Photo: Tristam Kenton.
Actor Howard Brenton (seen above in Churchill in Moscow at the Orange Tree Theatre) likes working in small venues where he doesn’t need a mike. He says, “Microphones have no place in the theater.”
Some of the best theater my husband and I have ever seen has been in front of very small audiences. There is something about the intimacy of the setting that can inspire actors to outdo themselves. I recall a thrilling version of Moby Dick years ago when the GeVa theater in Rochester, New York, was just starting out. There were maybe five people in the audience.
At the Times in the UK, Dominic Maxwell wrote recently about London’s tiny Orange Tree Theatre, asking, “What do Patricia Hodge, Jane Asher, Roger Allam, Greta Scacchi, Anna Chancellor, Charles Dance, Geraldine James, Robert Bathurst and Freddie Fox have in common? Actually, that should be where do they all have in common because in the past three years these big names have all acted in plays at the 190-seat Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, southwest London.
“At the weekend Ian McKellen performed three solo benefit shows for it at the larger Richmond Theatre, which raised more than £100,000 [~$135,000]. That, beams Tom Littler, the Orange Tree’s enterprising artistic director, when I meet him at his theatre on a crisp January weekday, is ’15 or 20 per cent of the fundraising we need to do for the year.’ …
“Littler, 41, took over the Orange Tree in 2022. And while he knows that not every show can be an event on the level of next year’s Shakespearean fiesta, he reckons ‘a couple a year’ don’t half help build excitement about a theatre. The present show is Littler’s larky reinvention of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 comedy The Rivals, transplanted to a PG Wodehousey 1920s. …
“Littler is keen to argue that he is operating in the tradition of a venue that has been mixing revivals and new work since 1971, when its first artistic director, Sam Walters, set it up with his wife, Auriol Smith, in a room above the Orange Tree pub opposite. … But the big-name actors, plus the odd big-name director — Trevor Nunn did Uncle Vanya in 2024; Richard Eyre is about to do Strindberg’s The Dance of Death — is very much a Littler thing. …
“Littler knows famous faces are not everything. ‘But they are important for the profile and they help to get a new play seen. But I always say, it’s not a fame barometer thing, it’s the treat of seeing actors that good close up. …
“You have to wonder how Littler gets the talent. … He got the celebrated director Blanche McIntyre to make her Orange Tree debut (on Poor Clare) after writing her a fan letter. [David] Suchet’s involvement came after they had ‘a cup of tea together’ and discovered a shared love of Eliot’s play. [Patricia] Hodge’s involvement came because she shares an agent with Dance, whom Littler had worked with on Strindberg’s Creditors. …
“Read Littler’s program notes for The Rivals and you soon sense what a scholar he is. Sure enough, he has three degrees: one in English from Oxford, an MA in Classics from the Open University and an MPhil in 18th-century English literature he decamped to Cambridge to do, just before he got his previous job, running the even tinier Jermyn Street Theatre off Piccadilly Circus from 2017 to 2022. He talks enthusiastically about writers from Ovid to Ayckbourn, from Coward to Shakespeare. …
“He knows that ‘being a good scholar in theatre won’t get you very far at all on its own.’ He picked this up early: after getting into theatre as a child at Exeter School in Devon, he did lots of directing while at Oxford. Aged 22 he started a stint as an assistant director to Peter Hall while also putting on his own fringe productions, then later assisted other directors, including Nunn.”
More at the Times, here.
Don’t you love that the artistic director’s name is Littler? Seems like he was destined to make theater productions littler.
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