Battersea Arts Centre suffered an appalling fire last Friday that has devastated its grand hall. The pictures of flames licking over the building’s roof were chilling. But the mood at the theatre is resilient, and shows are going on.
Next Tuesday, 24 March, sees the start of the new Hourglass festival, with debates, cabaret, shows and events created by young producers. And on 7 April its Taking a Stand season begins, full of political work including a contribution from that extraordinary talent, Chris Goode.
The theatre’s artistic director, David Jubb, told me about the incredible support it has received: local schools have baked cakes; other theatres have offered space and support; £70,000 in donations has flooded in; even the Brownies have pitched in. A wall in the staff’s temporary office has pinned on it hundreds of messages of support and solidarity.
This is the sign, indeed, of a beloved institution right at the heart of its community. And on Wednesday, five days after the fire, came delightful news: the theatre cat was finally discovered. Pluto was hungry, unusually desirous of hugs and affection, but strong and healthy.
O, for a learned titter
To Edinburgh to interview the new director of the international festival, the delightful Fergus Linehan. He told me about not only what he had programmed for his first festival this August (which looks enticing – Complicite, Robert Lepage and a new stage adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark), but what fell through. This is rare: hardly anyone has the confidence in an interview to admit to less than glorious success, despite the fact that to do so is immensely disarming.
“I wanted to do an incredibly funny festival – I thought it would be the most counterintuitive thing,” he said. “But it just killed me. I kept coming across things that were quite funny but not very funny.”
I did wonder how you would sustain an entirely hilarious festival that included high-end dance, theatre, opera, pop – and, especially, classical music. Then I remembered what the composer Thomas Adès has been heard to call the “Wigmore chuckle”: the learned titter that can sometimes ring out at the end of the scherzo of a particularly “witty” string quartet. You don’t see folk rolling in the aisles exactly. But still.
Stoicism on the stairs
I fell down the stairs the other day. When I say “the stairs”, there were only two of them. That was enough: I felt like I’d been whacked round the back with a cricket bat, and when I stood up and tottered to the bathroom I fell unconscious, waking up to find myself propped on the toilet seat, Judy Garland-style, with my partner patting me on the cheek and telling me to “stay with it”.
Back at work, I lost no time in whipping out my bruises to any who’d humour me. (“Christ,” said a colleague, with gallows newsroom humour, “you look like you’re fresh out of Guantánamo.”) Drama queen that I am, I even sent bruise selfies to my octogenarian parents, despite the fact that they are no stranger to the dramatic tumble, always displaying admirable, blitz-style stoicism, including the occasion on which my father waited for almost three hours with a broken hip for the East of England Ambulance Service to arrive; and the time my mother spent two years nursing an undiagnosed broken arm.
I draw two conclusions. First, the home, previously thought of as an asylum (in both senses, in fact) is nothing but a deathtrap. Second, what a falling-off there has been betwixt the generations.
