Curtains Down for Hackney Empire in New Year
London’s premier variety venue Hackney Empire is to go dark in the New Year with most of
its staff members made redundant, according to a report in The
Stage this morning.
Financial problems have been blamed for the closure, which
will take effect at the end of this year’s pantomime,
Aladdin. Performance in the main house will cease “for a
period of reflection” of between six and nine months with plans to reopen in
time for the 2010 pantomime season.
Hackney’s celebrated participation and youth work will
continue during that time but reports suggest only a skeleton staff will be kept
on at the theatre, with consultation over redundancies scheduled for early October.
Clarie Middleton, interim chief executive of Hackney
Empire since the departure of Simon Thomsett last month, remained pragmatic about
the reasons for the temporary closure.
“The idea is that we stop, take a breath and take stock
of the way the organisation operates,” she told The Stage. “We just need a little time to
do that. If we were to just keep on working, we wouldn’t have time to stock take
and perhaps look again at the way we sell tickets, different marketing
techniques, different programming perhaps.”
Artistic activity will be “substantially reduced”, Middleton said, although there will be a number of events held at the theatre as part of a “major participation effort”.
There is considerable confusion among staff at the news as 2008-9 proved the theatre’s most profitable year since it reopened in 2004 following
a £15 million refurbishment (See News, 29 Jan 2004).
