NON-WEST END THEATRES

Almeida Theatre

Location: Almeida Street, N1 1TA (blue, yellow)

The Apollo Victoria Theatre

The Apollo Victoria's Art Deco building (1930) started its working life as the New Victoria Cinema, a purpose-built movie house. It stopped being used as one in 1975. Six years later the building reopened as a 2200-seat theatre. For almost two decades the edifice hosted the musical Starlight Express. The show closed in 2002.

Location: 17 Wilton Road, SW1V 1LG (orange, turquoise)

See Also: CINEMAS

Website: www.apollovictoria.com

Lyric Theatre Hammersmith

In the 1940s Binkie Beaumont's non-profit subsidiary mounted productions at the Lyric.

The Company of Four took a lease on the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Emlyn Williams, whose one-man Charles Dickens show was mounted by the Company, remarked that the Company of Four existed for an audience of two .

In 1971 Frank Matcham's The Lyric Hammersmith (1895) was demolished. The building's baroque interior had been taken apart and put into storage. Subsequently, it was re-erected within the King's Mall shopping centre.

Location: Lyric Square, King Street, W6 0QL

Website: https://lyric.co.uk

Poor Chap

In 1958 the producer Michael Codron mounted the initial London staging of Harold Pinter's play The Birthday Party at the Lyric. The dramatic piece opened to hostile reviews and ran for only a week. The playwright went to see his creation and chose to sit in the circle, which had been closed off by the theatre's management because of the small houses. An usher tried to prevent him from doing so. Pinter identified himself. This prompted the response, Oh, you poor chap in you go. On the day after the play's closure, The Sunday Times newspaper published a strongly supportive review by the influential drama critic Harold Hobson. This helped to establish the dramatist s reputation.

Website: www.pintersociety.org

New Wimbledon Theatre

In 1960s Wimbledon Theatre was managed by Arthur Lane, one of the last of the actor-managers. His discoveries included Roger Rees (1944-2015), a native of Balham who went on to star in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1980 adaptation of Charles Dickens's novel Nicholas Nickleby (1839).

Location: 93 The Broadway, Wimbledon, SW19 1QG

Website: www.atgtickets.com/venues/new-wimbledon-theatre

The Old Vic

Upon one occasion, Kean was playing the role of Othello. During the performance he became aware that the audience seemed to prefer the actor who was playing Iago to him. He broke the fourth wall and addressed the audience I have never acted to such a set of ignorant, unmitigated brutes as I see before me!

In the mid-1950s the Old Vic was dominated by Richard Burton and John Neville (1925-2011). The press sought to portray the colleagues as rivals and each developed his own - mostly young female - claque.

Neville moved to Canada, where he became a highly regarded theatre director. He had the title role in Terry Gilliam s movie The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988).

Ed Mirvish (1914-2007) was a Canadian who made a fortune through discount retailing. In 1982 he bought The Old Vic and then paid for it to undergo a major restoration. In 1998 the Mirvishes sold The Old Vic.

Location: The Cut, SE1 8NB

Website: www.oldvictheatre.com

Richmond Theatre

Location: Little Green, Richmond, TW9 1QJ

Website: www.atgtickets.com/venues/richmond-theatre

The Rose Theatre

Location: 24-26 High Street, Kingston, KT1 1HL

Website: www.rosetheatre.org

The Royal Court Theatre

In 1870 The New Theatre opened on what had been the site of the Ranelagh Chapel, a former Nonconformist chapel, in Ranelagh Street. It moved to the eastern side of Sloane Square, where it became The Royal Court theatre.

In 1932 The Royal Court closed as a theatre. Three years later the building was reopened as a cinema. In 1952 it became a theatre club. This status enabled it to mount productions of plays that had not been censored by the Lord Chamberlain's Office.

In 1956 George Devine and Tony Richardson launched The English Stage Company. The former became its artistic director. He was responsible for bringing to the London stage the works of dramatists such as John Arden and John Osborne. Each play was given only a short run at The Royal Court. This meant that the Company was able to present a large number of productions. Some of these transferred to the West End. The Company's founders included the cultural figure the 7^th Earl of Harewood, who was a cousin of the queen. From time to time the Company dispatched the peer to the Office, which was based in St James's Palace in order to try to justify the nature of a production.¹

Peter O Toole (1932-2013) became known to London audiences and thus moviemakers through playing Pete Bamforth, a foul-mouthed Cockney N.C.O., in the Lindsay Anderson's production of Willis Hall's play The Long and The Short and The Tall (1959).

In 1958 the theatre presented the initial production of what was to prove to be a durable partnership - that of the playwright Arnold Wesker and the director John Dexter. The pair's working relationship contained an element of friction. Upon one occasion, Dexter became so overwrought by Wesker's suggestions that he was moved to exclaim, Shut up, Arnold, or I ll direct this play as you wrote it!

In Edward Bond's play Saved (1965) there is a scene in which a baby is stoned in a pram. As the theatre s Artistic Director, William Gaskill (1930-2016) was deeply involved in defending the work against the Lord Chamberlain's Office, which declined to grant the theatre a licence to stage it. The theatre produced the play as a private club. However, the Office did not accept this ruse. It prosecuted and Gaskill was fined. Bond's Early Morning contained a lesbian scene between Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale. The Office banned the play. Gaskill mounted a secret Sunday afternoon staging of it. A few months censorship ended.

In August 1965, while on stage, Devine collapsed. The following month he resigned as The Royal Court's Artistic Director. He died the following January.

In 1969 Nicholas Wright, the joint artistic director of the Royal Court, launched the Theatre Upstairs. The playwrights whom he worked with included Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, and Snoo Wilson.

In 1970 David Storey's (1933-2017) Home opened at The Royal Court starring (Sir) (Arthur) John Gielgud (1904-2000) and (Sir) Ralph Richardson (1902-1983). (Gielgud was a great-nephew of the actress Dame Ellen Terry (1847-1928))

In 1975 Wright left the Royal Court. (Subsequently, he became a playwright, starting with Treetops (1978). He also worked as the literary manager at the National.)

Location: Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS (purple, red)

Website: https://royalcourttheatre.com

¹. Harewood went on to serve as the Chairman of the British Board of Film Classification. Under his leadership the body became a tad less liberal in its outlook when assessing movies that were essentially commercial exploitations of sex and violence.

Angry Young Men

George Fearon was the Company's publicist. During a meeting that he had with John Osborne, he termed the dramatist an angry young man . Soon afterwards Fearon realised the phrase's potential. It was taken up by the media. The Angry Young Men label became attached to a generation of writers who came to public prominence during the mid- and late 1950s - the likes of the novelist Sir Kingsley Amis and the author Colin Wilson.

The Godfather of Absurdity

(Norman) N.F. Wally Simpson (1919-2011) was an Absurdist playwright whose early works received their premieres at The Royal Court in the late 1950s. His style was highly influential upon the comedy of Peter Cook and the Monty Python team.

Simpson s plays were staged at The Royal Court at the same time as those of Osborne and Pinter. David Nobbs was a great admirer.

Came third in a play competition run by The Observer newspaper.

A Resounding Tinkle (1957) and One Way Pendulum (1959) were mounted at The Royal Court. The latter was filmed with Eric Sykes and Jonathan Miller.

His absurdism had a relentless logic. Some believed he drew on Ionesco; Simpson claimed not to have heard of him. He was not interested in narrative, preferring to focus on the present.

The Ned Sherrin-produced television series World In Ferment (1968) debunked news bulletins. The B.B.C. did not recommission the series. The Corporation wiped all of the tapes. Thereafter, he went out of fashion.

The Royal National Theatre

The idea of establishing a national theatre was mooted by Effingham Wilson as early as 1848. The scheme was not pursued seriously until 1904 when H. Granville Barker prepared a National Theatre Scheme & Estimate; appeals raised enough funds to enable a site in Cromwell Gardens to be purchased in 1930. The architect Edwin Lutyens became associated with the project. However, the Second World War intervened. The Festival of Britain was held on London's South Bank in 1951. It was decided that an arts complex should be developed as a legacy of the exhibition. The proposed national theatre was incorporated into the scheme. In 1963 the National Theatre Company was set up under leadership of the actor Sir Laurence Olivier. The troupe s inaugural, temporary home was The Old Vic.

The South Bank Theatre Board supervised the building's design and construction. The body's chairman was Lord Cottesloe. He gave the architect Sir Denys Lasdun free rein. Construction of the complex started in 1969. The National Theatre has been described as European Modernism reinterpreted through an English sensibility. The building is one of those instances where the British show both their aesthetic blindness and their capacity to act in a herd-like manner; ever since its character became evident it has been widely derided.¹

In 1973 the director Peter Hall succeeded Olivier as the head of the National. He hired the Shakespeare scholar John Russell Brown (1923-2015). He effectively replaced Ken Tynan. The former remained until 1988. The theatre's South Bank building was opened in 1976. The three principal auditoria were the Olivier (1150 seats), the Lyttleton (890),² and the Cottesloe (300).

Olivier recruited William Gaskill (1930-2016) to help launch the National Theatre. Gaskill went on to be the Artistic Director of The Royal Court.

The Theatre developed a close relationship with the West End. A number of plays and musicals, such as Les Miserables, have started out as National Theatre productions and have then transferred to the commercial stage.

In the early 1980s Bill Bryden's Cottesloe Theatre company of actors, which included Tony Haygarth (1945-2013), acquired a reputation for hard-drinking. It was claimed that when the group moved on the takings of the National Theatre's Green Room bar dropped by 80%.

In 1987 Richard Eyre became the Director of The National Theatre. Fellow directors he worked with included Stephen Daldry, Nick Hytner, Sam Mendes, and Deborah Warner.

Location: Upper Ground, SE1 9PX

Website: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

¹. Lasdun also designed the London Television Centre towerblock to the east of the Theatre. It is a far less interesting building. Its only merit is that it helps to set off the National all the better.

². The industrialist and politician Oliver Lyttleton served as the Chairman of The National Theatre. His parents had campaigned actively for the creation of such an institution.

Theatre Royal Stratford East

The Theatre Workshop's founders drew inspiration from the likes of Bertolt Brecht, Rudolf Laban, and Erwin Piscator.

The director Joan Littlewood could be conniving and a bully. She frequently verbally lambasted her actors and held grudges against those who left the company without her blessing.

The actors whom she directed included Harry H. Corbett, Glynn Edwards (1931-2018),¹ Howard Goorney (1921-2007), Nigel Hawthorne (1929-2001), Yootha Joyce (n e Needham) (1927-1980), Roy Kinnear (1934-1988), Jimmy Perry (1923-2016), George Sewell (1924-2007), Victor Spinetti (1931-2012), and Dudley Sutton (1933-2018), and Barbara Windsor (n e Deeks) (1937-2020).

The Theatre Workshop mounted the inaugural production of You Won t Always Be On Top, a play that had been written by Henry Chapman, a building labourer. The piece contained strong language. In 1957 he, John Bury (1925-2000), Richard Harris (1930-2002), and Gerry Raffles were prosecuted by the police. The case was heard at the Court House in Stratford. The presiding magistrate had spent his working life in the building trade and therefore did not find the play offensive. Therefore, he dismissed the prosecution.

In May 1958 the Theatre Royal Stratford East staged A Taste of Honey, a play in which a young working-class woman had a one-night stand and was then aided through her pregnancy by a gay art student. The play had been written by Shelagh Delaney, a nineteen-year-old former cinema usherette from Salford.

Stephen Lewis (n Cato) (1936-2015) took to the stage because Joan Littlewood challenged him to. He wrote Sparrers Can t Sing (1960) from improvisations that Theatre Workshop actors engaged in. The show transferred to Wyndham s the following year and was turned into the film Sparrows Can t Sing (1963). Its dialogue had a distinct element of Social Realism to it. Lewis acquired national fame through playing Blakey , a bus inspector, in the Ronald Wolde and Ronald Chesney-written television comedy series On The Buses (1969-73). Bob Grant (1932-2003), another actor from the Workshop, played Jack Harper in. The show owed some of its popularity to its having an element of class conflict.

In 1970 the Theatre Workshop closed.

Location: Gerry Raffles Square, E15 1BN

Website: www.stratfordeast.com

¹. Best known as Dave the Barman in the television series Minder.

James Dyson

While James Dyson was studying at the Royal College of Art, Joan Littlewood commissioned him to design a children's theatre. He did so, planning to use an innovative aluminium tube technology. The only person in the United Kingdom who had used it before was Jeremy Fry (1924-2005). Dyson went to visit him and was made a job offer, which he accepted.

Website: www.rca.ac.uk/study/the-rca/experience/student-voices/rca-luminaries/sir-james-dyson

David Backhouse 2024