Show of intimacy

Show of intimacy

The stage is tiny and the pay lousy, yet film stars clamour to work at the Almeida. John Whitley finds out why

John Whitley
Saturday 7 February 1998
Electronic Telegraph

When the French film star Juliette Binoche makes her triumphant exit in the new London production of Pirandello's Naked next week (previews from Thurs), she won't be able to sweep gracefully into the wings as befits last year's Oscar winner. The Almeida theatre has no wings, so instead she must march off in full view of the audience, clamber down a rudimentary metal ladder, negotiate a clutter of backstage machinery and dive down two more steep steps before she can reach her shared dressing room.

Hollywood it ain't. But despite such working conditions, the cramped 300-seat north London theatre has big names such as Binoche, Ralph Fiennes, Diana Rigg, Rupert Graves and Kevin Spacey queuing up to appear in its productions for a wage of only £225 a week.

It's a roster and a reputation that have built this converted literary institute in Islington into the country's hottest drama venue, even making its joint artistic directors strong contenders to take over the National Theatre last year.

It also comes top of the list for any visitor sampling Britain's artistic life. Indeed, Binoche, like many of its other performers, discovered it through the recommendation of a friend.

"I went to see Ivanov after Ralph Fiennes told me about it," she says, "and I loved the space so much that I asked if I could work there. I haven't been on the stage for almost 10 years and this place has that warmth and intimacy with the audience that I'd been missing. I love the idea of everyone being paid the same - that we're all in the same boat."

It all sounds dangerously close to becoming a luvvies' paradise when Rupert Graves weighs in, "I love the epic quality of that curved back wall." "There is so much energy there," sighs Binoche.

Other theatre bosses are less impressed. "To me, it seems like the movie culture transported into the theatre," says David Farr, artistic director of the Gate Theatre, also in north London. "I suspect that they tend to look for a top actor or director to come for a play and then look for the play itself afterwards."

"This is all radical chic, really," complains one distinguished director in tones previously reserved for 'Hampstead intellectuals'. "It's a bit like a cocktail party. The space is so tiny you can't see the play because of looking at the people."

But the stars are simply a happy coincidence, according to the two men who have created the theatre. "It's very gratifying that so many distinguished people want to work here," says Ian McDiarmid, the actor who took over the Almeida with Jonathan Kent in 1990. "But when we began, we simply wanted a place where we could put on the plays we felt passionately about. All the rest came later."

Kent agrees: "I've never cast a play on the basis that it would give someone famous a juicy part. The fatal mistake is for anyone to come to the Almeida and say, 'I'd like to work here', because within minutes they get a phone call! It was after Kevin Spacey saw Ivanov that he offered to work here and now he's in The Iceman Cometh.

"Actors come because we choose plays that attract them, plays that aren't obvious, and we try to commission translations from the greatest living writers - Ted Hughes has translated Phèdre, for example. And casts don't have to spend their lives doing them - it's as simple as that."

In fact, the Almeida only exists at all as a piece of administrative legerdemain which refuses to accept its fate. As it is categorised by the Arts Council as a receiving house, a home for other people's productions, it gets only £429,000 of public money.

But McDiarmid and Kent, himself an actor turned director, run it as a much more costly producing house, like the National Theatre or the Royal Court, creating its own productions at an average five a year. The perpetual gap can be filled only by private fundraising, ticket sales and the willingness of big names to work there for peanuts - though the "pension" from McDiarmid's appearance in Return of the Jedi as Emperor of the Universe may help.

"It is a constant tightrope," acknowledges McDiarmid. "We get about a third of the grant the Royal Court receives. So we have to fill 80 per cent of our seats with every play, or 60 per cent with new work; otherwise we risk bankruptcy.

"But then, when we started we had enough money for one and a half plays. We thought we might last three months."

The policies that attract celebrities also attract a staggering £650,000 in private fund-raising as well as gifts in kind. "I think this is because people can see where their money goes - you can practically spot it on stage," explains Kent. "There is no great bureaucratic hole. And that makes people feel part of the community at the Almeida."

Even a more objective observer, such as Sir Richard Eyre, agrees. Newly released from the directorship of the National Theatre, he is directing a new play by David Hare, The Judas Kiss, for his erstwhile competitors.

"First of all, it's a very good space - there's nowhere in London quite like it now that the Royal Court has changed. It feels wonderful. Then it's very hospitable and makes conditions in which people feel confident to do their best. A big attraction for established actors is the short runs of two months compared with seven to eight months at the National, which just doesn't work if you want to do filming as well."

Eyre's production, with a cast that includes Liam Neeson, is evidence that the Almeida's ambitions don't stop at the Islington boundaries. In 1995, it staged Hamlet with Ralph Fiennes at the old Hackney Empire and now The Judas Kiss will open at the Playhouse in the West End, possibly transferring to Broadway - chic, certainly, but about as radical as Terence Rattigan.

"This is simply because, by the time Liam committed to it for March, the Almeida's own theatre was already booked up," explains Eyre. "But it is in the nature of the artistic urge to expand with success and they obviously want to grow. The test is to expand without dilution."

So this autumn McDiarmid and Kent are taking on the West End by forming a joint company with a commercial producer to bring larger-scale work in a season of three or four productions at a regular West End theatre - perhaps the Albery - where shows can be seen by a wider audience and, perhaps, a more profitable one.

This expansion will be on the back of a 12-week touring programme, based on the company's first residency at the Malvern Festival this August, where it will present The Doctor's Dilemma and Edward Albee's new play, before they come to London.

"Of course, we'll also bear a greater part of the risk," notes McDiarmid. "But it does give us a way of getting more out of our work and it should feed back to this building, which will always be the heart." And if it pays off, the scheme will form a model for all small theatres unable to exploit their successes with longer runs in larger theatres.

It may sound like folie de grandeur, but, as McDiarmid says, "The nature of the Almeida is that we operate at risk, and that gives one a sense of heady recklessness." There could hardly be a more devastating response to slurs about radical chic.

SPEB