Morning:
13°c
A couple are bickering in a poky room. She is trying to assemble an Ikea shelving unit with a spoon with little success. He is pacing up and down, ranting about bombing Uzbekistan. She mutters something about Colombian drug lords; they kiss tenderly, inches from my nose; I burst out laughing.
No, I am not describing a night of marital back-and-forth chez Godwin, but an evening at the most intimate theatre in London. With no ceremony, Arch 468 on Coldharbour Lane, SW9, has just opened its doors to the public: three of them on the night I went. That's half the total capacity.
When you consider the fact that Arch 468 has launched with a play — Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, by Caryl Churchill — that was seen little more than a year ago at the Royal Court and universally rubbished, and the play concerns itself with that most timely of subjects, Bush and Blair's “special relationship”, you might suspect that the venture is not best positioned to ride out the recession.
Which makes it all the more perversely delightful that this was so thrilling. Churchill's play re-imagines the US-UK relationship as a dysfunctional partnership in which two men exchange meaningless sentences about foreign policy, reduced to a kind of nonsense poetry.
Young director Hester Chillingworth has reworked it here in promenade form, meaning you are allowed to wander around at whim, and has blithely expanded the cast to four, greatly increasing the chance that there will be more actors than punters.
At least a third of the audience (well, me) found it hilarious, too, but since the remaining 66.66 per cent weren't laughing, I wondered if I ought.
Arch 468 is a laboratory for incubating the theatre of the future — and it's not so ludicrously uncommercial as it first appears.
By day, it's a rehearsal space for the likes of the Bush Theatre and Trafalgar Studios, which makes enough money for its artistic directors, Rebecca Atkinson-Lord and Roland Smith, to fund anyone with a glint in their eye.
There's a glut of interactive theatre at the moment: Stovepipe is shortly to open in the abandoned West 12 shopping centre, while Shunt Vaults in London Bridge continues to host strange happenings. This breaking down of barriers between performers and actors is just the thing for a disconnected, credit-crunched London — and being outnumbered by the actors stretches intimacy to its most thrilling conclusion.
I only wish I had dared hand the actress a screwdriver.
