Tom Lawrence in The Masque of the Red Death, Battersea Arts Centre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
A year ago, the outlook for Battersea Arts Centre was pretty grim. Wandsworth Borough Council had announced its intention to begin charging the organisation full commercial rates for its use of the old town hall it occupies, and stop its funding altogether.
However, following a hard fought campaign, Wandsworth graciously rescinded their planned funding cuts. Then came the phenomenal eight-month, sellout success of Punchdrunk's Masque of the Red Death, with BAC attracting unprecedented audiences in their thousands. Suddenly the venue was not only a highly respected hub for the theatrical cognoscenti, it was a party destination for thousands of young, and not-so-young Londoners interested in the subversive, immersive delights of this unusual theatrical experience.
This week BAC launched its new Burst festival and, at the launch event, unveiled exciting longer-term future plans for the building. And blimey, what plans they are ...
BAC now has a 125-year guaranteed lease on the building, with the first 10 years (at least) rent-free. Beyond this, they also have full support from Arts Council London, which has bestowed a very generous grant on the organisation.
As was remarked, coming after the adrenaline rush of facing possible extinction, this new influx of funding has landed on an organisation that has been thinking very hard about its mission, about what it's for and its core raison d'être. BAC is in lean, fighting fit shape. Its artistic directorship has just floated some of the most exciting new initiatives to hit the London theatre scene in quite some time.
Prior to The Masque of the Red Death, BAC had operated two studio spaces, plus a few offices dotted about the place in the building. The cavernous grand hall and the rooms round it had been reserved for renting out as an additional revenue stream, and much of the acre taken up by the building was never seen by BAC visitors. Masque changed all that, giving participants the opportunity to wander through the whole lot of it. This new relationship with the premises is going to be maintained.
Co-artistic director David Jubb noted that the rooms would revert to their original 1893 names, and that the spaces were going to be "scratched" - in the same way that new ideas for theatre pieces are tried out. At the same time, BAC is working in partnership with the architects Haworth Tompkins to meet the challenges of adapting the spaces of this Grade II listed building sympathetically.
The architect Steve Tompkins spoke of his passion for the project, and the dynamic relationship with the building being adopted. Rather than being viewed as an exercise in problem solving, this is to be an exploratory process that keeps artists very much at the centre of the thinking.
Another brilliant initiative is 2009's Home project, which will see BAC offer actual live-in residencies to 24 practitioners. Speaking to David Jubb about the thinking behind this, he made an interesting point: "When companies like Complicité, Improbable, Forced Entertainment and so on were starting up in the 1980s, there was the dole and a thriving squat scene. Through this scene came incredible cross-fertilisation amongst artists. It would be great when we can offer practitioners the chance to make work together and meet each other in a similarly fertile environment."
The event also introduced the new other half of BAC's artistic directorship David Micklem, who comes to the organisation after six years as Senior Theatre Strategy Officer at Arts Council England, during which time he managed large scale projects, including associate producing Artichoke's import, The Sultan's Elephant. The lack of red tape and bureaucracy across the presentations was impressive.
The impression throughout was that these decisions were reached by conversation rather than procedure - the heady sense that if someone has a good idea, there's a good chance of it happening. BAC stands out as a strikingly mobile, accessible place for artists to create genuinely exciting work. The future of British theatre just got several shades brighter.
