Performance venues

London's stages and concert rooms: the West End houses and the playhouses that make their own shows, the grand halls, the churches with a musical life, the jazz basements, the comedy clubs, the clubs proper, the rooms above pubs where things start, and the booth on Leicester Square that sells off what the West End has not. What is on is listed under each venue, and in What's On.

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Finborough Theatre

Fifty seats over a pub in Earl's Court, and a record of staging plays nobody else would touch.

PlayhousesFringe & pubs

It opened above the Finborough Arms on 24 June 1980 and holds fifty people. Half the programme is new British writing and world premieres; the other half is the part that makes it unusual, which is nineteenth- and twentieth-century plays that have not been staged in decades and in some cases were never staged at all. Somebody here reads them, decides which ones still work, and puts them on.

The new writing has a record to match. Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and F***ing started here and went to the Royal Court, the West End and Broadway. Naomi Wallace's Slaughter City went to the Royal Shakespeare Company, Anthony Neilson's The Censor to the Royal Court, and Nicholas de Jongh's Plague Over England to the Duchess.

Fifty seats means it sells out, and it is worth booking before you have decided whether you like the sound of it.

Where
118 Finborough Road, SW10 9ED
Nearest station
West Brompton · 4 min walk

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