Full Text:

London is recycling itself - and theatres have led the way. Before banks were routinely transformed into restaurants and public lavatories into beauty salons, two stages sprang to life in industrial buildings, and helped to change the way the public thought of such spaces. 

In Islington the glorious Almeida, where it is almost impossible to see a bad production, was opened as a literary and scientific institute in the first year of Queen Victoria's reign: in one of its incarnations it was a factory for carnival novelties, in another a Salvation Army citadel. More recently, in Covent Garden, the Donmar Warehouse, which once served as the vat room of a brewery and as a warehouse in which bananas were ripened, has begun to make the theatres of the West End look like fusty dowagers: over-painted, heavily upholstered and named after nobs. 

The Donmar is scarlet and black and dark brown. There is a low woodenboarded stage, with the audience pressed up against it on three sides, and a gallery bounded by a red metal grid. Lights and looping cables are very visible, hung on big black girders. The winch that was once used to load bananas is now used for moving scenery. 

A theatre doesn't have to look sassy in order to put on sharp-edged plays, but the unboxed-in, anti-genteel boldness of the Donmar's architecture has increased the impact of its productions. When Sam Mendes became artistic director five years ago the building was on the point of being renovated: it had been set up as a rehearsal area by Donald Albery and Margot Fonteyn, each of whom gave it half a name; in the late seventies it had been the London home of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in the
eighties had housed a number of companies, including Druid and Cheek by Jowl. One
of the redevelopment proposals involved turning the theatre round to make a small
proscenium stage. Mendes intervened to stop this and to keep it as an open space. "The whole point of this theatre is that it's in the West End, but it's not a West End-style theatre." 

Mendes' own productions are visually clear, carefully choreographed and inclined to snake through the auditorium. His tirelessly raunchy Cabaret converted the stalls into a night-club in which the audience sat at tables, as if in the KitKat club, becoming, as it were, collaborators. When he put on Sondheim's Company, using a brightly lit, uncluttered set "I tend to look for simple organic properties that can have a hundred
meanings. I couldn't use a breakfast table filled with cutlery" - his singers fanned
out from strikingly grouped choruses to race around the gallery. 

There have always been new plays at the Donmar: 80 per cent of the productions in 1998 will be of new work. There have also always been modern classics. Mendes' background has left him with an appetite both for commercial and for subsidised theatre. He has whizzed from running the Minerva Studio at Chichester, through the RSC and the West End, to being invited at the age of 30 to apply for Richard Eyre's job at the National - he didn't do so. He has directed Ralph Fiennes in Troilus and Cressida, a long running Oliver! at the Palladium, and helped Jane Horrocks to dazzle in The Rise
and Fall of Little Voice. The only thing for which he seems to have no taste is "fiddly naturalistic plays". He has talked of himself as being influenced by Peter Sellers, Ronnie Barker and John Cleese; when directing, he wants to create "a huge experience in a small room". 

Musicals have an important place in Mendes' plan to turn the traditional West End inside-out; he wants, he says, to bring them up to date with contemporary music, "which doesn't mean using a chamber orchestra to play 60s and 70s rock music". Eleven days after the election - "the Tories, the most destructive influence on the arts, have been in power since I was 14; I pray Labour gets in" -he will for the first time direct a new musical. 

Cameron Mackintosh, along-time supporter of musicals at the Donmar, brought  Dempsey and Rowe's The Fix to Mendes, who describes it as "a black satiric comment on media power and political sleaze": it tells the story of an American politician who is the creature of his backers. 

Mendes has also been talking to Alex James, Blur's bass player, about a musical featuring London life, and has said he would like to approach Pulp's Jarvis Cocker. One composer has come to him with the idea of making a musical about the Saatchi brothers. 

Sam Mendes has already helped to change the way West End theatre can look;
he now seems set to change the way it sounds. 

Copyright Statesman and Nation Publishing Company, Ltd Apr 25,1997

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission