London’s Gate theatre, not to be confused with its Dublin namesake, is no more. A combination of factors, including rising costs, declining funding and its move in 2022 from its original home in Notting Hill Gate, means that it will cease trading next month. But it is worth celebrating its achievement over five decades.
It has been an astonishing nursery of talent and has always stood for a defiant internationalism. You climbed the pub’s well-worn stairs and found yourself in a space that embraced the world. In 1982 Stein launched an offshoot above another pub, the Latchmere in Battersea, where I still recall Susannah York as the Amazonian protagonist of Kleist’s Penthesilea.
Where Stein led others followed. His successor was Giles Croft, who ran the Gate from 1985 to 1989 and, taking a snapshot of his final year, I find the following list of shows: two Russian plays in Denis Fonvizin’s The Infant and Bulgakov’s Adam and Eve, a Marivaux double bill of The Colony and Island of Slaves, Heiner Müller’s The Task and a neglected English classic in Susannah Centlivre’s The Wonder. Nowhere else in the UK could you find a programme of such rich eclecticism.
Stephen Daldry took over in 1989 and I remember this young man in specs and scuffed sneakers standing at the top of the stairs welcoming people to the theatre as if they were guests in his home. Daldry not only introduced thematic programming – one of his seasons was called Women in World Theatre – he also showed that anything is possible in a small space. One of his discoveries was of a Bavarian dramatist, Marieluise Fleisser whose Pioneers in Ingoldstadt from the 1920s involved, in Ian MacNeil’s breathtaking design, a cast of 30 crossing a bridge.
I recall Daldry telling me that such ventures were only possible because the Gate was unsubsidised: plug into public funding and it would not only be artistically accountable but would also have to pay Equity rates. Daldry was clearly a brilliant director. He also encouraged others.
It was at the Gate that I first became aware of Katie Mitchell through her productions of Euripides’ Women of Troy and Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova in which Paola Dionisotti in the title role memorably demonstrated the private cost of capitalist success. Daldry stimulated another young director and his eventual successor, Laurence Boswell, to pursue his obsession with Spanish drama. It was thanks to Boswell that we got to know such classics as Tirso de Molina’s Don Gil of the Green Breeches, Lope de Vega’s The Gentleman from Olmedo and The Great Pretenders in which Louis Hilyer was an actor-manager who so identified with a Christian martyr he was playing that he ended up being spectacularly crucified.
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