Soho Place

I do enjoy a mid-week matinee in the West End. Has to be a matinee, it’s a near two hour train ride in and another two hours back again. Plays rather than musicals, although there are worthy exceptions. And the venue is as much a part of the day out as the production itself. Those rickety old London theatres take you back to a golden age before the curtain even comes up.There’s a thousand stories in the wood panelled walls themselves. Yes, yes, the toilets are cramped and stink, there’s even less leg room in the seats, your neighbours elbows will spend most of the play in your ribs and the balconies are vertigo-inducingly high. I’m also reasonably convinced that no number of fire drills will prevent a stray spark from cremating several dozens pensioners, half of whom will probably be crushed to death in an unseemly stampede down those narrow smoke-filled stairwells. I’m still young and fit enough to belong in the stamper rather than the stampee category, so I don’t worry myself too much.

Yesterday I went to see The Spy That Came In From The Cold at Soho Place. What a revelation. Not the play, but the venue. I’ve read Le Carre’s full collection, so no surprises there. But the theatre – gosh golly. It’s a new theatre. The first new theatre in the West End in more than half a century, so the blurb says. So it’s out with the wood, stained seats, musky damp smell and worn patterned carpets and in with the polished metal, glass and tile. You walk off the street straight into the bar – with seating! Lots of seating. It was, dare I say, an actual lounge. So civilised. In fact, I stopped in the doorway and started to back out. I must have taken a wrong turn, this isn’t how London does theatres. But it was no wrong turn. New theatre, new ideas. So good, so far.

The auditorium itself is different too. The seating surrounds the stage. The balconies aren’t too deep. It’s a smallish theatre. Intimate, shall we say. The toilets? Plenty of them, and roomy enough that you don’t get a dose of splash back by the bloke next door who is a little too care-free in letting go. The plus points are racking up. Somethings, of course don’t change. The purchase of a thimble sized tub of Haagen-Dazs still leaves you feeling robbed. And some folk still don’t consider deodorant to be a necessity. But one can’t blame the theatre for that. But make no mistake, I like Soho Place. A lot. I still like the rickety old fashioned ones too. It’s nice to have different things in life, isn’t it. But anyway, the production itself? Well, it’s a good time of year to hand out grades.

D: Clarkston. Excellent reviews, but I found it all a bit meh. A story I neither wanted nor needed to hear. C: The Score. Flawed, and scarcely worthy of a C, but it’s Brian Cox, so it couldn’t be a D. Although he did fumble his lines more than once. B: My Master Builder and Giant. Both great stories, told well by Ewan McGregor and the marvellous John Lithgow. B+: Spy That Came in from the Cold. It made the most of the stage set-up with some fine acting. And the Mousetrap, which is….well, it’s the Mousetrap. Agatha at her finest. A: My play of the year is The Years. Brilliant concept, clever plot, superbly executed. And the tension and discomfort that some scenes created within the audience was next level. Highly recommended.