Soho Theatre Moves Into Gear

Thursday night in Soho, and the place is absolutely heaving. You literally can’t get down the street because of the crowds standing outside the pubs and none of these people are going to the theatre.

Still, the Soho Theatre in Dean Street feels more a part of its own environment these days, as new artistic director Steve Marmion oversees some big changes. The problem has always been the ground level bar, and the downstairs Indian restaurant that nobody went to; or if they did, it was rarely after seeing a show, or indeed before seeing one.

The bar always seemed separate, and the prices were prohibitive to the theatre crowd. This doesn’t much matter at the Young Vic, where the bar manages to have a double life as a destination for non-theatregoers, and a fairly good facility for the Young Vic crowd.

But at the Soho, this didn’t happen. And it still may not. At least Marmion is trying to do something about it. The major innovation is scrapping the restaurant. And guess what? There’s going to be another theatre down those stairs — making three Soho venues under one roof in all — a sort of 150-seater cabaret lounge with round tables and another bar with a license extended into the wee small hours.

So, the Soho Upstairs will be home to brand new companies and projects and rehearsed readings, the Soho Downstairs (opening in mid June) offers comedy, cabaret and waiter service — “20s Berlin meets 50s New York meets 21st century Soho” runs the slogan — while in my lady’s chamber, as it were, of the half-way upstairs main house, Marmion fires his biggest guns.

The brilliantly designed first brochure reflects this various topography, with the main house programme printed on glossy paper in between a rougher, narrower booklet detailing Soho Theatre Upstairs and Downstairs. Just reading it is to go on a crash course in what’s happening in the crossover territory of new writing and comedy.

And there couldn’t be a better illustration of this sharpened-up new policy than Operation Greenfield from Little Bulb which opened last night on the very first day of Steve’s “official” engagement.

Raw, funny, touching and brilliant, Operation Greenfield is one of the most startling and original new pieces of theatre I’ve seen in a long while, and goes straight to the top of my “best this year” list alongside London Road at the National Theatre — a show, I note, whose run has been extended for a further couple of months in the Cottesloe, pushing the previously announced Double Feature of new work backstage into a scene painting studio.

Already, Marmion’s new Soho Theatre has the feel and atmosphere of a hipper, sharper-focussed and more mainstream-related venue than the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh at festival time. The Assembly Rooms, of course, no longer exist, as they are about to be translated into a supermarket, an act of architectural and cultural vandalism almost on a par with what the city, and the university, did to George Square in the 1960s.

Ironically, it’s to George Square, and those miserable university buildings, that the Assembly Rooms now decamps. George Square used to be one of Edinburgh’s loveliest squares, with a beautiful tended garden where the unlovely spiegel tent is now plonked down each year.

You’ll hardly credit it when you get there, but Princes Street will be closed down and dug up yet again this year, as the ongoing non-event of the new tram system takes another turn for the worse with yet more wrangling and re-laying of tramlines and electricity cables.

Never mind, the Soho Theatre will be up there, with Marmion’s own sketch comedy show, Late Night Gimp Fight, enlivening the Pleasance Courtyard and Neil Hamburger crossing the Atlantic once more, as it says in the brochure, “to delight, baffle and disgust audiences with his unique and audacious anti-comedy” at the re-located Assembly. Bring it on! Oh dear, is it really time to start thinking about Edinburgh already?