The double triumph of Southwark’s Menier Chocolate Factory – who yesterday took the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer and last week were named the Up-and-coming studio venue of the year in the Peter Brook/Empty Space Awards – is a rare testament to how sheer energy (and a little bit of good luck) can put a venue on the map very quickly indeed.
It was only in the February before last that David Babani and his business partner Danielle Tarento stumbled upon the Menier Chocolate Factory – a building that had already helpfully been converted into a theatre and restaurant complex, but was not as yet functioning at full capacity.
I remember actually going down there to review a production of The Master and Margarita for The Stage a few months before they took it over, in October 2003, and I wrote then: “First of all, a warm welcome to a splendid new fringe theatre, the Menier, located in the former Menier Chocolate Factory building in Southwark, a stone’s throw from the Tate Modern. This spacious and smartly appointed flexible room has the potential to be the next Arcola, with the added attractions of an attractive restaurant and art gallery in the building, too, not to mention that it’s far easier to find! But my welcome to the opening production it is hosting, a highly ambitious but over-complex stage version of Bulgakov’s sprawling anti-Stalinist allegory of good and evil, The Master and Margarita, has to be altogether more guarded….”
But within six weeks of Babani and Tarento finding it, they had taken it over and re-opened it for business – and by that summer, had their first fully-fledged hit when they imported the potently funny one-man show Fully Committed from off-Broadway with Mark Setlock, the original New York actor around whom it had been written, recreating his performance here. Given that the show was set in the reservations room of a swanky restaurant, it’s appearance here (though the restaurant is more homely than swanky) was virtually site-specific theatre. It attracted the critics in dribs and drabs, but word got out that here was something special; that show transferred to the Arts; and by the time of the Menier’s next opening, the first night critics were all out in attendance together here.
In other words, within a few months the place had acquired an indefinable sort of energy; and it has never left it. A Paines Plough curated season of new plays earlier this year made it a compelling place for new plays, while Babani’s particular producing passion for musicals has paid dividends with the UK premiere of Jonathan Larson’s Tick Tick Boom that followed. Tonight, the theatre hosts London’s first sighting of Sondheim and Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George since it received its UK premiere at the National 15 years ago.
All of this is achieved without any subsidy at all; just the commercial imperative of producing shows that people want to see, and giving them food they want to eat beforehand, both at reasonable prices.
Compare and contrast this state of affairs, say, with what happened at the late, still-lamented by some but ultimately lamentable Bridewell Theatre Company. Despite a decade-long run at its premises near Blackfriars (most of them rent-free, thanks to the good graces of their landlord, the Bridewell Institute), the theatre never put itself on the map in the same way.
It bleated on about lack of subsidy to do its self-appointedly “important” work with new musical writers, but that work was seldom actually supported by either big audiences or big critics. I always tried to support their work as much as I could, but it was a losing battle. Partly, it was a problem of identity: by letting out the premises to other producers all the time, confusion was sewn in the public mind; when you saw a bad production here – and there were many – it was easy to think it was thanks to the artistic policy of the theatre, not the quality of the incoming company. (The Menier, by contrast, is now set to produce all of its own work).
But though it was a fantastic “found” space, and endlessly versatile, too, in the configurations it could be adapted into, it also failed to bring on more than the narrow coterie of dedicated musical fans to its cause. Musicals are one of the most popular of all theatrical activities in the West End, yet here was a fringe house dedicated to them that failed to get that message to those theatergoers. The Menier, again, is managing to make itself hip and news, both at the same time.
