On Saturday night, just 24 hours after a major part of the building was severely damaged by fire, the show went on at BAC. A performance of Fiction took place in the debating chamber at the front of the iconic building on Lavender Hill which has developed and hosted some of the most significant theatre of the last 30 years.



As news came through of the devastating fire on Friday evening, I was at the New Vic in Newcastle under Lyme talking to the theatre’s artistic director Theresa Heskins. “I’ve worked there,” she said quietly. I’m pretty confident that on Friday night, as show time approached in flagship theatres, regional venues and village halls and arts centres across the land, there would have almost certainly been somebody present who at some time, in some capacity as producer, artist or technician, would had worked at BAC. Its influence has spread way beyond Lavender Hill.

A theatre is not just a building. It is all the people who pass through it, and who – for however brief a time, a few days or weeks or years – call it home. The people may move on, but the ghosts linger; theatre may be ephemeral but all shows leave their traces in every brick. Whenever I walk into BAC I glance upwards and have a sudden vision of Neil Bartlett performing A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep on the staircase at a time in the late 80s when so many were dying of Aids. The same staircase where my children played as tots whenever we visited for a family theatre outing, which was often.

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In my mind’s eye, the grand hall is forever full of whirling dancers from the end of Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death; I see a group of young children in the foyer, their eyes shining with giddy delight, during the Once in a Blue Moon Ball in which we parents were confined to a crèche and the children had the run of the building. A youthful Tom Morris is eternally standing by the box office waving his arms around and saying, “You’ve just got to come and see this thing we’re scratching called Jerry Springer: the Opera.” In my head I see myself and Adrian Howells lying on a bed together in deep companionable silence. Remember being pushed on a board out of an upper window so I was staring up at the clouds. Feel again the thick foggy darkness of Sound and Fury’s The Watery Part of the World performed in the pitch black. When I step into the council chamber I see Kneehigh’s bloody, giddy The Red Shoes being replayed over and over and Kate Tempest performing Brand New Ancients as if her very life, and our lives, depended upon it. That is what theatre can and should be.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Adam Burton and Hector Harkness in BAC’s The Masque of the Red Death. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

BAC has often talked about inventing the future of theatre, and it has. Through the Scratch process (celebrating its 20th anniversary at the end of this month), but also through its nurturing of artists, its pioneering sense of theatrical adventure, its openness to new ideas that brings constant renewal. By reimagining the producing model. So many great independent producers began their careers at BAC. There have been nights at BAC when I’ve leaned forward in my seat acutely aware that I’m seeing the future, even if it’s not yet fully formed, from companies such as Little Bulb, 1927, Coney and Gecko.

BAC’s influence has spread far and into every layer of British theatre and every aspect so that it is part of our theatrical DNA. But it has also understood that whatever its place in a national theatre ecology (and the current strand of work A Nation’s Theatre is evidence that it understands its privilege and looks for ways to share it) it counts for nothing unless it plays a central role in the local community. When I think of BAC I don’t just think of that iconic building on Lavender Hill where Emmeline Pankhurst spoke and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls rose again, I also think of sitting in Tooting and Battersea classrooms with groups of children who are reinventing the world with the imaginative help of BAC artists. Or of watching local teenagers make work with Nic Green, Mem Morrison and others. On Friday afternoon local people stood and cried as the building burned, a sign of just how embedded it has become in the hearts and lives of Wandsworth families. No wonder it had a hit with a terrific family show called The Good Neighbour.

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It is a great irony that no theatre has thought harder, investigated more thoroughly, experimented more boldly or imagined more fiercely how a building may best be restored and reimagined so it can best serve its local community, artists and audiences in the 21st century than BAC has done in conjunction with Steve Tompkins of architects Haworth Tompkins. Now they will have to begin again.

“Brick by brick, we will bring that building back,” vowed artistic director David Jubb on Friday evening as the building still burned. They will, but they will need all the help they can get from every possible source, not least because it was the grand hall that provided BAC with an income. BAC has been at the forefront of reinventing the future of British theatre. Now it will have to reinvent itself so it can carry on the work that is so crucial to the local community and that makes it one of the most powerful engines of 21st-century British theatre.

Details of how we can all help are on the BAC website.