The Stage

Exclusive: New Off-West End venue to replace Westminster Theatre after ten-year wait

Published Wednesday 8 February 2012 at 18:01 by Alistair Smith

A replacement for the old Westminster Theatre will finally open this autumn, following a protracted and sometimes bitter decade-long battle to create a new purpose-built, mid-scale theatre in central London.

The St James Theatre will launch at the end of September, housed in a residential development near the Victoria Palace Theatre on the site of the old Westminster Theatre. It will feature two performance spaces, designed by Foster Wilson Architects, which was also responsible for the similarly-sized Trafalgar Studios. Unlike the Trafalgar Studios, though, the venue will host a bar/ restaurant, which will subsidise the work on stage.

The team running the St James will be led by artistic director David Gilmore - best known as the director of West End musical Grease - and West End general manager Guy Kitchenn as executive director.

Gilmore, who has previously served as artistic director of the Watermill and Nuffield Theatres, told The Stage: “Our plan is for shows to run for six to eight weeks with us. Perhaps the way to think of us is like an Off-Broadway theatre. A show could come to us for an awful lot less than putting it on Shaftesbury Avenue. If it’s an absolute sell out, you can pick it up and move it, and if six or eight weeks has just about exhausted its audience, then fine.

“The feeling is we should be able to offer this try-out experience, linking up with producers who are setting up a tour or have a tour that they want to bring into London. They can open it with us and take it out on tour, or bring it into us. They’ll be able to offer their players a London date, and the whole thing will be done in a top-level way, but without breaking anyone’s bank balance. It will be tricky to pull off, but I think we can do that.”

Building work is expected to be completed by June, with fitting out finished in July. There will then be a soft opening period in which drama colleges RADA and Central School of Speech and Drama will be invited to use the venue, with gala openings followed by a full season launch in the last week of September.

The programming will feature a mix of rentals, co-productions and self-produced work, with the main 312-seat space used for theatre and the smaller 100-seat studio mainly hosting music and comedy.

Gilmore said he was particularly keen for the St James to serve as a home for transfers of regional theatre productions. He explained: “I’ve always thought that there is terrific work being done outside London, some of which does make it to London, but an awful lot of which doesn’t. I would love it if we could be looked upon as a home for shows which wouldn’t otherwise be seen in London.”

He added that the theatre will host small conferences, lectures and event launches during the day to help fund the enterprise, which is being run without subsidy on a commercial basis. The theatre is also equipped with video and broadcasting equipment, so shows can be recorded or broadcast live from the site.

The latest plans for the St James follow a string of ill-fated proposals to replace the Westminster Theatre, which closed in 2002 and was later demolished following a fire.

Plans to create the UK’s first black-led theatre on the site collapsed in 2005 when Arts Council England removed £4 million of capital funding because of internal problems at theatre company Talawa, which was to run the venue.

Reopening plans then remained in limbo, with the site at one point mooted as a potential new home for the Bush Theatre, until theatre company London Aloft came on board in 2008 with plans to run the venue as a commercial operation. Westminster council granted new planning permission for the site in May 2009 and an opening in 2010 was announced. But it soon became clear that building work had stalled, with difficulties emerging around stipulations in the original planning permission.

Late in 2010, the building’s developer Yolanda Limited controversially removed London Aloft from the project and replaced the company with the team behind the St James Theatre - led by joint chief executives Robert Mackintosh and Alan Judd.

The full programme for the first season at the St James Theatre will be announced in April.