Small but perfectly performed

Published 18 December 2000

In its decade of ascendancy, this theatre has achieved A-list imprimatur. As it closes its doors for refurbishment, David Jays celebrates the Almeida effect

"You watch people dying as you die," offers Jonathan Kent, explaining theatre's particular appeal. "It exists in real time, it is a metaphor for mortality." The observation seems unexpectedly mordant from Kent, who, with Ian McDiarmid, is joint artistic director of the Almeida, the small Islington theatre that has done little but flourish during their 11-year tenure. Famed for its intrepid repertoire and for attracting the cream of stage and screen talent, for rediscovering classics and tempting new plays from Pinter, Miller and Hare, it is soon to close for a 14-month refurbishment after a new production of The Tempest. It seems a good time to reflect on the Almeida effect.

In 1990, I was living in Peckham, south London. Three, then four, then five of us huddled in a flat where the gas heating had been condemned, the roof dripped into saucepans dotted between sleeping bags, while the landlord wrote autobiographical novels about escaping from the asylum. Cold and shiftwork sapped our entertainment - my memory of that long winter is of nights in and close friendships imperilled by disappointment. But we none the less roused ourselves to trek across the river for Jonathan Kent's and Ian McDiarmid's first production at the Almeida. The building originally opened in 1837 as a reading-room and lecture hall for Islington's Literary and Scientific Institution, and subsequently tarted itself up and down to house a music hall, the Salvation Army and a factory for carnival novelties. It became a theatre in 1980, presenting notable early productions by Theatre de Complicite until the actors Kent and McDiarmid were appointed.

That first production was Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution, starring Glenda Jackson as a ferocious Renaissance artist commissioned to celebrate a military victory, but who instead fills the canvas with ignoble, torn and bleeding reality. A radio play let loose on stage, allowing Jackson to lash out with her razor-honed tongue, it was an ambitious and brilliantly staged (by McDiarmid) quarrel about the purpose of art. We never saw the painting itself, merely the assertive edge of a gilded frame when the canvas was tamed in a gallery. An exhilarating evening, it kick-started deadened imaginations, and we returned for the rest of the opening season: Claire Bloom in When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen's wintry final play about the artist's last gasp; McDiarmid magnificently ratty in Volpone, staged by Nicholas Hytner in a mud-lapped Venice stagnant with greed; and the suggestive anthropology of David Lan's Desire.

The Almeida soon established itself as a necessary theatre. Each season brings revelations, reassessing Racine, Rattigan, Lorca, Marivaux and Shaw. Asked to pick one cherished rediscovery, Kent chooses Ivanov, Chekhov's early tragicomedy of torpid promise. "It was a play that was rather dismissed. Michael Frayn said it was the only Chekhov he'd never translated, because it wasn't worth doing. So I'm very pleased that, in David Hare's revelatory version, it was demonstrated to be not just a piece of juvenilia, but a potent portrait of society." Ralph Fiennes played the haplessly icy Ivanov, hiding behind hooded eyes, with Harriet Walter as his dying Jewish wife, and a large cast of small minds and foul manners etching a grotesque society bereft of heart and purpose.

Alongside Hare, there have been sharp new versions of classic plays by Ted Hughes, Frank McGuinness and Craig Raine. "Any classical revival is a conversation between the time and place in which the play was written and the time and place in which it is performed," Kent argues. "It's important to have a contemporary voice addressing the play." New works have been equally significant. "It's too easy to be boiled down in a convenient sentence," Kent complains. "'Stars come to Almeida for £325 per week in classical revival' - I'm afraid that's rather glib journalese." Again, big names attract the headlines, particularly the fruitful association with Harold Pinter (Moonlight, Celebration), but there has also been an intriguing strain of elliptical American plays, by Edward Albee, Phyllis Nagy and, recently, Neil LaBute's sour triptych bash.

Although the liveliest recent Shakespeare productions have been in intimate spaces, Kent admits: "We avoided Shakespeare. Personally, I wanted to bide my time." Jonathan Miller's finely perverse Midsummer Night's Dream was a study of ennui among the silver-spoon classes, but other Shakespearean excursions have taken place away from home: a frock-coated Hamlet in the faded Hackney Empire and, this summer, Richard II and Coriolanus at the Gainsborough Studios. With Ralph Fiennes in the title roles, the productions were romantic but incurious, their most interesting note a satirical disengagement from political reality. Richard II was powdery with nostalgia, the sweet, moist smell of new-mown grass hanging in the air.

Stars such as Fiennes have inevitably grabbed headlines for the Almeida: Kevin Spacey giving the American Dream a good kicking in The Iceman Cometh, preparing for American Beauty; Cate Blanchett quivering on the verge in Plenty; Juliette Binoche, Liam Neeson, Klaus-Maria Brandauer . . . Even more significant is the attraction for a generation of British actors who made their names at the RSC or the National Theatre and might have been expected to return there in great classical roles. "The great flowering of Diana Rigg's later career has been in association with the Almeida," enthuses Kent. "Medea, which was hugely influential in my life, was also a gearing-up for Diana." They later collaborated on two Racine tragedies in the West End, notably a thrilling Phedre, in Ted Hughes's implacable, stirring translation. Not only Rigg, but also David Suchet, Barbara Jefford, Richard Griffiths and Penelope Wilton have abandoned subsidised stages, as have younger stars such as Tom Hollander, Helen McCrory and Emma Fielding.

"When We Dead Waken was my first production ever," Kent recalls. It appeared initially that the theatre would springboard Ian McDiarmid's burgeoning directorial career, but he has largely remained on stage, brilliantly vulpine in Moliere and Marlowe, and now playing Prospero in The Tempest. Rather, it was Kent who crossed over. "The minute I directed, regardless of what anybody thought of it, I knew that was what I should be doing. I acted once after that [appropriately jaded in Anouilh's The Rehearsal] and that was it." The defining moment was watching a stage-frightened Richard Griffiths triumphantly conquer his fears: "I caught myself thinking, how do they do it? And I told myself, that is the moment you cease to be an actor."

It is always inspiring to hear of someone stumbling into a vocation, although some of Kent's most celebrated work leaves me cold - the brassy clang of Rigg's Medea, the studiedly disengaged Fiennes. The best of Kent has been in his bittersweet productions of Pirandello and Moliere. He infuses these self-consciously artificial texts with diamond cruelty and intense plangency. Moliere's The School for Wives looked ravishing in a drizzle, with McDiarmid's flinty old monster both tormenting and tormented. The Rules of the Game, Pirandello's sly drama of infidelity, dripped with sorrow behind deluding glass, and Naked displayed a febrile Juliette Binoche shuttling unwillingly between personae.

A constant beauty of the Almeida stage is the curving brick back wall. Textured, pitted with the building's past lives, it can appear harsh or inviting, elemental or enveloping. Most productions exploit it - the wall responds to light with craggy revelation. None has been more teasing than David Leveaux's marvellous revival of Pinter's Betrayal, where adulterous skirmishes in chilly interiors suddenly sighed as a shutter opened up and the wall could suggest a melancholy Venetian holiday, finding a lost ideal of romance amid tarnished relationships. The wall will survive the forthcoming renovations - it is the squashed foyer, dressing-rooms and seating that will be transformed. In between, the Almeida will stage productions in a former bus garage in King's Cross, including Anna Friel in Lulu, and Hare's new version of Platonov, another early Chekhov play.

Those first Almeida soul-stirrers, Scenes from an Execution and When We Dead Waken, were dark plays mordantly questioning the value and appropriation of art. "It's ironic that I'm ending with The Tempest," Kent considers, "because When We Dead Waken was Ibsen's Tempest, an examination of the sacrifice that art involves. Ibsen's conclusion is that it's not quite worth it, or at least that the costs are enormous. The Tempest is also a very bleak play - anger tempered by despair. How Prospero was ever seen as this twinkly Father Christmas I'll never know."

The Almeida has undoubtedly achieved A-list imprimatur. I've watched Princess Margaret rustle through the cramped foyer, and I've sat behind the Blairs, as their alarming grins raked the auditorium. But Kent argues that "what is depressing is that 11 years of the most remarkable work, which is driven by will and a collective imagination, has not really been rewarded. For all the Almeida's accolades and everybody thinking it's absolutely marvellous, we're still grotesquely underfunded. We had a turnover of £6.5m last year, and we get £450,000 from public funding. That's a nonsense when you think that the National gets £14m, and yet our repertoire and the number of plays we do is not far short of the National."

Increasingly, the institutions founded in postwar enthusiasm seem to have lost their reason for being. The theatres in the Barbican and on the South Bank were designed as people's palaces, easing audiences into great plays with generous legroom and good sightlines. It was argued that these texts needed to breathe on huge stages with expansive visual metaphors to produce an inclusive shared experience. Classic RSC productions created eye-popping cosmologies, put whole societies on stage. Texts were scrubbed down and cranked up, and actors thrumming with personality none the less subscribed to an ensemble ideal.

It still happens, fitfully. The current mean-spirited carping at Trevor Nunn's record at the National is not terminal (soon, no doubt, the pendulum will swing to thwack the RSC's Adrian Noble). But Nunn's handsome ensemble that did such polished work last year has juddered this winter, while the RSC's boldest recent move was to acknowledge its fracture with the cycle of history plays called "This England", produced by four wholly distinct directors working in apparent isolation.

When Kent points to the iniquities of funding, he is keen to assure me that "it's important that the National gets as much money as it needs". But surely he refers to subsidised theatre when he reflects: "That's the sad thing about our culture - the status quo is always propped up. Theatres should be allowed to grow and die - they are reflections of mortality and humanity." It would be miserable to accept that the national companies have become dinosaurs lumbering into an ice age. However attractive it feels to nestle into smaller theatres such as the Almeida or into the ox-blood womb of the refurbished Royal Court, London needs venues that can reflect its own sizeable ambitions and population. As for many others, the Almeida has been an invaluable part of my imaginative life - but it cannot tell the whole story.

The Tempest is at the Almeida, London N1 (020 7359 4404), until 17 February 2001

David Jays writes for the Observer and Sight & Sound

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