Suppose we were in possession of a time machine and a stout pair of shoes, and so able to take a long walk around the London of the early 1970s. In different parts of the city, we would pass – probably without a glance – three derelict and empty buildings: a Covent Garden warehouse once used for ripening bananas; the old headquarters of a confectionary company near Waterloo Bridge; and, just off Upper Street in Islington, a former Salvation Army chapel.
Over the last 40 years, these neglected premises have successively become key British playhouses with a commercial clout and international reputation that belie their small size. The fruit depot was turned into the Donmar Warehouse theatre, the sweet company converted into the Menier Chocolate Factory theatre and the vacated church is now the Almeida theatre.
Until recently, most artistic observers would have placed the Donmar (Broadway transfers including Frost/Nixon) and the Menier (several hit Stephen Sondheim revivals including Sunday in the Park with George) just ahead of the Almeida. But, this week, the north London venue won eight Olivier awards for two recent productions – Lucy Kirkwood's epic of west-east politics, Chimerica, and a revival of Ibsen's Ghosts – and so out-performed both the National Theatre, which usually dominates theatre prize-givings and the commercial sector.
These honours coincide with the Almeida's last-but-one production – an adaptation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four – transferring to the West End, where its current show can soon be expected to follow: Mike Bartlett's King Charles III, a cheeky speculation about the present Prince of Wales finally succeeding his mother, has received largely five-star reviews in a production by the Almeida's new artistic director, Rupert Goold.
As a result, the theatre has been treated, in terms of news stories and editorials, as an overnight sensation, although it opened in 1980, initially under the artistic control of Pierre Audi. During Audi's decade, the Almeida was mainly a London showcase for productions that had begun elsewhere in the country. But, after the appointment of director Jonathan Kent and actor Ian McDiarmid as joint bosses in 1990, it staged around six major new productions each year, and this rhythm continued under Michael Attenborough, who ran the building from 2002 (after an expensive refurbishment, during which productions camped out in a dis-used King's Cross bus station) until handing over to Goold late last year.
London theatre has no official equivalent to New-York's distinction between Broadway and off-Broadway – although the listings magazine Time Out has sometimes used the designation "off-West End" – but the Almeida, Donmar and Menier are the landmarks of an unofficial fringe in the English capital.
Because British theatreland is full of massive Victorian buildings, designed when music hall and drama had the sort of mass audience that TV commands now, there had historically been a shortage of studio spaces. So it's significant that all of the newer acclaimed auditoriums are small – the Almeida, with 325 seats, slightly bigger than the Donmar and Menier – which permits risks to be taken with choices of play, although causing frustration when a production takes off and sells out. These venues also place the audience close to the stage, which is an arrangement conducive to subtly powerful acting, such as Lesley Manville's Olivier-claiming portrayal in Ghosts of a woman who has lost her despised husband and discovers that her beloved son is mortally ill.
Much of this week's comment on the Almeida's packed trophy cabinet has attributed the suddenly golden profile to Goold's arrival, but the division of credit is complex. Chimerica, though co-produced by Goold's Headlong theatre company, was scheduled at the Almeida in the Attenborough era, and the venue's achievements have been pretty evenly spread across the 34 years, as shown by the fact that my own top 10 of plays seen there includes work from each of the three producing regimes. This list of hits contains two original scripts, two British premieres of American successes and six starrily cast classic revivals, which is fairly representative of the general emphasis of the repertoire.
My selection, in chronological order: Scenes from an Execution by Howard Barker (1990), Harold Pinter in his own play No Man's Land (1992), Diana Rigg as Medea (1994), Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh (1999), The Goat by Edward Albee (2008), Steven Adly Guirgis's The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (2008), Harley Granville Barker's Waste, directed by Sam West (2008), Jonathan Pryce as King Lear (2012), Ghosts (2013), King Charles III (2014).
Even so, the recent haul of awards is noteworthy in any circumstances, but especially so because, just over three years ago, the Almeida was widely assumed to be facing ruin. On 30 March 2011, Arts Council England (ACE) responded to large cuts in state cultural funding by the coalition government by trimming provision to many of its subidised companies: the Almeida's grant was reduced by 39% in real terms.
This punishment was not perceived to be the result of artistic underachievement – unlike for some other clients who were cut – but to have resulted from a new "postcode test" to prevent over-provision of the arts in some areas. In the same accounting round, another north London producer, the Arcola, was given a 82.1% hike in public finance. But there was also a strong suspicion of attempted social engineering: the Arcola's manor is Hackney, a traditionally working-class part of the capital, while the Almeida – its address often Freudianly mispronounced as Al-media Street – is in emblematically middle-class Islington, where many theatre-goers have little need of subsidised ticket prices. Indeed, on many evenings there, the thought has struck that, if a bomb were to wipe out the audience in the stalls, Britain could be run for the next few years on the lucrative death duties suddenly released.
At the press conference to announce the cuts, a revealing row broke out. Representatives from the BBC and Guardian questioned the Almeida reduction, but journalists from the trade press (The Stage, Variety) argued that the repertoire in Islington had become stale and safe, while Hackney's was edgier and more experimental; and it seems likely that ACE had applied some logic of this kind. But the line surprised me at the time and has been disproved by the final two years of Attenborough's Almeida tenure, and the first of Goold's, which have been a model of alternating classical excellence with ambitious new writing.
You might think that ACE would be embarrassed by the triumph at the Oliviers, but the position is complicated. It could be argued that, by flourishing despite the loss of a third of its public money, the theatre has vindicated the judgment that private patronage would be able to make good the shortfall of government cash.
This has not been easy – the programme for King Charles III points out that the theatre needs to raise £1.4m annually to keep going – but has been achieved by targeting the flusher customers for extra cash. The annoying economic problem of theatre is that the demand for a hit production will normally be greater than the supply of seats: especially in a small theatre, and one where big-name stars are keen to work, but will usually commit only to a short run. So, for those willing to pay more, the Almeida offers add-ons such as social events with cast and director or, for a really big cheque, potentially a performance in your own home.
And, though recently unfortunate with public funding, the theatre proved lucky with recruitment when, in February 2013, Goold was persuaded to give up Headlong (for whom his productions had included Enron and The Effect) to succeed Attenborough at the Almeida. The announcement caused surprise because Goold was seen at the time as one of the strongest available candidates to take over the National Theatre from the retiring Sir Nicholas Hytner. (A post subsequently claimed by Rufus Norris.)
The Almeida, though, was probably more suitable for Goold: both American Psycho, which he directed for Headlong as the final show of Attenborough's regime, and King Charles III would have resulted in much more media and public fuss about their respective content – a musical about a serial killer and a Shakesperean pastiche featuring the ghost of Diana, Princess of Wales – if they had been staged in a building that is still officially called the Royal National Theatre.
The next production at the Almeida will be Mr Burns, the European premiere of a multimedia American piece that is subtitled a "post-electric play". Post-Oliviers, interest will be high, although the shows that took trophies home this week serve as a warning of how difficult it can be to predict a hit. By coincidence, both scripts had originally been let go by someone else: Kirkwood's Chimerica was originally offered to the National Theatre, while Eyre's version of Ghosts was commissioned seven years ago for a West End production that never happened.
After those two homeless scripts found such a hospitable refuge at the theatre, more and more projects will hope to follow them. Though now decades beyond its life as a church, the site in Almeida Street has become a place of cultural worship.
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