With theatres across London losing funding and Above the Stag closing, the new King’s Head Theatre feels like a miracle opening. It isn’t: it’s the product of hard work. With no permanent artistic director and partnership discussions underway with the Almeida, the King’s Head is shaking things up. Adam Bloodworth meets CEO Sofi Berenger
Hugh Grant made his professional debut there, and the likes of Joanna Lumley and Richard E Grant entertained in the days before they were famous. But after 53 years the iconic King’s Head pub theatre closed last year. It was bittersweet, as the black box space had become a saving grace for early-career artists. But this week, something exciting happened: a new theatre for London.
Version 2.0 of the King’s Head Theatre opened within touching distance of the old venue. Surrounded by pink paint in the new theatre’s exposed brick bar, neon light strips are pulsating on the walls. The lights can be programmed “depending on the audience,” says CEO and artistic director Sofi Berenger; God forbid a strobe setting seeing off boomer audience members.
This shiny new venue, created over ten years with private capital, seems an almost unbelievable achievement given the state of the arts in London. In the past year the Donmar and the Hampstead Theatre have lost Arts Council funding and the National Theatre announced that it is to “reduce activity levels in order to ensure financial stability.”
We’re in discussions with our neighbours the Almeida. We’d like to work together to support London’s actors with our new stage
Sofi Berenger, CEO and artistic director at the King’s Head Theatre
“When our neighbours the Almeida are losing £100,000 of their arts funding per year it just doesn’t seem realistic that we’re going to go for it,” says Berenger, who laughs when I say the new theatre feels like a miraculous achievement. It isn’t: it’s the result of lots of hard work. She bats away the idea that the new opening was some fluke of nature by presenting the impressive pitch deck. “We’ve set up a dedicated investment scheme for the shows and that’s what’s going to help us get artists’ work on the stage,” she says.
The idea is for the venue to “self sustain itself. I don’t think I necessarily need the NPO Arts Council funding if I’ve got an investment pot of money, which is what we’re raising at the moment.” Inspiring stuff, much like the theatre. It spans six floors, with a main auditorium seating around 220 and a more intimate late-night cabaret space for 50, which has a shade of late night hedonism about it even with the sun shining in the mid-afternoon. There are two bars, a shop, and a soon-to-be unveiled gallery space. No longer a pub theatre, the King’s Head hopes to support Islington’s remaining grassroots London theatre venues – including the Hen and Chickens, The Old Red Lion and The Hope – by providing a bigger platform for artists.
Berenger is also in discussions with Rupert Goold, the artistic director of the Almeida Theatre next door, about collaborating. They’d like a smaller space to platform work by artists not quite ready to play the formidable main house there, which at only 400 seats is viewed as one of the most fertile new writing stages in the country, if not the world.
We are where the innovation can happen. There is significantly less pressure to perform at our venue, so it enables artistic risk and plenty of innovation
Sofi Berenger
In short, the new King’s Head is in a unique position to support both little and large. “The midscale is where innovation can happen because there is significantly less pressure and it enables artistic risk and innovation,” says Berenger. “We’ve discussed the potential, the ambition and the cultural need to have more talent development spaces,” she says. “The conversations I’ve had with the Almeida were really positive. About the opportunity to develop talent pathways for artists to start their careers at a very grassroots level with us, doing our 200 seat main auditorium, then working their way up to the scale, pressure and prestige of somewhere like the Almeida.”
Programming will be queer-leaning, and largely by independent producers, although the theatre hopes to produce at least one of their own shows per year. Their opening gambit is a drama called Exhibitionists, a show about four men on the art scene in San Francisco. Launching the raucous 50-seater stage is Godot is a Woman, a feminist reappraisal of Samuel Beckett’s most famous work, created in light of his rule that only men could ever perform in Waiting for Godot. There’s a licence that allows boozing beyond midnight, and the possibility to go into the small hours if they choose to make the space more of a club environment, which Berenger has hopes for.
Amid talk about the need for London theatres to have artistic directors (there have been multiple high-profile resignations recently and some London theatres are doing away with the concept entirely), Berenger has opted for rolling creative heads rather than one singular overlord. “There’s a real questioning of what the role is,” says Berenger.
“When you have an artistic director the identity of the building becomes about that person. Our identity of our building is about the queer community, to create a more linear hierarchy, to not make it about one person’s vision. I think not having an artistic director, we’re able to program much more diversely.” Some things are more back to basics.
Berenger would love to keep the theatre’s relationship with the still-operating King’s Head pub next door, perhaps even offer pre-theatre menus if she can convince owners Young’s to collaborate. “The King’s Head was the first pub theatre of the modern era and the reality is that the landscape of pubs has changed,” says Berenger.
“In the 1970s, when the King’s Head opened, there were a lot of independent pub landlords. It was a job – you owned and operated the pub and you had one or two pubs. At the King’s Head there was this beautiful ecology and equilibrium where the theatre funded the beer sales and the beer sales funded the theatre. It really worked. That’s a very different climate and reality when you’re working with larger property development organisations and the face of London these days.
There are very, very few independently owned businesses. I think that has significantly shifted what pub spaces are and can be. I’d love to continue to be a part of that world and figure out how to create an ecology that might work.” As much as she is forward-looking, Berenger has the perfect alchemy you’d hope for from anyone leading a space that was birthed by the closing of an institution: a gentle nostalgia for the past.
“I’d love to do a pop up season [in the old theatre], maybe go back to the good old days of King’s Head founder Dan Crawford, when he did lunchtime theatre,” she ruminates. “Why not continue that collaboration? It’s just a very different landscape now.”
Visit the new King’s Head Theatre at 115 Upper St, N1 1QN; support the theatre via its Angels for Angels programme
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