London Theatres by Mark Rylance & Michael Coveney

Author:Mark Rylance & Michael Coveney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Frances Lincoln Limited
Published: 2017-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

The theatre opened in 1981, this dressing room under the stage dating from a major upgrade in 2003.

It used to be said – though not recently – that Beck’s ghost was seen loitering in the theatre absorbing the interval chat about make-up, drag and dressing up. After local residents fought to save the building from demolition, Beck’s derelict emporium was bought and ‘rediscovered’ (paint and plaster chiselled laboriously from the brickwork) by the director Pierre Audi and two university friends, Will Bowen and Chris Naylor, in the mid-1970s. Their inspiration was Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord in Paris, a similarly derelict 1876 music hall that Brook and his colleagues relaunched – preserving the ‘distressed’ atmosphere of the place in its brickwork and architectural features – as a Centre of International Theatre Research (and production) in 1974.

The new Almeida Theatre Company was launched at the Edinburgh Festival in 1979 and the building finally opened as the Almeida Theatre in 1981 with a Grade II listing and a series of stark, and startling, productions of classics, visiting companies such as Shared Experience and Complicite, and a contemporary music festival. When Audi moved on into the world of European opera, and handed over to the director/actor partnership of Jonathan Kent and Ian McDiarmid in 1990, this transition heralded a decade of galloping sponsorship, star power, glamour, and stage design, starting, ironically, to obscure the brickwork once again. The company’s offices were on Upper Street, further towards the Angel, the other side of The King’s Head pub theatre, one of the first London fringe venues.

The Almeida’s local empire was extended into other resonant venues. Ralph Fiennes played Hamlet for the Almeida at the Hackney Empire; Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, was Francesca Annis, who became Fiennes’ off-stage lover over the next ten years, thus giving a Freudian rewrite to the old adage, formed in answer to the time-honoured academic question, ‘Does Hamlet sleep with Ophelia?’ ‘Yes, dear, but only on tour.’ Then, in 2000, Fiennes played both Richard II and Coriolanus for the Almeida colonising the old Gainsborough Studios in Shoreditch, once a railway power station, whisky-bottling plant and warehouse for Oriental rugs, pending redevelopment as apartments; Alfred Hitchcock shot both The Lodger and The Lady Vanishes there. This was a clever redesign by Haworth Tompkins who, in 2001, wrought another sensitive refurbishment of a found space: a derelict (soon to be demolished) bus depot at King’s Cross, while the Almeida itself underwent its drastic reinvention. Again, the King’s Cross venue had its industrial interior left raw, and the roof and gable were turfed in sedum; the project was completed in just seventeen weeks. The place opened, with a physically and scenically remarkable production of David Hare’s translation of Chekhov’s early play Platonov, on 11 September 2001.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.