Afixture on London’s Dean Street for 25 years,Soho theatrehas hatched plays that won Oliviers, shows that earned the Edinburgh comedy award and ideas that became TV hits. On any night, across its upstairs studio theatre, its main house and basement cabaret bar, you’ll find plays from new writers, experimentations in clowning, drag performance, standup comedy, or a hybrid of them all.
In those rooms, I’ve watched American clown Natalie Palamides giving such a spirited performance that she vomited on stage, dancer and comedian Adrienne Truscott challenging rape jokes, and performance artist Kim Noble pushing audiences beyond comfort. I’ve sung along to ballads with sketch group Daphne, and folk songs with Sh!tTheatre.
Soho does all this by running a “festival programme”, with multiple shows per room, per night. “It allows us to take risks,” says executive director and CEO Mark Godfrey. “You can say now, 25 years on, we had the first play from Tanika Gupta, from Moira Buffini, early work from Chris Chibnall.”
And perhaps most famously of all,Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who first performed her one-woman show – and later hit TV series – Fleabag at the venue. “Soho theatre has a genuinely experimental, risk-taking attitude,” Waller-Bridge says. “It’s one of the only theatres that consistently puts on provocative work from lesser-known writers and performers and encourages them to be original. I’ve seen some of the best work of my life in those spaces.”
Waller-Bridge began her artistic relationship with Soho in 2009, in finance-industry satireRoaring Trade: “I remember throttling Andrew Scott with a tie as the lights went up every night, which was the beginning of one of the most happy collaborations of my life.” With colleagues in her DryWrite theatre company, Francesca Moody and Vicky Jones, she became an associate artist at the theatre, commissioning Adolescence writer Jack Thorne’s play Mydidae in 2012.
Fleabag first appeared in Soho’s upstairs room. Being offered space to preview “was no small thing”, Waller-Bridge says. It returned, post-Edinburgh, and Soho supported its West End transfer. “It’s Fleabag’s home. The Soho theatre audience is so up for it … unshockable, game for anything, fun-loving and curious.”
Now that game-for-anything is going to get a lot larger. As the theatre celebrates its 25th anniversary, it’s also starting a new chapter – the opening of 1,000-seaterSoho TheatreWalthamstow, in north-east London, where it will entertain its biggest audiences yet.
It’s been a long journey. Soho theatre on the West End’s Dean Street opened in 2000, but the company was founded as the Soho Theatre Company in the late 60s by theatre directors Verity Bargate (namesake of Soho’s new writing award) and Fred Proud. It became Soho Poly when it moved into a university basement in 1972. Deliberately free from “the trappings of bourgeois theatre architecture”, it was a pioneer of lunchtime theatre, allowing performances to “reach a different sort of audience”,write Matthew Morrison and Guy Osbornefrom the University of Westminster. That basement showcased future stars such as Bob Hoskins, Harriet Walter, Hanif Kureishi and Caryl Churchill. “It was about new plays and new writing, that fringe explosion of the 70s,” says Godfrey, who’s been with the company since 1990, its final year as Soho Poly.
By the mid-90s, after a stint at Cockpit theatre, Soho theatre was homeless. Fortuitously, the national lottery was emerging. With director Abigail Morris and producer David Aukin, Godfrey found a building on Dean Street that had formerly housed a synagogue. The vision was influenced by the diversity and collective spirit of the south London theatre Ovalhouse, the ICA’s punk aesthetics and experimental performances, the fun of comedy clubs. Rather than one artistic director, Soho has “a plurality of voices”, Godfrey says. “They love the work,” says performance artist Bryony Kimmings. “In the curating of their programme, they’re also artists.”
Those voices now include creative associate Pooja Sivaraman and head of comedy Steve Lock.Comedyis now a core part of Soho’s identity. In 2000, short-ish plays meant Dean Street’s stages were free by 9pm, so mixed-bill comedy, then eventually solo standup shows, filled the gap.
Lock started working on the box office in 2001, but soon moved into comedy programming, scouting experimental shows at the fringe, and programming things crowds couldn’t find at comedy clubs. “It was about full-length shows, which intrinsically felt more theatrical. We started to feel like the natural home for people’s one-hour shows in the early 2000s, and it’s snowballed from then.” Soho welcomed American drag performers such as Kiki and Herb, plus acts such as Hannah Gadsby before their rise to fame.
For the first 10 years at Dean Street, the basement was an Indian restaurant, which also ran the ground-floor bar. In 2011, it became Soho Theatre Bar, and the basement became a bespoke cabaret space. They decided “to give equal importance to theatre, comedy and cabaret”, Godfrey says.
Lock points to artists like Kimmings and Noble, who could never be squeezed into one box. Temi Wilkey, whose recent show Main Character Energy blended performance styles, says: “It’s an extraordinary space for people whose work is genre-pushing.” Kimmings says: “They never say no. They trust you to be creative.” When I ask artists what sets Soho theatre apart from other institutions, many say community. Associate artists used to be given membership to the Groucho Club, but when the theatre started running the bar, this was swapped for bar discounts instead. The idea was to build a club-like atmosphere right there.
When you enter Dean Street’s bar now, chances are you’ll recognise someone – it’s a “snipers’ alley” per one TV producer’s analogy; you’re always in the eyeline of an artist, writer, agent. For punters, this means the chance to spot a star.Social media was abuzzin 2023 when Florence Pugh, Andrew Garfield and Phoebe Bridgers were snapped after attending Kate Berlant’s show.
It helps that many of the artists connected to Soho arrived as fledging talent, such as Waller-Bridge, growing within the theatre, before achieving mainstream status. Kimmings had never visited Soho theatre until a meeting to discuss the transfer of her 2010 fringe show Sex Idiot, a tale of chlamydia and reappraising relationships. She’s spoken in the past about the snobbery and classism that can come with traditional theatre. Soho is “not like that at all”, she says. Meeting Lock and dramaturg Nina Steiger: “The two of them felt like family, like home, immediately,” Kimmings says. They earned her respect. “[Steiger] taught me how to use the principles of narratives, that was so exciting to me,” she says, and she saw Lock’s passion for new work. When she wanted to make another show – an exploration of alcohol and creativity – they gave her space to develop and she wanted their input. Kimmings now teaches young artists and says most dream of staging their work at Soho. “It’s managed to establish a mark of quality and experimentalism.It feels like if you’re there, you’re original, you’re good quality.”
Sign up toInside Saturday
The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.
after newsletter promotion
Cheerleading new artists is vital, says Waller-Bridge, especially in the current funding climate: “Writers need places to take risks, and to have the support of a theatre who back you as an individual rather than just a single project means you can push the boundaries.” Without that, “we’ll just end up with more and more generic work because people need to hedge their bets”.
Poppy Jay, of the podcast Brown Girls Do It Too, used to walk past Soho theatre on the way to Topshop in nearby Oxford Circus. It seemed like “a cool place”, but not for her. “Brown women, south Asian people, the theatre space doesn’t really feel like ours,” she says. Jay and co-host Rubina Pabani were invited to create a stage version of their podcast, which they developed at Dean Street into a theatrical mix of jokes, sketches and discussion of sexuality and cultural expectations. Despite initial fears of not belonging, she says the theatre is “embracing of talent and people from other backgrounds. It’s completely different to how I always imagined theatre spaces to be.”
While many artists are scouted, Soho theatre also runs “labs” to coach new talent. Comedians Jack Rooke and Olga Koch started in the comedy programme and playwright Ryan Calais Cameron in the writers’ lab. Rooke, creator of sitcom Big Boys, remembers the comedy lab as “the most valuable education I’ve ever had. One day would be being taught how to apply to go to the fringe by Richard Gadd, the next week we’d have a masterclass with the DryWrite team,” he says. “It taught me to be OK with putting darkness and silliness next to each other.”
It led to the live show Good Grief, about the aftermath of his dad’s death, and two subsequent shows, the seeds of Big Boys. He commemorated Soho’s role in his career by naming a Big Boys’ character after staff member Jules Haworth, who helped him secure a comedy lab bursary. Soho got TV commissioners in the door, Rooke says: “It’s always been good at taking a risk on new talent and not just following where the buzz is.”
In the upstairs studio, Sivaraman describes the importance of the labs while in the background performer Shafeeq Shajahan rehearses The Bollywood Guide to Revenge. “Shafeeq started on the writers’ lab and drag lab, and this show was programmed as part of Soho Rising [a new talent festival] last year. Now it has a one-week run.” With the opening of Soho Theatre Walthamstow, there’s potential to reach a larger stage. Palamides, who’s worked with Soho since her debut show Laid, will be the first to grace the beautifully restored theatre with Weer, her absurd 90s romcom that earned plaudits in Edinburgh. Jay will perform Brown Girls Do It Too later in the year – as a Walthamstow local, she saw films in the venue as a teen, so it feels like a full-circle moment. In the autumn, Kimmings will present Bog Witch, about rediscovering nature, her first show in more than five years: “I don’t think I could’ve done it with anybody else.”
It’s been nearly 15 years since Godfrey joined the fight to transform the Walthamstow venue, which nearly became a church, into a functioning theatre. With the launch imminent, he reflects on Soho’s origins. “One of the challenges is: how do you become a bigger organisation and still keep that queer-punk, radical-fringe core identity?”
They hope that “plurality of voices” in the theatre’s artistic team and the relationships they’ve built with artists over the years will preserve the Soho spirit. In the early days of Dean Street, the company was “under the radar”, says Godfrey, the pressure was off and creativity flowed. Will it be easier to fill an auditorium now on the cachet of Soho’s past successes, or will people expect mainstream acts from a larger venue? Alongside the company’s usual genre-melding works, tickets are already on sale for a pantomime and shows from Jon Ronson and Adam Kay. “We believe it will work, but it will be nice when you actually see it.”
During the redevelopment, there was some criticism over theloss of local LGBTQ+ venue The Victoria, which adjoins the site, but there has also been local outreach work. There are new labs programmes for Walthamstow locals, and many of the staff, including Godfrey and Soho Theatre Walthamstow co-chair Alessandro Babalola are locals themselves. Growing affection and audiences among residents, as well as persuading others to make the journey out, will be crucial.
Memories formed at Dean Street might hold lessons in how to retain the theatre’s identity. Kimmings laughs as she recalls one night in the cabaret basement, when an audience member bit her leg and she ended her show dancing on stage next to Juliette Lewis. To her, Soho theatre is “a place where you get to be free. A place where you can cast off your baggage and really belly laugh. That is so precious.”
Soho Theatre Walthamstow opens on 2 May.