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.

What is on at them this week is in What's On: Performance

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Old Red Lion Theatre

Sixty seats above a pub first built in 1415, and the room The Play That Goes Wrong started in.

PlayhousesFringe & pubs

There has been a pub on this corner since 1415, when Islington was fields; the building you walk into went up in 1899. The theatre upstairs opened in 1979 as a club and holds sixty people.

It is family-run and takes unsolicited scripts, which almost nothing else does - the reading department gets through more than a thousand a year. That is how Nina Raine's Rabbit reached a stage in 2006, and how Mischief Theatre got their first run of The Play That Goes Wrong in 2012, four years before it settled into the West End for a decade.

Sixty seats and an open door means a high proportion of what is on will not work. The compensation is that you are watching it before anyone has decided whether it does.

Where
418 St John Street, EC1V 4NJ
Nearest station
Angel · 1 min walk

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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