In Shakespeare’s day, the South Bank was the West End - the place, outside the city’s borders and therefore jurisdiction, where such licentious behaviour as the putting on plays (and the selling of sex in brothels, many of which were run by the same people running the theatres) could go on unregulated. The Festival of Britain in the 1950s famously brought the arts, if not sex, back to the South Bank with the building of the Royal Festival Hall, and then the addition of the NFT and then National Theatre in the 70s meant that a new cultural quarter was being established between Waterloo and Westminster Bridges, and extending further down Waterloo Road to the venerable Old Vic and nearby Young Vic.
Both of those theatres are now being reinvigorated, with Kevin Spacey (see blog entry for Thursday last week) as artistic director at the Old Vic, with the Young Vic in the middle of a major rebuilding programme (but continuing its operations elsewhere meanwhile, launching its Young Genius season in collaboration with the Barbican with Robert Lepage’s The Dragon’s Trilogy opening there tomorrow).
But there’s also been an astonishing artistic regeneration of the entire area that is now stretching down the river as far as Tower Bridge. Going east from the Old Vic, you come to the Union Theatre (a small fringe space beneath railway arches near Southwark tube station), then Jerwood Space (a smart rehearsal room centre used by many West End shows and aspiring younger companies who’s rentals are subsidised), then the Southwark Playhouse (though they’re looking for a new home now), then the Menier Chocolate Factory, who in just over a year have established themselves as a major theatrical player in the area.
No wonder that companies are migrating here with alacrity. The Unicorn Theatre for children are building their own purpose-built new venue near Tower Bridge; and today comes the announcement, too, that Ballet Rambert are to have their own £16.5m new home behind the National Theatre on Upper Ground. The company’s artistic director Mark Baldwin comments, “If this is the cultural heartland of creative Britain, it’s a powerful place for us to be. We’re not just a little conservatoire in Chiswick. We’re in the middle of the city where people can visit us.”
