It feels like a lifetime ago. In 2011, I was appointed director of Camden People’s theatre in London, initially as a job-share with my partner Jenny Paton. Neither of us had run a venue before. Jenny was a producer; I co-ran a touring theatre company, with a sideline as comedy critic for this newspaper. We got the job as we were raising our first child, then aged one. It was a new chapter of life. We were going to make this flyblown corner of Hampstead Road a hothouse of radical theatre! But first we had to unblock the loos.
In week one, the director of an Italian production of Hamlet emailed to cancel his scheduled run. I mentioned that that would incur a small fee. He replied, protesting at my “mafia-style blackmail”. “Dear Brian. Your theater rips the little life of someone who does his job honestly and with passion. You are not worthy. What is your theater? With regret. Michele.” It was a stark welcome to life as an impresario.
But it wasn’t representative: I’m leaving CPT this week, after 13 years as AD, and – happy to report – no one has called me a mafioso since. (Maybe they thought it and kept it to themselves.) But those first few months were a baptism of fire. I didn’t understand how, in a city of 8 million, our shows sometimes sold no tickets (zero! nil! nada!) whatsoever. Turns out “if you build it, they will come” does not apply to offbeat theatre in the British capital. Maybe it was the traffic noise from the main road accompanying every performance? Maybe it was the near-constant sound of water cascading from the ceiling into a metal pail? Might that put some people off?
If it ever did, it doesn’t any more: CPT had a makeover in 2020, under lockdown, and is leaky and noise-polluted no longer. (Give or take the odd occasion …) But when we oversaw that refurb, we tried to preserve the unpretentious spirit of the place. Not for us gleaming chrome and glass: we were proud of our homely shabbiness. When I started out in theatre in the 1990s, it wasn’t so unusual to encounter DIY art spaces in central London: the Drill Hall, near to CPT, was one of them. Now, there are vanishingly few places that feel like they’re owned by artists and communities, in service of art and community rather than corporate sponsors and glitzy reputations.
I remember when I first interviewed for the job, way back when. The board, still largely comprising founding members of CPT (a splinter group in 1994 from the legendary radical outfit Unity Theatre), volunteered that “the name may be a problem” and I was welcome to change it. This was at the dawn of the David Cameron era, when terminology redolent of trade unions and the People’s Front of Judea were far out of fashion. But Jenny and I liked the name. We didn’t want to change “people’s theatre”, we wanted to make it mean something. The question was: can you be both a venue with a reputation for experimental performance and a theatre for the people? That was the circle we set out to square.
Did it work? Well, it’s still a work-in-progress – but the work, and the progress, is where the joy is. We tried straight away to be welcoming to local residents, in the unheralded corner of central London where CPT is located. (Bloomsbury to the left of us, Regent’s Park to the right. Stuck in the middle with Euston.) We welcomed council tenants when they came to check their electricity meters in our basement – an unorthodox arrangement for a theatre, but there you go. We got visitors enquiring about kung fu – because of the legacy gold lettering on our building, advertising “Chinese medicine” and “martial arts”. I was sometimes tempted to offer them a class – for a modest fee, of course. Hi-YAH!
We invited a community choir to perform one night, but too many of them squeezed into our lift, and it got stuck between floors. I fished them out, limbo dance-style through a narrow aperture, one by one. We were always accessible to a fault – the fault being, passersby could wander in and find themselves on stage. I was once performing my own show when an intruder entered and began to cross the stage. I thought he must be heading to his seat, but he wasn’t. He stopped next to me, and as the audience looked on he introduced himself as Karl. So began a bewildering conversation that took several minutes, in the glare of the stage lights, to untangle.
At our best, though, adventurous performance meets popular involvement more confidently than this. I’m thinking of the show we made with local teenagers about London air pollution, Fog Everywhere, which (to the amazement of the kids in question) prompted Camden council to legislate for higher air quality standards. Or our show telling the sorry tale of HS2 in Euston, which invited community members on to the stage to speak and sing – in harmony with the 19th-century radical Thomas Spence – their unheard stories of lives blighted for years by development. Or the summer festival we set up in the residential square behind our building, where kids learned to hula hoop and Bengali mums beatboxed.
All this took place against the backdrop of a years-long struggle to get a lease on our council-owned premises. Partly due to HS2, which placed a sword of Damocles over everything in our neighbourhood, we existed for years under threat of eviction. Or worse, at one stage, when Camden encouraged us to share the building with an, ahem, “entrepreneur and philanthropist” (and pal of Boris Johnson), whose vision for 58-60 Hampstead Road was, let us say, imperfectly aligned with our own.
I tell you all this to impress upon you how precarious our small independent arts spaces are, what an effort is required just to keep their heads above water. The real estate is contested. Funding dries up. The culture wars rage. But the effort is all worth it. Small spaces can do things big spaces can’t. Other theatres worry about commercial risk. At CPT, the risk would be to programme conservatively – and jeopardise the nonconformist, clued-up, in-for-a-penny audience we finally managed to build.
Small theatres are more limber, can try things out, and throw down gauntlets. With less at stake, we can trouble-make – which CPT is good at. We teed off a culture secretary, one of the Tories’ many, when we hosted a theatrical People’s Tribunal on British Crimes of Aggression in Afghanistan on the anniversary of 9/11. We trialled so-called trigger warnings before most other theatres – and staged the arguments against them too (courtesy of a play by soon-to-be West End playwright Marcelo Dos Santos), well before every British actor over 60 jumped on that bandwagon. For all of this, we were variously branded “middle-class luvvies”, “woke idiots”, “apologists for jihad” – or a community of staff and artists working and re-working out what’s possible, what’s needed, who should be included and what should be challenged today. We need small, canary-in-the-coalmine organisations to do that – to get it right, to get it wrong.
We also need them to find new talent, from all backgrounds, and celebrate it. More so than when I started at CPT, it’s a hostile environment today for aspiring artists. They need all the support – moral and practical – they can get, and organisations like ours provide it, below the radar, day after unglamorous day. There are countless now-major artists and projects – Cash Carraway’s Refuge Woman (which morphed into the BBC hit Rain Dogs), cult performance favourites Sh!t Theatre, Nouveau Riche’s global hit Queens of Sheba, the hip-hop theatre artist Conrad Murray, the fantastic activist theatre outfit Common Wealth – who benefited early in their careers from CPT’s support. With the demise of the Vault festival, and with many theatres programming less (and more cautiously) since Covid, the survival of such spaces is vital. If, that is, you care about the future of British theatre.
The search is now on for a new artistic director of CPT. Unblocking the loos is a smaller part of the job than it used to be. But making a home for new generations of artists trying to do things differently – that’s not changed. I’m off to Glasgow to join the team at A Play, a Pie and a Pint, another small organisation punching way above its weight, supporting the theatre-makers of tomorrow. I’ll be 400 miles away from Camden – but a little bit of my heart will be there for ever.
Brian Logan is the Guardian’s comedy critic and the outgoing artistic director of Camden People’s theatre
