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 Lane bailing 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 you to 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.