In a quiet corner of Victoria, a tutu’s throw from Billy Elliot The Musical and a short hop on a broomstick from Wicked, a new theatre, like a tentative toddler, is taking its first steps.
The St James theatre, built on the site of the unfortunate Westminster theatre that burned down in 2002, is the first newly-built theatre complex in central London for 30 years and holds within its walls the hopes of doting parents Artistic Director David Gilmore and Associate Artistic Director James Albrecht.
Yet with the venue’s official opening and start of the inaugural season just days away, life seems relaxed in this shiny new, glass-walled centre brimming with polished hope and unsullied promise.
“Very few directors have the opportunity to open a new venue in central London,” Gilmore tells me as we sit in the theatre’s bar, jazz tinkling in the background, the lauded taste of the chef’s new burger still lingering on his taste buds. “It happens to one or two people in a lifetime. So when you’re approached and asked your ideas for what you might do, you think long and hard about it.”
Gilmore is a theatre man through and through. Since leaving school on a Friday to start a job as a student Assistant Stage Manager at the Everyman Cheltenham the following Monday – which came as a surprise to his parents – he has worked in theatres, taking shows to the West End, working at the National and running the Nuffield in Southampton.
In the new, purpose built complex, which features a bar, restaurant, 300-seat auditorium, 100-seat studio space, filming facilities and a specially commissioned marble staircase that is also a public work of art, Gilmore saw an opportunity to bring something new to the London theatre scene.
The first season is a dramatic mixed bag; Sandi Toksvig’s tale of the mental health of squaddies, Bully Boy, is followed by romantic musical Daddy Long Legs. An inventive take on Cinderella runs over Christmas with Out Of Joint’s production of Our Country’s Good completing the season.
It is a season of co-productions, drawing successful shows from regional theatre – Bully Boy premiered in Southampton and Cinderella at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, while Daddy Long Legs comes in from the US – which is the model Gilmore is championing; giving these quality productions a London outing and building producing partnerships.
On what he looks for in shows to fit the bill, Gilmore explains: “I don’t want to be bored. I don’t want to be meretricious. I don’t want to do things for the sake of them. They have to have intrinsic merit as a script in the first place. They then have to be things you can afford to put on.”
That subject of cost is particularly pertinent when you consider the St James theatre will receive no subsidy. It has to be fully self-sufficient. This explains the importance of the restaurant, the bar that will be open all day for audiences or any other patrons that might fancy a croissant and a coffee or a lunchtime chat, the flexibility of the space to include corporate functions or to record performances for television or DVD, and the membership schemes. Every part of the building, even that striking, sweeping staircase, must contribute to the theatre’s success.
I suppose this makes it even more surprising that Gilmore and Albrecht don’t appear more nervous. Excitement is definitely the order of the day as they banter and laugh through our brief chat.
While the pair work as a team, Gilmore is more closely associated with the main house programming, while Albrecht has programmed the comedy, jazz and cabaret playing Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights in the studio space. “It’s not the Berlin wall,” Gilmore jokes about the division. “Going back to my biology days, it’s a semi-permeable membrane through which there is osmosis.”
There are, as there must always be, creases that need ironing out as the venue grows towards its potential. The toilets, for example – and there are many of them, which will undoubtedly have female theatregoers flushing with glee – currently welcome your entrance by automatically turning the taps on. They shouldn’t. But, Gilmore adds with a confident smile, “It’s not like saying the stage is in the wrong place or the auditorium has got the wrong seats in it.”
“Until we work out the flow of people and the use of certain areas,” Albrecht adds, “it is going to be trial and error.”
So, with plans in place, I leave Gilmore and Albrecht checking that the chairs in the bar are stackable. If victory comes from paying attention to the details, Victoria is on to a winner, and this brand new theatre will grow into a London mainstay.