The new theatre and rehearsal rooms at LAMDA are still a work in progress. For big productions they hire theatres around London and for smaller shows use their existing studio theatre that seats about seventy-five.
On Saturday night four of us walked there to see Othello. It is a play I know quite well, although this was the first time I had seen it on stage. You will recall that it has a double time-scheme. Most of the action takes place over the course of a single day in Cyprus but there are exchanges of messages with Venice that would have taken days by ship. Iago is Shakespeare’s blackest villain; Othello a subtle portrayal of a flawed man.
The LAMDA production had multi-casting, so we had three Othellos, three Desdemonas and three Iagos, one of whom was a woman. It made for a highly interesting evening and afterwards we compared notes on the performances. The middle pairing worked best for me but this was in part because they had the best lines.
The bar maintains its record for selling the cheapest G&T in London – £3 for a double at the staff rate which seemed to apply to me. The LAMDA theatre is three minutes walk from Barons Court station and tickets to their shows (top price £10) can be booked online or by ‘phone. Their new stage will seat about 200 and I guess will be ready in March next year, some six months later than originally planned. Construction has been complicated by its location, wedged between the tube lines and the Talgarth Road dual carriageway. This is what it will look like.
