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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.
What is on at them this week is in What's On: Performance
A puppet theatre in a converted temperance hall down an Islington alley, working continuously since 1961.
PlayhousesFor children
John Wright, a South African puppeteer, found a derelict temperance hall - a hall built by the Victorian movement against drink - in a passage in Islington, and opened it as a puppet theatre on 24 November 1961. It has been one ever since. Wright died in 1991 and the theatre carried on without him.
It is small, and the smallness is the point: marionettes and rod puppets read at close range and lose everything from the back of a large house. The programme is the theatre's own productions and visiting puppetry companies, much of it adapted from picture books, and some of it made for children too young to follow a sentence. A second building, the Little Angel Studios, opened in 2014 on Sebbon Street a few minutes away, and it is a stage as well as a workshop: about half the season plays there, to no more than seventy-five people.
It won The Stage's Fringe Theatre of the Year in 2024, which is an unusual award for a puppet theatre to take off the fringe houses, and a fair measure of what it has become.
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