Small building, big thinking: London’s fringe theatres fight back

The pandemic has presented a unique set of challenges for London’s smaller theatres - but the work has never stopped
The Gate Theatre in Notting Hill

In between dreaded pings, London’s theatres are lighting back up. After the so-called ‘Freedom day’ go-ahead on July 19, many venues in the capital are beginning to return to full capacity for the first time in over a year. But for fringe theatres, it isn’t so simple.

Far from springing their doors open and packing in punters as soon as they were legally allowed, these smaller venues are all approaching their return with caution and a strong sense of personal responsibility. Some are hanging on until the autumn, while others have completely changed their auditoriums – or moved to new ones entirely. “We want to do it right, not right now,” is the guiding principle for Theatre503, a 64-seat space above the Latchmere pub in Battersea.

For 503, a launchpad for young writers such as Yasmin Joseph, whose acclaimed play J’Ouvert started life there before a West End run this summer, box office only covers about half of the theatre’s core costs – it’s heavily reliant on funding. “I’ve always made a joke that we’re about £5,000 and a broken boiler away from financial crisis anyway,” says Andrew Shepherd, the theatre’s Executive Director.

The organisation worked throughout the pandemic to continue supporting writers, launching online courses – some of which now have a six-year waiting list – and trying to support the freelance community. “In some respects we ended up being almost counsellors – just a space for people to share fears, hopes and worries.”

Theatre503

But despite remaining committed to their mission, it has been frustrating to not be able to put any work in front of live audiences. “It’s literally what we exist for. You can develop scripts, you can put together courses – but if you don’t give a writer a stage to put their work on, what’s the point?” says Shepherd.

Like many organisations, though, the past year has allowed 503 to make serious, long-desired change. “The pandemic has allowed us to go: if not now, when?” Shepherd says. In a rare positive news story for theatre, in June it won funding for a second building, which will be based in Nine Elms and include a dedicated writers’ room. There’s a plan to make the Latchmere space accessible, and hire fees for visiting companies have been eliminated from the business model. This essentially means a potentially prohibitive fee is replaced by a 50:50 box office split between the theatre and the company, and will “effectively reduce the financial liability of a producer by about 25 per cent, which we think will help a lot”.

There will also be a continued focus on livestreaming work to enable it to be seen by as many people as possible. “We’re a weird organisation in that we launch writers and hope they don’t come back,” Shepherd says.

The Gate Theatre has a similar set-up to 503: it’s a 75-seat venue above the Prince Albert pub in Notting Hill. The list of talents to have worked there is an illustrious who’s who of British theatre: Stephen Daldry ran it in the early Nineties, Sarah Kane directed work there and Jude Law and Rachel Weisz have performed there. It plans to reopen in September with a production in an entirely different venue, a prelude to the search for a more accessible new home.

Ellen McDougall

“We’ve got a new space in Camden which is slightly bigger, fully accessible, and will enable us to do a fully socially distanced audience. I know you don’t have to socially distance anymore, but we’re so cautious about rules changing at the last minute that we’ve decided to go with a place that will give us that flexibility,” the Gate’s artistic director Ellen McDougall tells me.

“The situation for us up to now has been a bit all or nothing: either we can reopen without social distancing, or we can’t open. So it’s really exciting to have this new space.” It leaves West London with one fewer fringe theatre however, and the Gate itself with the challenge of attracting a new local audience.

Elsewhere, the Arcola Theatre in Dalston reopened in June in an outdoor venue. A tent given to the theatre by Latitude festival was being used for costume and prop storage, until it was decided last summer that it could be revived as a Covid-secure performance space. The theatre worked with scientists at Imperial College London, who have also been informing the government’s SAGE committee, in order to better understand viral transmission and how they as a venue could mitigate that. Parts of their building – including one performance space and dressing rooms – are underground, and therefore do not have optimal ventilation. While the decision remains constantly under review, for now they feel more comfortable operating in the new outside space.

The Arcola Outside space

Cruelly, in March 2020, just weeks before the country was put into its first lockdown, the Arcola launched a year’s worth of work to mark its 20th anniversary. “We’ve been gradually moving more and more in the last few years to producing more of our work in-house, and co-producing, commissioning plays and developing them in-house. And that year was about showcasing a load of those projects, and then, of course, we had to unproduce everything. It was heartbreaking,” says Jack Gamble, who is Associate Director at the Arcola and currently directing The Game of Love and Chance. Ticket sales went to zero overnight and refunds began to be issued, but the local community were supportive. “A lot of why we’re still around is because of how generous our audience and local community were. Arcola Outside has been mostly funded by donations,” he says.

The Pleasance Trust is a somewhat unique organisation in that it produces shows for Edinburgh Fringe but also has a small theatre in Islington. The latter reopened in May, reimagined as a cabaret-like space with socially distanced seats and table-service – audiences have been loving it. But without another full-scale Fringe this summer, Anthony Alderson says the organisation will have essentially not earned any money for three years; 85 per cent of its revenue usually comes from that annual three-week event.

“London will wash its face as a theatre, but it isn’t able to make a big enough contribution to the head office. Overheads are crucial; Edinburgh keeps the head office alive and enables us to run London. Like so many businesses, we have different cost centres – it’s not unusual. So we’re having to re-think: how does the Pleasance survive? We need to think about diversifying our business model. That’s something we’re looking at, at the moment,” says Alderson.

The Pleasance Theatre in Islington

One necessary evil may be increasing ticket prices – although many shows are currently sold for £5 and it’s unlikely to go much above £9, so it remains a good value night out. Edinburgh is returning this year, with an IRL element as well as an online one, but the Pleasance’s activity is drastically reduced. In 2019, it opened 33 venues and presented just under 300 shows; this year it will produce about 40 shows, with 12 of those online. Another added layer of complication for the organisation is that the Scottish government is issuing different guidance to Westminster, which means following two different sets of rules.

It’s something of an understatement to say the past year has been challenging for theatre, but it seems clear that there are a unique set of hurdles for London’s smaller spaces. McDougall describes the last year as “the hardest I’ve ever had in my career”. The Gate did not initially qualify for funding as part of the Cultural Recovery Fund, but received some in the second round, which has been an “absolute life-saver”. They’ve used this time to not only slow down the process as they work with artists, but to try and put in place tangible, positive measures to address “the burnout culture that exists across the industry”.

This includes sticking to a five-day week rather than a six-day week, and a move to eight hour rather than frequently twelve hour days. Putting on a show at the moment, especially with a new venue added into the equation, “is ten times harder than it ever was,” says McDougall, but she believes that these new measures are important to improve the experience for everyone. Why wasn’t it always like that, I ask? Money, essentially, says McDougall, and pre-pandemic there was “a desire to produce as much as we can, with as small amount of investment as we can. I guess the thing for me is: can we think about doing that better?”

Jack Gamble in rehearsals for The Game of Love and Chance
Alex Brenner

The Gate has also been undertaking an anti-racism programme in the past year, and hopes to make a carbon neutral production of its previous epistolary hit Dear Elizabeth, and “flatten the hierarchy” in the rehearsal room. “All the problems that were there before the pandemic, and kind of coming back, I feel that certainly at the Gate there’s a real determination to interrogate those things and be steadfast in our commitment to making things better. It’s not going to happen overnight, and we’ll get it wrong on the way, but we’re trying,” says McDougall.

So, ultimately, what will the past year mean for fringe theatres? Alderson says it could take many years to see the impact – the Fringe acts as a talent feeder and the disruption may not become visible until much later down the line. But the impact is being felt by the freelance community, the lifeblood of the fringe, right now. If there have been any positives, “they have come massively at the expense of our freelance community,” says Shepherd. This point is made by everyone I speak to. “There are surveys showing how many people are having to leave the sector,” says Gamble.

But one thing that has become clear: not being able to go anywhere has put people more in touch with their community than ever, and many of these buildings have always been proudly local.  During lockdown, Gamble set up the Public Campaign for the Arts to protect and advocate for the arts and culture across the UK; it now has 220,000 supporters. “The experience of opening a show and seeing people come back together has clarified for me the civic and community role that theatres and arts venues have in bringing people together and creating meaningful connection. After a year of lockdown and the pervasive self-isolation, it’s the antidote to that: it’s togetherness, it’s community – it’s a sense of us.”

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