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Greenwich isn’t currently what you call a theatre mecca: London’s maritime borough has a pleasant small scale venue in the shape of the Greenwich Theatre, but that’s pretty much it unless you count the Mamma Mia! dinner show at The O2.
Astonishingly, then, it’s just been announced that what would appear to be the biggest theatre in London will open there next autumn in the form of the Troubadour Greenwich Peninsula Theatre.
To be clear, it won’t have the biggest capacity house in London. But it will have two 1,500-seat theatres inside it, which is pretty damn big individually (bigger than all but a handful of musical theatre and opera houses) and combined it’ll rival the 3,069-set Edinburgh Playhouse for the title of biggest theatre in the entire country.
What the hell is going to be staged there, you might reasonably ask. The Troubadour chain is an intriguing one that has been bringing large, flexible, somewhat architecturally prosaic spaces to London for a few years now. In a statement, the company’s co-CEOs Oliver Royds and Tristan Baker suggest the new theatre will be used to transfer in large scale shows struggling to find a berth in a West End with a very limited stock of available big theatres. Fair, but 1,500 seats is really big, and remember there are two of them.
If we look to the other Troubadours we might see some clues to the future of the new one. The Troubadour White City was a damp squib that staged a single ill-advised National Theatre transfer that flopped and the venue never really recovered. Troubadour Wembley Park was more successful and much busier but only really found its groove last year when it was converted into the permanent home of the revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express. Troubadour Canada Water Theatre went one further: the venue – which opens to the public next month – was explicitly conceived from launch as the home of the imminent The Hunger Games play. So you can well imagine that the dream with Greenwich Peninsula is to fund a couple of very large, very ‘destination’ shows and bed them in for as long as possible.
All will be revealed in time: we wouldn’t expect there to be any programming announcement until next year, although with so many seats to sell we’ll probably get a fair bit of notice.
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