The Stage

West End fringe scene faces more closures

Published Wednesday 16 August 2006 at 12:20 by Alistair Smith

Fringe theatre in central London has been dealt a new blow after it emerged that studio and cabaret venues at Covent Garden’s Theatre Museum will not reopen as performance spaces following the institution’s proposed closure in 2007.

The news comes less than a month after The Stage revealed that Leicester Square venue the Sound Theatre was to be bulldozed to make way for a hotel. This latest development further diminishes the number of recognised fringe venues available to producers in the West End, with only Jermyn Street and the New Players theatres remaining.

Officials at the Theatre Museum have now announced that they will be closing as of December 31 and that the live performance events “do not fit in with what the Royal Opera House [and the proposed Victoria and Albert Museum partnership] have planned for the new organisation” when it opens in the autumn of next year.

As well as regular seasons of drama in the studio, programmed by the Courtyard Theatre, the Theatre Museum’s Paintings Gallery features a range of cabaret events, which will also be shut down come January.

The loss of the studio is a particularly hard blow for the Courtyard, which has been left homeless. General manager Tim Gill said: “We’re not best pleased. We originally took on Covent Garden to tide over the period while our King’s Cross site was under redevelopment. Now we may temporarily not have a venue in London.”

Both spaces will continue with a full programme of events into December, with the Courtyard presenting four productions, beginning with Blue/Orange and culminating in December with Mrs Warren’s Profession.

Meanwhile the Cabaret Confidential and Transatlantic Talent series will both continue in the Paintings Gallery alongside one-off cabaret performances. The programme includes shows from Liza Minnelli impersonator Rick Skye and West End star Shona Lindsay. A spokesman for the Transatlantic Talent series said that the closure of the space marked “a considerable loss to the London cabaret scene”.

He added: “Following the second and final season of the Transatlantic Talent series at the museum, we are hopeful that it will find a future elsewhere. However, we are saddened by the loss of such a fabulous venue, without which the series would not have been born.”

A spokesman for the Royal Opera House stressed that it was still in discussions with the V&A over plans for the future of the museum and that the ROH had not made any “definitive plans” for the Studio Theatre and Inside Theatreland events. He added: “Any decision about the current use of the spaces has been made by the Theatre Museum and V&A.”

Meanwhile a spokeswoman for the V&A, insisted that despite the announcement which has been made to producers working with the venue, no final decision has been taken on the future of the studio space or Paintings Gallery.