Amadeus at Wilton's Music Hall, a building infused with "precarious grandeur and seediness". Photograph: Tristram Kenton
In the course of a rather Lynchian dream a few nights ago, I found myself in the auditorium of the crumbling Wilton's Music Hall after dark. Anyone who steps through the door of Wilton's for the first time is instantly bewitched by the building's precarious grandeur and seediness. It is a place teeming with the ghosts of long-departed shows.
Wilton's is among the list of the world's most endangered places (you can help save it here). I know theatre isn't really about bricks and mortar, but I still form real emotional attachments to venues. They don't have to be pretty to get under the skin (one of my favourites, the Arcola, resembles an underground car park), they just have to be home to good work.
Superimposed on the map of the world in my head is a delineation of all the auditoriums where I've sat waiting for that moment when the curtain goes up, the lights snap on, and the magic takes hold. Theatres come to mean more than their architecture: they comprise imaginary museums of productions as well as the atmosphere and spirit of the place, which shifts depending on who's running them at any one time.
This month I'm in the first flush of love for the Toynbee Studios in East London, Arts Admin's airy, well-appointed new base. I've already seen two fascinating shows from Forced entertainment's back catalogue there, discovered Curious - a performance art company I wish I'd known about earlier - and now I'm looking forward to Mem Morrison's Leftovers.
Newer venues jostle against the ones I've already settled down into slightly fractious long-term relationships with. I care about, say, the National Theatre and Royal Court with tangled intensity: these are the places that can disappoint me terribly before I have a night that reminds me what it is I love about them, or what it was.
What about you? Which theatre do you have a make-up-break-up affair with? Which ones can't you imagine your life without? Or better yet, tell me about any hidden gems you've discovered.
