The Greenwich Studio Theatre:
A brief history

This text is taken verbatim from the programme for the GST’s revival of “Out in the Cold” at Battersea Arts Centre in October 1995.

Greenwich Studio Theatre, now enjoying a period of exile at BAC, was founded in 1990 at the Prince of Orange pub next to Greenwich BR station. The three young actors who set it up, Neil Linden-Johnson, Nick Carpenter and Ian Embleton, approached the publican with their idea, took out the necessary bank loan, and ran the theatre for two and a half years, mainly as a receiving venue for visiting fringe companies, while staging successful productions of their own. The most acclaimed of these, Distant Point by the 20th century Russian playwright Alexander Afinogenev, was nominated for a London Fringe Award, is still fondly remembered in Greenwich, and pointed the way for the next administration.

Neil, who managed to run the venue single-handed for much of the last year while his partners were away working, sold the theatre's name and business in 1993 to the Anglo-German husband and wife team Margarete and Julian Forsyth, who set about pursuing their European agenda and staged, between September 1993 and June 1995, eight productions of little known European plays by authors from Austria, Denmark, France, Germany and Switzerland. Four of them were classics from the 18th century Age of Enlightenment: Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm from the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War in Prussia; Holberg’s Erasmus Montanus, in which a pedantic student returns home to a backward Danish farming community; Diderot’s The Nun, about a young girl's attempts to escape from a convent, and Marivaux’s delicate love comedy The Will. The others were Arthur Schnitzler’s The Green Parakeet, set in a pub in the French Revolution, four short turn-of-the-century Viennese plays by Schnitzler under the title And Women Must Weep; Friedrich Durrenmatt’s psychological thriller A Spanner in the Works, set in a sleepy Swiss village; and Borchert’s postwar nightmare Out in the Cold. In the last two years the GST has been regularly compared to the Gate Theatre at Notting Hill, won a 1994 Time Out Award and the 1994 London Fringe Best Director's Award, and has now been nominated for the 1995 Peter Brook Empty Space Award. As the theatre's reputation grew, so too did the audiences and, naturally, the bar sales. Nonetheless, by July this year GST staff were finding relations with the publican of the Prince of Orange, former world heavyweight wrestling champion Bill (Wayne) Bridges, increasingly difficult, and decided with regret to uproot Greenwich Studio Theatre from its original base, put their equipment, seating, rostra, etc. into storage, and take up temporary residence at BAC while exploring other possible venues in Greenwich. Ironically, this crisis came just as they had at last secured generous sponsorship for their work from investment advisers GLC Ltd and could begin to plan for long term success and continuity.

In August it became clear that their departure from the Prince of Orange would be fraught, to say the least. First they discovered that Mr Bridges had invited someone else to run a theatre at the pub after they had gone, and that person declared his intention of using the name Greenwich Studio Theatre. Secondly, in early September they found themselves locked out of the premises with all their equipment, lighting and seating still inside, having to negotiate for the removal of their computers and essential office files.

At such times it is useful to have a lawyer in the family. Among the partners in West End legal firm Amhurst Brown Colombotti is one Nigel Forsyth, who had seen every one of his sister-in-law’s productions and felt that a reputation built on the unpaid efforts not only of core GST staff but of upwards of 100 talented actors was worth protecting. In the High Court on Thursday September 21st, Mr Justice Lightman granted Greenwich Studio Theatre Ltd an injunction against Mr Bridges which prevents him and anyone he appoints using the names Greenwich Studio Theatre, Studio Theatre Greenwich, or any name “colourably similar thereto” that might cause confusion in the theatre-going public. The judge also granted a court order for the removal from the Prince of Orange of all GST property, including the comfortable charcoal grey upholstered seats now installed in the BAC for audiences to watch Out in the Cold and other productions in the “I Wish I’d Seen That” season.

The BAC is a friendly, vibrant and inviting place to a bunch of “exiles” from Greenwich who so nearly saw two years of effort go down the tube. Without the court’s protection, and without GLC’s generous sponsorship, Greenwich Studio Theatre Ltd. would have ceased to exist. Are there theatre practitioners, reading this programme, who would like to tell us about their own hair-raising experiences in pub venues? Perhaps there is a small publishing house that would be interested in a little booklet entitled “Pitfalls of Pub Theatre”! We cannot yet tell the full story, as the injunction is an interim judgement and the case goes to full trial in a year or two. Watch this space!

Margarete Forsyth, Artistic Director, GST
Julian Forsyth, Associate Director, GST