Best Fringe Theatres in London

Best Fringe Theatres in London

21 July, 2008
by: John Ellingsworth

Outside the somnolent inner-city circle of theatres — little more than terminals where one may observe a performance of The Sound of Music, or The Lion King, or Buddy — there exists another kind of theatre venue, lurking and secret. Whisper: the fringe. Here you may see a new show in the same building every week, perhaps every day. Here there are dedicated returning audiences; theatres where the relationship between venue and company is more than contractual; works of art which contain within themselves the rules of their own communicative power; curatorial intelligences that are alive to the aesthetic intentions of theatre as well as its commercial traction. Of course the fringe is also low turnout and no heating and appalling searing theatre experiences (good and bad). No ice cream at the interval. No interval. Hideous distended audience participation traumas. Here are some places to start:

Camden People's Theatre
I reviewed my first piece of experimental theatre here: Donkey Shadow by Petra’s Pulse. Two performers danced around with watermelons on their heads, threw fish up and down and rolled cooking pans in ellipses on the floor. The main CPT theatre is street-level and small, having a kind of dry sepulchral air which is (usually) exciting. (There's also a zero-rake basement space which is hot like Hell and likely to activate latent claustrophobic anxieties.) Administration is charmingly chaotic, with audience sometimes forced to sit on the stage.

Blue Elephant Theatre
Wins itself incredible extra bonus Fringe Points for being situated more or less in the middle of a council estate. The theatre is a cool (in the sense of skirting cold) basement with good enough facilities but no backstage or point of entry short of a sidedoor: fine for a lot of the dance/physical theatre shown there. They programme a lot of young companies, which ups the consumer risk accordingly. There's a comfy café playing live music, and rather a lot of arts college poseurs in the audience.

Gate Theatre
This avowedly international theatre is currently enjoying a renaissance under the dual-captainship of Carrie Cracknell and Natalie Abrahami. Miniature dance wonder I Am Falling won praise in January; Pierre Rigal likewise rocked with Press; and in 2008 maverick theatre-maker and prose genius Chris Goode remakes the Chekhov play Three Sisters. Performances are often improvised and vary accordingly but on most nights the place is electrifying. Audiences stumble out, changed.

Shunt
Shunt are a ten-person theatre collective living and working in the gloomy catacombs under London Bridge. Sometime in 2007, unbearably exciting rumours began circulating about a show where audience members went through a nondescript station door and descended by lift to a surreal labyrinthine underground world. In retrospect it was never secret really (they even teamed up with the National Theatre), but in the last year or so it's become rather well-known and busy. There are a number of performance spaces radiating out from a hub-like bar they call the Shunt Lounge — itself occasionally ripped by powerful crosscurrents of theatre, unannounced performances and live art interventions. Rains of viscera and sand are de rigueur.

Linbury Studio
Attached as it is to the palatial Royal Opera House, the Linbury must fight harder to impress the cool kids. Publicity tends to describe it as an intimate venue, which it isn't: very high with lots of grey steel and a futuristic gladiatorial feel, as though built to be fiercely stomped upon by the spectators of a cage fight. Height is good for aerial work, and the ROH2 have shown favour to circus in the past. They run an annual season of work called Firsts which showcases new pieces by young and emerging companies — most of it in the puppetry, physical performance, mixed media vein. Tickets are locked at £5, but quality is consistent: they catch people before they go big.

Also-rans: For wayfarers there's the distant artsdepot (very open and very colourful — reminiscent of Google HQ) Their programme is nice and esoteric, but audiences are small, and you worry that at some point they're going to cave and start staging non-stop Noël Coward adaptations.

Stranded in the wretched null zone around Canary Wharf, The Space is a converted church which honestly in some ways is not fit for theatre (the stage lighting always seems to catch the front few rows of the audience, so you feel somehow like you're on the stage), but it has a good annual festival called Enterprise.

Recently refurbished Jackson's Lane in Highgate is chaotically active, with a programme heavy in dance and circus. Heading east The Hackney Empire does puppetry and live art and devised theatre and musicals concerning nuns and such. Nearby Toynbee Studios is partly a performance space for Artsadmin's extensive superteam of in-house and associate artists — running impressively from old-guard dance/physical theatre company DV8 to visual artist and theatre-maker Graeme Miller to prolifically in-residence poet Lemn Sissay, via a lot of landmark artists in between — but the Studios are also an important stop-off point for fringe touring companies.

Down south BAC is an important presence in London's cultural life. For much of 2007 it operated as a giant sensorium, housing Punchdrunk's Masque of the Red Death, but now it's business as usual, which means the return of BAC scratch nights, a system for supporting new and emerging companies by allowing them to try out early work in front of an interested audience.

Without fixed location, LIFT (the London International Festival of Theatre) has had many homes over the years. 2008 will be the first time the Festival has had its own venue: the Lift Parliament, some kind of a portable building which has been very publicly designed and redesigned over the last few years. After all the artist's renditions and digital pre-constructions it'll be interesting to see what it looks like, and how it works, and what happens inside.

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John Ellingsworth