The Pleasance is 25 years old, its founder 70, but the Edinburgh venue has London sister that will take the brand to new heights
It takes time and a lot of determination, not to mention enough imagination to change your mind, to turn what started as little more than the consuming hobby of a former schoolmaster into a pillar of Fringe theatre, but it can happen. Look at the Pleasance.
It was the light in Christopher Richardson’s eye when he first went to the Edinburgh Festival in the 70s in the company of a few interested young men – Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and Howard Goodall, to be precise – and decided to become a part of the Fringe.
In 1985 he and his team of volunteers created a theatre and bar out of a building he rented from Edinburgh University’s Students Association which had once been a hostel for fallen women - “I’ve always loved the thought that this was the place where they fell” - in a narrow street called The Pleasance. It now has 28 spaces with over 200 shows scheduled this year and close on 250,000 visitors, and a London Pleasance that is going to outgrow it. Pleasance is a brand.
This week the Pleasance is celebrating both its own 25th anniversary and Richardson’s 70th birthday, and it marks a new push to establish Pleasance London, in Carpenter’s Mews off the Caledonian Road behind King’s Cross as well as the 2009 Edinburgh season.
Richardson’s career is a famous theatre story. Born into an army family and a child of the public school system, he first designed a set at Wellington College where Nicholas Grimshaw, the president of the Royal Academy, and former Edinburgh Festival director Brian McMaster were his schoolmates. After a skirmish with the army, he studied furniture design under Hugh Casson at the Royal College of Art, and then went on to teach, first at a prep school and then at Uppingham where he taught Stephen Fry.
As well as sets he designs theatres, especially for schools like Roedean, but also the Young Vic in its version before Steve Tompkins’s transformation, Jersey Opera House and the Theatre on the Lake in Cumbria.
Pleasance Edinburgh became a test tube for talent, and still is. Frank Skinner and Steve Coogan shared the stage in the first year, Skinner far outshining Coogan in Richardson’s opinion, but Jack Docherty, Arthur Smith, Graham Norton, Fascinating Aida - back this year celebrating their own 25th anniversary - and even the playwright Patrick Marber (“Yes, he did stand up – what better way to hone your lines or work how to deliver them than to work as a stand up?”) all started there.
Imposingly over six feet tall, mercurial, often testy, but commanding undying love and loyalty from those who work with him, he made Pleasance Edinburgh into one of the cornerstones of the Fringe. He dresses like a retired colonel on holiday, and he once successfully disguised himself in his own theatre by the simple expedient of not wearing his panama hat. His friend Bill Burdett-Coutts, who runs another Fringe cornerstone, the Assembly Rooms, says he is an omnipresent image. “It’s tempting to think him eccentric, but in fact he’s not” he says. “What he has is a vast enthusiasm for supporting the talent that emerges through the Fringe. He also has a unique spirit, which has driven him through the years to keep the Pleasance the remarkable place it is.”
Richardson had a London flat in Caledonian Road and in 1994 he took over a nearby former omnibus shed, a vast space that had been the HQ for Circus Space. There was already a bar-restaurant downstairs, and he created a 250-seat flexible theatre space and braced himself for a surge of enthusiastic audiences.
“You see, I’d seen the railway coming (the development of the King’s Cross area just to the south), but unfortunately I was ten years too early” he admits. Under his successor it is about to blossom.
Richardson retired in 2005, handing over to another former pupil of his at Uppingham, Anthony Alderson, but is still a presence, like a favourite and indulged uncle. Alderson, who has acquired a large new space next to the theatre Richardson crated 15 years ago, has given his hopes for Pleasance London forward jolt.
“Christopher was the Pleasance, he built it and its atmosphere and then made it into a charity which was a brilliant move, but the organisation he created was always going to be bigger than he is, so it’s moving on” says Alderson. “There’s a new energy in the programming. It needed some young blood in the thing, so it’s changing a lot.”
Last year they presented Steven Berkoff’s On the Waterfront, this year the find is likely to be the Comedians Theatre Company version of School for Scandal, or possibly A British Subject, a play by the actor Nichola McAuliffe and her husband, crime reporter Don Mackay, about Afghanistan. Stand-up still has its place, and Al Murray will be back.
But outside of festival time, Alderson’s focus is going to be on Carpenter’s Mews, which he says is going to eclipse the Edinburgh operation before long.
The London Pleasance will be available for rehearsal, a convenient and flexible space for theatre, TV and film use. But principally it will be the launch pad for new work produced by new writers and directors – Rufus Norris and Edward Hall both started at the Pleasance. And beneath there is the restaurant which is requisite to successful venue management today.
“We’re going to be a kind of revolving door – people will come in doing one thing and leave doing something else because of what’s happened here” says Alderson. “And there’ll be no restrictions, only one proviso: whatever happens has got to be good. Christopher’s Pleasance is a brand now, and we have to live up to it.”
