The Stage

Sound Theatre will face bulldozer

Published Thursday 20 July 2006 at 17:15 by Nuala Calvi

West End fringe venue Sound Theatre is to close down in September, as the building in which it is housed is to be demolished and replaced with a hotel.

Sound will go dark after the run of Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing and the venue’s bar, restaurant and nightclub will move to another building in Leicester Square that does not have space for a theatre.

Mig Kimpton, Sound Theatre programmer, said the company was still committed to operating a fringe venue in central London and is hoping to find a replacement home for the venture.

“We have realised over the last eight months there’s certainly a demand and need for a central London fringe venue,” he said. “Although there are some fantastic ones already, like Jermyn Street Theatre, there need to be more opportunities like the Americans have Off-Broadway.”

Sound Theatre is one of only a few fringe outlets in the West End, including the Courtyard, the Jermyn Street and New Players theatres.

The 150-seat venue opened last June as a producing house run by KIT Productions but the group pulled out following the collapse of its Christmas show Snow! The Musical and the resignation of its creative team.

The building’s landlords relaunched it in the new year as a receiving house run by Kimpton. Since then it has staged a mixture of plays, musicals, cabaret and comedy and championed gay dramas such as Blowing Whistles and Love Me, Dorothy!.

Helen Divine, co-ordinator of the Fringe Theatre Network, said: “I think it will be hard for them to find somewhere else in the West End but the idea behind Sound was to take shows from other fringe venues to a West End audience and I think that is really important. It benefits all the other smaller theatres because it raises the calibre of performances for the fringe and brings people in who wouldn’t normally see that kind of work.”