New Ventures in Hard Times
Is the world upside down, or heading that way? Not only have we culled a second small crop of raspberries from our back garden, but there has been an unprecendented winter flowering of honeysuckle and sweet peas.
And as the arts world braces itself for the cuts in the New Year, the director Lucy Bailey goes right ahead and opens a new studio theatre somewhere between Notting Hill and Paddington, on Hereford Road.
The Print Room is an old 1950s warehouse that Bailey and her fellow artistic director, Anda Winters, stumbled across three years ago, and they’ve fashioned a very welcoming and flexible theatre space.
The opening show, Pasolini’s Fabrication, with an impressive cast led by Jasper Britton, is played inside a sort of large box — a similar design concept to the current version of Blue/Orange at the Arcola — with the audience peering at the actors as if through a window.
One can only salute the courage of Bailey and her collaborators — aided, of course, by her husband Bill Dudley, the designer — in launching such a project at this time. And with such an unusual and challenging play.
Of course, no-one ever asks anyone to open a new theatre. No-one asked Peter Hall to start the Royal Shakespeare Company, and no petitions were signed pleading for George Devine and Tony Richardson to launch the English Stage Company at the Royal Court.
The theatre changes and evolves only by artists taking the initiative and hoping that audiences and funding will follow. Bailey and Winters have not announced a policy, nor even a season of work to follow Fabrication.
The Print Room will define itself over a period of time by the shows it presents, and it will be interesting to see if it can survive alongside the Finborough, say, or the Arcola, as a platform for new work and new talent, or whether it will remain an ambitious vanity project for Lucy Bailey to do the kind of productions she cannot do elsewhere. I suspect that will be the best reason of all for having the new name on the theatre lists.
The one thing I really like so far about the Print Room is the effort you have to make to get there. It’s buried deep in the heart of Westbourne Grove, and it’s quite a trek from the nearest tube stations.
It’s an odd quirk of mine that if a theatre is right on my doorstep I shouldn’t really be going there too often. Although I must say I am looking forward to tottering down the hill to the Roundhouse once the RSC are back there next month with, among other things, Lucy Bailey’s Julius Caesar with its virtual crowd.
And today’s opening of six short plays about women, crime and justice at the Soho Theatre is almost too conveniently located at the end of a bus ride from the top of my road.
Then tomorrow I’m going to Paris to see Peter Brook’s new stripped down version of The Magic Flute. They’ve even made Brook’s Bouffes du Nord — from which he is finally retiring this season — very easy to get to, as the Eurostar flashes across the Channel in just over two hours, and the theatre itself is quite close to the Gare du Nord.
Brook has been running the magical Bouffes for the past thirty-five years. Like Lucy Bailey, he wanted to create a space, or rather occupy one, that best suited his evolving theatrical method and vision. Who knows, we may think of the Print Room in a similar trademark way in the coming decades.
