully-bombs it stood up to in WWII. Neither can we discount the words of my favourite-actor-that-I’ve-never-seen-act, Edmund Kean, to the Vic’s audience:
“In my life I have never acted to such a set of ignorant, unmitigated brutes as I have before me.”
As close to the constipated exclamations of a fringe actor as ever I’ve heard.
The Vic’s walls sweat with the talents of the ages. Literally. Up the stairs from the stalls you’ll feel the piercing eyes of Richard Burton upon you. Waltz with Michael Redgrave and Edith Evans on your way down to the loo. Chat with a wild-eyed Peter Scofield by the circle bar. The place is thick with ghosts, metaphorical and apparent. Having spent a terrifying summer locking up backstage, I’ll testify that things really do go bump down stage right (the poltergeists can be pacified by playing radio over the tannoy, just ask the stage-doorkeeper).
Working at the Vic assisted and protracted my progress like an overly tactile lollipop-man. Employment there was a warm, fuzzy refuge from the lean months of our acting careers, when expulsions of drama school graduates bumped us down from hot young gambits to tepid mid-tween two-bits. Strange thing is, I’ve mapped out the trajectory of my acting jobs and every good gig I’ve ever had has come about because of working behind that damned, glorious bar.
Consider it when next you take a trip down The Cut. Take a good look at the faces tearing your tickets and mixing your Gin & Tonic. You’ll never find a team as nimble-witted and mammoth-hearted. But a few of them you’ll be seeing again in starrier performances than “That’ll Be £4.20 Please Madam”. Bet your life. So this week’s blog is dedicated to the ushers and bar-staff at this leviathan of the off-west-end, including those who’ve gone on to become film stars, award-winning writers and Hollywood costume designers (they know who they are). More importantly, here’s to those still grafting there today. They won’t be for long.
Charles Kingsley once described the Vic as:
“…a licensed pit of darkness, a trap of temptation, profligacy and ruin.”
Now, say what you like about The Water Babies, but anyone who’s ever had one too many lychee martinis in the temporal vortex that is the Pit Bar will understand exactly what old Charlie’s on about.
Yet another reason to surrender to the spirits of the Old Vic.
Every good theatre has versatility on its side. The Manchester Royal Exchange doubles nicely as an intergalactic spaceship. The Old Vic’s public bar successfully moonlights as an Ultimate Fighting Arena (well, it did before they installed CCTV). And the National Theatre is obviously London’s unofficial bastion in the likely event of zombies overwhelming the South Bank.
And then there’s the White Bear Theatre Club. If it weren’t for the signs, you might think that you’d wandered into the wrong place and certainly the wrong decade. There are no less than half a dozen televisions offering a variety of sporting events in a pub the size of a pool table. Yellowing league listings adorn the walls. Earnest pencilings of famous football stars line the corridor to the toilets. And the clientele are a trans-era collective of flat-caps, tracksuits and motorcycle jackets. As a curious finale, the barman feeds the flowers out front with the slops from leftover pint glasses. So what on earth would I be doing there seeing a play about Byron and the Shelleys?
Well, it was a play I auditioned for. And like all bitter and thespically-challenged actors I was curious to see how it would turn out without the acute disadvantage of me. My previous experience of the White Bear involved a surly barman giving me a good telling-off for requesting a coffee. I had learned my lesson, and this time ordered an ale, which, somewhat ironically, tasted of mocha.
Waiting for curtain up, I spoke to a member of the flat-cap constituency – a quartz-eyed fellow by the name of Topper.
‘So have you seen much in the theatre out back?’
‘Nah, theatre’s not really my thing. John tried to drag me along once, but—‘
‘John?’
‘John Hurt. Used to have a little breakfast pint together. But like I said, not really my thing…’
Truly these men are the living chronicles of actors gone by.
Now, being the penny-pincher that I am I had a two-for-one offer. The amiable box office took my announcement of this by promptly doubling the price of my tickets. Confusion unmuddled, I sat down on the side of the corner theatre (like the Old Red Lion, the venue seats its audience on one right angle and the stage on the other), sipping my beer and ignoring the taste of Arabica bean. I now pass judgement on the production in the time-honoured manner of many a rejected actor:
Absolute cracker of a night. I’ve not seen quality of this caliber in one of the smaller theatres for yonks. Actually, for a theatre that sits somewhere in the Twilight Zone between Kennington and Oval, it was astounding. Not only that, it was produced with barely a piece of furniture beyond a pillow and stool. It was a packed house propped up by deliciously filthy language. The way theatre about the Romantic poets should be.
See, I can be a good sport. Something, incidentally, that the White Bear has in abundance.
Talk about scandal. One minute I’m at the theatre enjoying a perfectly respectable piece of Restoration — the next I’m in the depths of Lewisham doing the twist (again) between a woman dressed in a yoga mat and a man in a faux-bearskin loincloth, mixing mojitos for people in bubble-wrap. Theatre is truly transportational.
To explain. Once upon a time I worked at this week’s venue: in the teensy, affable bar, tucked beneath the stairs to the stalls like some hastily-assembled franchise of pre-bedtime children. I spent my quiet shifts leafing through free copies of bad books and wondering how long my post-graduation unemployment-funk would last. Then I’d meander home through the Greenwich foot tunnel, where I was once unsuccessfully mugged by a man wearing a pirate’s outfit. Actually, working at the Greenwich Theatre provided me with the best address I ever had — Cyclops Mews, Homer Drive, Mudchute, Isle of Dogs. A right old postcode odyssey.
The Greenwich Theatre has the munificent, orphans-at-Christmas feel of an old regional venue, which is the first good reason for paying a visit. Because Greenwich doesn’t feel like London. It feels Dickensian and quaint, with its antique market and naval college and (immolated) tea clipper. And how many other fringe venues are only a hop, skim and jet along the Thames? With more transport links than anyone imagines, Greenwich is utterly charming.
Tonight’s performance was The School For Scandal, Sheridan’s corrosively satirical comedy of manners — incidentally one of the first grown-up plays I ever saw. In fact, still have the production script. Inside are the perspicacious scribblings of a flourishing tosspot. For example, ‘Humour — but they don’t laugh?!!’ as if deadpan had been invented circa 1991. Also inscribed for posterity is the dubious assertion that ‘Sarcasm is the god of poetry’. This does not bode well for the memoirs.
The company’s protean actors were also doubling up for tandem performances of Doctor Faustus. Stupendous workload notwithstanding, the direction was devilishly inventive, the production riotously and repeatedly hilarious. Fittingly —or perhaps I was under the influence of Greenwich’s salinity— the theatre stage itself seemed reminiscent of a galleon’s deck.
But is this centuries-old play still sea-worthy? As Mr Garrick’s prologue puts it:
A school for scandal! Tell me, I beseech you,
Needs there a school this modish art to teach you?
The backbiting affectation and fiendish sniping of the 1770s seems very much alive, judging by any newsagent stand’s offerings — Celebrity Mums, Rundown And Unfit! screams Heat’s latest headline. Bitchity bitch-bitch.
Which brings us back to yoga mats and loincloths. As every theatre-going veteran knows, hang around long enough in a post-show bar and you will inevitably be invited in cavalier fashion to a fancy dress party that a friend’s friend of the cast is throwing. The party in this case —jointly hosted by painters and sexual health workers— was replete with hijinks, gossip and drinking songs about STDs, though with mercifully fewer asides. Even Sheridan’s Ofsted-recommended School For Scandal can’t compete with that.
This week’s venue has the dubious prestige of being the only theatre I’ve ever walked out of. Not, rest assured fringe-lovers, because of anything to do with the production. Just good old-fashioned self-humiliation.
A few years back, during the first half of a touching and reverential play, a platoon of youths behind me were flipping texts to one another. More unforgivably, the text alerts in question were Crazy Frog Redux and Akon singing about how lonely he was. They tittered maniacally and eventually I responded with an exasperated:
‘Oh, come on…’
At which point I realized that the audience —and actors— were staring at me, horrified, presuming my outburst concerned their deeply touching reconciliation scene. I made my excuses like a tabloid hack at a brothel.
If only we’d been on Broadway. This week saw James Bond and Wolverine battling disruptive audience members, with Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman directing their celestial fury towards a front-row audience member who forgot to switch his phone off. They may have hyper-gadgets and super-powers, but these boys are squealishly susceptible to cracks in the ol’ Fourth Wall.
Thankfully tonight’s performance was interruption and mortification-free. Theatre503, formerly the Latchmere, formerly the Grace theatre. Same venue, but now with added mysterious numbers. Perhaps 503 is the meaning of life. Perhaps it just means they get to the top of the listings. Either way it’s refreshing. It’s also deceptively close to Clapham Junction, which means pretty much anyone in London should be able to get to it easily with no excuses. Take note, my esteemed colleague, who burst into the theatre half an hour late.
Fearless new writing is the directive of the 503, and over its burgeoning years it’s previewed many authors of whom I am intensely fond and covetous, particularly the talent-crammed collective that was The Apathists. They even coaxed the skyrocketing Tom Hardy in to run an actors’ gym —Shotgun— culminating in a tremendous production of Blue On Blue.
However, seeing a play here about a death-row warden, I felt the inscrutably malevolent voice of my old principle in my head: ‘What’s the relevance, darling?’ (don’t read into that, he called everyone darling. Or at least in our impressions of him he did). What interest could a British audience have in an American execution block?
Judging by sniffling into scrunched tissues at curtain call, a helluva lot. The Ones That Flutter by Sylvia Reed —like its set— is a beautifully compact production. An outstanding evening begins front-of-house — not in all OWE theatres do you get the artistic director taking your ticket. The auditorium is a snug descent down into a confidential playing space, which doesn’t require traps and tricks when the acting is up to scratch. Which it certainly was tonight. To top it off, which other fringe venues have a sumptuous private antechamber to discuss the play in at the end of the show?
The perfect place to confront noisy audience members. Not, remember, during the performance.
Approximately 83 theatres make up the glorious confederacy of the Off-West End. 83! Show to show that’s 8 straight days of sitting in the dark; roughly 166 gin & tonics - and 8 limes, if you’re the type. I for one am that type, and here begins a rather rapacious attempt at compiling a taster menu; a sampler of all 83 fringe venues. Sort of like stamp-collecting, but with less licking. One would hope.
Phileas Fogg-like delusions of grandeur aside, I begin by having one of those days. You might call them ‘a working day’. My usual, erm, working day consists of 20% lie-mongering, 4% panicked dead-lining and 76% girlish tittering as I filter rude words through my Mac’s speech function. But today starts with an audition for a play requiring me to murder crustaceans live onstage, and go tongue-to-tongue with my ‘grandmother’. To be honest, only one of those theatrical gimmicks intensely appeals. I sneak in front of a fellow actor because I have an impending game of tennis and a terminal lapse of attention. On the courts I am destroyed by a giant Italian, and it strikes me that hastily-purchased, Wimbledon-inspired tennis rackets are summertime’s equivalent to Boxing Day puppies. After this I attend yet another Alexander Technique session, and begin to suspect my spine resembles a half-played game of Jenga. At dinner I spill chili-squid down my white shirt, which rather stylishly kicks off an evening of bumping into influential contemporaries. Finally I arrive at the Gate theatre in Notting Hill.
Be warned: the pre-show entrance up to the Gate feels misleadingly like a rollercoaster queue. Inside, however, is the closest thing you’ll find to a miniature Royal Court. Familiar faces of stars-in-ascension abound, huddling cross-legged by the intimate toilets. This and the lack of a bar compels people to mingle - and converse?! - which is rather nice.
Tonight’s play is Vanya, a streamline approach to Chekhov’s chubby classic, written by the increasingly dexterous Sam Holcroft. I like this slim-fast approach to old Anton. His short stories - The Kiss, An Avenger, The Duel - seem to work potently on a smaller scale, and for some reason the reduced cast here provide real bite to the comedy. As we settle into the Gate’s cinematic slice of a sloping auditorium, the bleak simplicity of the set suddenly erupts. I don’t know quite how they managed to rotate their box-of-tricks shed-set on that modest, sprightly stage, but the effect was as dizzying as the performances. It’s rare, too, to see a play where the story is so punchily told through pure body language. That’s your subtext. Where do we learn body language if not at the theatre?
Certainly not on the commuter train home, where body language does not exist because everyone is so rammed up into each other that we might all as well be Chekhovian lovers. Smelly, knackered, gin-soaked lovers. Here’s to the Gate - and long may it remain, swinging.
Home is where the art is. And I’ve habited some less than artful places. I lived in a luxury apartment with a Jacuzzi and sauna that was so pointlessly expensive that we’d sit in the spa reminiscing about sustenance. I stayed with an ambassador’s daughter whose house was an elegant rubbish tip of priceless artefacts. I resided next door to an elderly deaf man with a flair for casual racism and a penchant for rummaging through my bin bags. Now I’ve moved again, and I’m waiting for some domestic horror-bomb to drop. But every nook and cranny compliments my questionable personality perfectly. Its garden encourages contemplation like a perfectly rolled cigarette. Its bathroom has a corner-tub with a ledge for resting the complete works of Bernard Shaw and/or Calvin & Hobbes. Its bedroom captures the sun’s rising rays, gently ushering you to consciousness in the way an alarm clock should but never quite does. It’s the perfect home.However imperfect relatives may be, perfection, however, is relative. Whilst house-hunting I viewed somewhere billed as an artist’s retreat (retreating from the onset of a political atmosphere that will undermine and annihilate the arts, I suppose). I was greeted by a man wearing bright ivy-green, pointy purple shoes and a top hat with goggles. He led me on a tour, passing through a room full of fish-tanks where a man in a wetsuit struggled; a stairwell impasse hosting a slinky-racing tournament; and a man painstakingly making castles out of cakes. Eventually we emerged on a roof terrace where a young woman alternated wheatgrass and alcohol in an attempt to breathe fire more efficiently. As in, to ease her carbon footprint.
I’m not sure if your carbon footprint is of utmost concern when fire-eating’s your career of choice, but it certainly underlined that nothing beats a home for pure drama. You may even find that you’re at your most intriguing when pottering about the house (many drama school exercises play to this fact). Even Hollywood agrees, with Synecdoche, New York, in which a beleaguered theatre director receives an award that allows him to create a live, never-ending theatre production in an abandoned set of flats. Cue shameless rip-off for this week’s proto-venue.
There is a huge building by Rodney Street in Elephant & Castle, still awaiting demolition because a few residents refuse to sell up. Government ministers were vocal about utilizing abandoned, recession-punctured shops for the arts (well, they were when they were still in office), but what about the hundreds of houses and buildings lying unappropriated now? With 2012’s Olympic construction drive there will be many structures in transition. I’m compiling a list of buildings awaiting renovation that might play host to a sort of revolving rep through the under-developed districts of London. The cheerless dénouement of The Cherry Orchard would chime well with the dynamite and diggers outside.
And why didn’t I move in with the purple pointy-shoed fellow? Ah. I just wasn’t artsy enough for them. Touché.
Don’t make me angry, boys. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
It’s come to my attention that contemporary televised cuisine is blatantly pulping, juicing and bottling the limelight from our old pal, theatre’s backyard. Jamie Oliver is muscling in on the social vigilance that’s traditionally been the stomping ground of the playwright. Gordon Ramsay’s verbatim performances barely convince (no chef in real life could speak to his KPs like that without receiving a ginger grater to the goolies). And Heston Blumenthal, with his fancypants ‘Ooh, let’s make food entertaining! Look, an ejaculating Roman soufflé!’. Food isn’t meant to be entertaining. Theatre is. Chop us some slack, lads, it’s a recession, and those particular green shoots are not for nibbling.
I jest, of course. But there is an opening in the market here, one still flourishing in North America: Dinner Theatre. In fact, during one production of Arsenic & Old Lace circa 1982, my mother found herself tussling over the last bread roll with the gigantic hand of Lou Ferrigno, aka The Incredible Hulk (see, that opening line wasn’t entirely arbitrary). If only she’d let him have that bread roll. I might have ended up with a new stepfather, a Hollywood childhood and fabulous green skin. O, wondrous thought.
Now, I’ll be honest: I’m a sensory glutton. I smoke a pipe with the paper. I Rubik’s Cube at the cinema. I listen to my ‘Learn Romanian Super Quick Fast!’ CD in the bubble bath. This epicurean overload isn’t for everyone. But there’s something deliciously decadent about dinner theatre’s concept: starter, first act, main course, second act, desserts and coffee with the finale. Yum.
This hankering to feed the belly as well as the mind led me to this week’s venue. Our show will be advertised, like all good dinner parties, via word of mouth; a discreet meeting point set in deepest darkest Bermondsey. From there a jaunt around the cobblestones works up your appetite, and you pass an old mission house with the ambiguous command FEED MY LAMBS carved into it. Finally you emerge at the dilapidated remains of a blubber factory, hidden between a disused leather market and the structural ghosts of vinegar plants. The old industrial heart of London, and, our venue. Several tables are splayed out for dinner, though you won’t choose who you sit next to. A chef broils and glowers and dices in a corner. Waiters shuffle and twinkle and deliver notes from other diners. And as dinner progresses, so does the plot. Though, you’re never quite sure who’s acting and who’s watching.
It probably wouldn’t suit Seneca’s Thyestes — we don’t want them to suspect they’re eating last night’s audience. What we’d need is a metamorphic play that uses each course as a sensory rocket launcher into the next. Culminating, of course, in the skulking possibility of a massive, madcap food fight.
And then at the meal’s end the Incredible Hulk bustles round tables, handing out wet wipes and making witty banter.
To my closest friends it’s a piece of vertiginous tomfoolery. To me it’s an affair of towering gravitas. I refer, of course, to my jealously-guarded hopes of becoming a free-running champion.
For those of you unacquainted with the modern marvels of free running, Parkour enthusiasts are those nimble will-o-wisps that bound through our cityscapes, clambering water-towers, conquering construction sites, pin-balling off cement-marooned trees to hang from mezzanines and generally encouraging your significant other to say things like ‘Oooh, hasn’t he got ripply arms?! I’d love to go out with someone like that. You know, someone with actual muscle definition. Actually, you know what would be nice, darling: if you started exercising above your fingertips, beyond the personal gym that is your MacBook.’ But I digress.
The natural habitat of these fine athletes has of late been the South Bank. The other day I was admiring their foot and handiwork —hoping their master would note my potential, beckon enigmatically, and invite me over to work on my decidedly un-ripply arms— when I noticed a group of unruly Lambeth youths mimicking them. They were hauling themselves up the electrician’s ladder on Waterloo bridge, vaulting over the fraying tightrope of a low-wire clown, offering to toss themselves into the Thames for the bargain price of a pound.
Somebody, I magnanimously concluded, should say something. I stood up, assumed my socio-conscious playwright face, and walked straight past them to write this blog. Never say I don’t contribute to the welfare of my community.
So. If the mantra of free runners is to treat the city as a playground, why shouldn’t we encourage more of this in our theatres? They may not be called playhouses anymore but a few of them retain the noble intentions of amusement. What if we found an off-west end theatre that did have enough space to allow these dizzying displays of neo-Olympian athleticism? What if we had a Rooftop Theatre?
Moving to London, the idea first occurred to me via the scientifically dubious medium of a dream. This involved myself and childhood friends (RAF navigator, marine biologist, semi-professional dog-napper) inheriting an old sausage factory in the midst of derelict Wapping and transforming it into a (ceiling) cracking venue.
Well, there may not be an old sausage factory waiting for us out there. But there is a fantastic jigsaw of pub roofs in Farringdon. There’s an unused swathe of station roof by Waterloo. There’s a lovely little nook above a 99p store in Clapham. And what play to better demonstrate the versatility of our giddy venture than an actobatic, contemporary reworking of Henry V, with plummeting channels between France and England for the battle scenes. ‘Once more into the breach’ and all that. Especially if the breach in question happened to be a thirty foot drop to the streets below.
Okay, so it’s a recipe for apoplectic insurers. But perhaps we could draft in a few unruly Lambeth youths willing to shake some spears and waive their Equity pensions.
I’m beginning to think my drama school might have diddled me. One (unofficial) lesson involved strolling along tube platforms pretending there was a bomb in our rucksack. We’d discreetly monitor the other passengers and deduce who might notice the casual disposal of an incendiary device. Pretty twisted, when you think about it. That said, this was 1999 — the tube seemed a less threatening place. Not a London Lite in sight.
It was Laurence Olivier who first suggested sitting on the Circle Line and just observing. Following his lead, I witnessed this couplet of brief encounters:
A man bustles his elderly parents along the platform. They’re clearly moving at a pace he regards as sub-evolutionary. He bounds onto the carriage, motioning incredulously for them to hurry up, and starts shouting at them as the doors close. He is whisked away. His parents chuckle as if this had been the plan all along.
A young couple appear, clearly furious with one another. Although they do not speak to nor look at each other, their hands clasp fervently. Suddenly the boy turns and whispers
‘Milwaukee shadow puppets.’
They slowly smile, she laughs, and they kiss.
I don’t know why more plays aren’t set in tube stations. The best dalliances happen there: illicit trysts, drug deals, espionage, or all three at once. The problem is that no production can afford a stream of carriages rattling past every four minutes (delays pending). Right?
Wrong. Peer through the window whilst zipping between Tottenham Court Road and Holborn and you’ll see a station where no passenger has alighted since 1932 — the ‘BritishMuseum’ stop. There are forty of these abandoned or relocated ‘ghost’ stations on the Underground. Try using your Oyster card there, Boris.
So here’s this week’s wooing of a potential new venue — the ghost station. From the strange brick tower of ‘City Street’ to the low white construct of ‘Bull & Bush’ station, they’re just begging to be commandeered for artistic mischiefery. Or at least for The Ghost Train by Arthur Ridley. ‘Down Street’, with its ox-blood red bricks, wasn’t even included in the original 1932 prototype. Winston Churchill and his cabinet used it as a secret base during the war. Churchill said Down Street was ‘one of the only places where it was possible to sleep without the sounds and worries of the bombing above’ (interesting how that never made it into anthologies of bravado-riffic quotes).
My boundless attention to detail has just flagged up that there has been a precedent to this idea: a production of Still Life in ‘Aldwych’ station, which failed to rock the reviewers’ carriages. Well, that was then and this is now. If these stations really are lying vacant, it’s time to descend on them like swarms of script-gnawing track-rats. Even if they’re still being put to clandestine political use. Accidentally bursting in on Gordon Brown getting a bit of peace and quiet from the latest Labour scandal could surely only add to the drama.
1999. Third term of drama school. I am on my final warning before an ignoble eviction from the premises. And not with the renegade flair in which Russell Brand and Tom Hardy departed. Nope, it’s my sheer lack of frivolity. I mulch through the ballet room dejectedly, and bang my head off the bar. Our principal pops his head in —a terrifying figure, with the eyes of a Tiger Shark and a tongue full of godlike rhetoric— and with typically baffling benevolence, says:
‘Darling, it’s called a play.’
Indeed it is. It’s worth remembering that, especially on the Off-West-End where we all work for nothing and the audiences expect West End values without the cliché.
And London theatre is very much like a playground. As such, there’s a gaping gulf between the flash West End and the frumpy Independents. The former have their designer trainers (sets), pocket money (wages), giggling admirers (audiences) and their behind-the-bike-sheds spin-the-bottle extravaganzas (opening night parties). The Off-West-End competes against this with the inspiration of necessity, low-fi edginess and end-of-run parties where glamour means a slice of pizza and a spanner to dismantle the stage.
The benefit of being the playground underdogs, of course, is inclusiveness. The West End hang out together off Leicester Square like juves on a garage forecourt, but they don’t really like each other. I mean, come on. When the Playhouse was ailing you didn’t see the Drury Lanebailing them out with the acumen of The Producers. At the very least the Fortune could have stopped hogging The Woman In Black and passed it around for a bit. The Off-West-End, on the other hand, band together because they have to. Sort of like The Goonies. But without the annoying accents.
This camaraderie suffers, perhaps, from the discrepancies of geography. Where exactly is the Off-West-End? From Hampton Wick to Highbury and Islington, from the Young Vic to the Hen & Chickens, so sweeps the ruddy realm of underdog theatre. There’s no snobbery here: unlike the snoots of Broadway, we have no Off-Off-West-End. And so we shouldn’t.
With the original ‘Theatre’ —Shakespeare’s first playground— being unearthed and resurrected in Shoreditch, and cinemas, boardrooms, amphitheatres and rooftops being reinvented as places of performance, I’m kick-starting a campaign to discover the best of brand spanking new venues in the Off-West-End. And I’m inviting youto help me. We’re looking for the next wunderkind to join the theatre playground: a venue that’s malleable and accessible and phantasmagorical enough to embody everything that’s best about the Off-West-End. Those of you acquainted with this blog may be concerned that my frenetic nature and infatuation with insurmountable challenge may take me too far, and that perhaps I’ll end up championing a theatre on a floating island in the middle of the Thames. And you’d be right. That’s just the kind of thinking we need. In fact we could kick off with a production of The Admirable Crichton.
See, we’re working well together already. On you go.
