Little London Theater Is Actors’ Dream Come True

Almost from the day they applied for the job 11 years ago, Jonathan Kent and Ian McDiarmid--a pair of actors with no experience running the show--turned London’s Almeida Theatre into one of the hippest companies in the world.

McDiarmid explains how he and his old friend got started as co-artistic directors. First they cooked up their own dream season: two new plays, two classics. They got Glenda Jackson interested in Howard Barker’s “Scenes From an Execution,” seduced Claire Bloom with Henrik Ibsen’s “When We Dead Waken,” lured director Nicholas Hytner (then hot off “Miss Saigon”) to helm a “Volpone” starring McDiarmid, and hooked Andrei Serban to direct a new play called “Desire.”

Then they went in for their job interview.

Says McDiarmid, speaking from the Almeida’s offices in London, “In this rather incredible situation where we hadn’t even been offered the job, we were in a position to present a first season. Then they said, ‘Sounds great; hope you pull at least one of them off.’ They liked our nerve, I guess.”

They pulled all the projects off and have been rolling out prestige hits ever since. Diana Rigg soon played Medea and Ralph Fiennes played Hamlet, both winning Tonys on Broadway when the shows transferred to New York. Fiennes returned for a rep of “Richard II” and “Coriolanus”; Kevin Spacey triumphed in London and New York in “The Iceman Cometh.”

The Almeida also presented world premieres by, among many others, David Hare (“The Judas Kiss” with Liam Neeson), Edward Albee (“The Play About the Baby”) and Harold Pinter (“Celebration,” a one-act paired with his 1957 “The Room” in a production that will travel to New York this summer as part of the Lincoln Center Festival). The Almeida’s most recent world premiere is now playing in London; it’s “The Shape of Things” by Neil LaBute (“bash: latterday plays” and the films “In the Company of Men” and “Your Friends and Neighbors”). “The Shape of Things” is already being discussed for a New York transfer.

All along, the company has showcased stars in intriguing plays: Juliette Binoche in Luigi Pirandello’s “Naked,” Cate Blanchett in Hare’s “Plenty,” Rigg in Jean Racine’s “Phedre” and “Britannicus,” to take only a few examples. Add to this list Anna Friel, well known on TV and film in Britain, seen in New York recently in Patrick Marber’s “Closer.” Friel stars in Kent’s production of Frank Wedekind’s “Lulu,” a 19th century saga of lust now at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

All this activity--not to mention the summer opera program--seems like overachieving on a grand scale when you consider that the Almeida Theatre is a 300-seat auditorium built in 1837 as a lecture hall for a scientific and literary institute. The Almeida has only two dressing rooms for the actors, a foyer and box office covered by a tarpaulin, and salaries for actors that stick to Equity scale, even for stars.

“They sure as hell aren’t here for the money, let me tell you,” Kent says from London. “Actually, in a funny way, there not being money has been rather good in that it has meant that there is no misunderstanding: People are only here for the work.”

Yet the Almeida space, small and rough as it has been, was a draw for Kent and McDiarmid from the beginning. The playing area covers roughly half the room, with a curved wall behind the stage and the audience positioned on a steep bank of seats. McDiarmid describes the Almeida as “a large space in terms of acting, and a small space in terms of watching and listening. So the tension between the audience and the stage is a very lively one. Epic theater in an intimate space used to be our cliche, but it’s true.”

Still, one of the most interesting things about the Almeida is that the company has regularly burst out of its theater’s four walls and into other performance spaces. Kent and McDiarmid have developed a history of finding new spots to stage plays, a habit that Kent says started in earnest six years ago when he directed Fiennes in “Hamlet” at the Hackney Empire, an East End musical venue. In 1998 the company converted the Gainsborough film studios into a temporary theater specifically for the three-month “Coriolanus” and “Richard II” rep. Kent explains why:

“There was no point in doing it in a 300-seat theater; neither play is suited to that sort of intimacy, I thought. Both of them seemed to me like public plays. But I didn’t want to do it in a conventional West End theater because somehow that simply becomes, ‘God, it’s Tuesday, let’s go see Ralph Fiennes in “Richard II.” ’ I’ve always been interested in subverting audience expectations. What’s great is that they go on a journey to a space they’ve never been to before, so in a way they’re more open to the play. They’re not buttressed by hacking their way through the West End, do you know what I mean?”

In 1998, the Almeida placed shows in eight venues, including the West End and Broadway. Of the 400,000 people who saw an Almeida production that season, only 68,000 were actually in the Almeida Theatre. So far this year, the Almeida has opened two new temporary theaters in an old bus station in King’s Cross, toured a show called “Decky Does a Bronco” to outdoor sites throughout Britain (it’s currently playing in a London park called Coram’s Fields), staged an outreach project with schoolchildren in an empty hospital and is now sending shows to Washington and New York.

“The Almeida is an idea,” Kent says. “It happens to have a beautiful little theater, but it’s an idea, an ethos. I suppose it’s an aspiration. We’re not an institution.”

As if to prove that notion, the Almeida building, located in the recently gentrified north London neighborhood of Islington, is closed until the fall of next year for renovations. (The company shut the building down in style last winter with a Kent-directed “Tempest” starring McDiarmid as Prospero. They removed the stage and installed a water tank into which Ariel sank without rising; an air lock awaited the actor underwater.) According to Sarah Weir, who stepped in as the Almeida’s executive director earlier this year, the theater’s renovation will cost $7.4 million, with $2 million coming from the National Lottery and another $2.6 million already raised. Both Kent and McDiarmid insist that the essential character of the place--which has “good ghosts,” in McDiarmid’s words--will be retained, while improving a few amenities for the actors and audience.

“People are going to go into the old space and think, ‘What the hell did they close for all this time and spend all this money on?’ ” says Kent. “But it’s a beautiful space, and we’d be mad to tamper with it too much.”