The Warehouse Theatre’s 2015 International Playwriting Festival will take place at the new studio theatre at the Fairfield Halls on June 6 and 7.
The deadline for entries for this year’s competition has been extended to March 15.
The IPF has been established since 1986, and was formerly staged at the Warehouse Theatre on the site alongside East Croydon Station.
The management of the world-renowned theatre continues under the banner of the Warehouse Phoenix, with a hope – perhaps forlorn – that a £3 million grant from developers Stanhope will be allocated by Croydon Council for building a new theatre as part of the Ruskin Square development.
The acclaimed 2013 winner of the Warehouse competition was The Road to Nowhere, by Sean Cook.
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I’m delighted to see Warehouse Phoenix making use of the new studio theatre facility at Fairfield. Hopefully, the festival will be a success and that will encourage WP to organise more productions there. It must be a more cost-effective solution than developing a seperate performance space on the Ruskin Square site that would need public subsidy every year from the outset.
Croydon is crying out for performance space, with organisations such as CODA having to go outside the borough to find suitable venues to perform their highly polished amateur productions. The Fairfield Halls has priced itself out of their market.
In the meantime, small venues such as the David Lean Cinema is screening movies to full houses two or three times each week, while the Spreadeagle Theatre is also playing to capacity audiences.
With an astute and commercial programme, including cabaret, music and comedy nights, in a 100-seater auditorium right next to East Croydon Station in the “Culture Quarter” (ha ha ha) of Croydon, a new Warehouse Theatre could become a go-to arts venue for south London, and stage new plays and showcase new talent, just as it once did. A modest public subsidy for that? Why not, if it goes some way to truly drive a regeneration of Croydon’s cultural outlook?