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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
The first theatre in Britain built for children alone, and still programming for nobody over twelve.
PlayhousesFor children
It opened in 1979 as the first theatre venue in the country given over entirely to children, and it has never widened its audience since. Everything on the two stages is made for somebody between nought and twelve, and the range is narrower than that in practice: a show is built for three-to-sevens or for eight-to-twelves, and says so. Seven to ten productions a year, some of them Polka's own and the rest brought in from companies working at the same scale - puppetry, dance, shows told without words, a musical out of a picture book.
There are two rooms. The Y C Chan Theatre is the main house, and takes the Christmas show and the larger touring productions. The Adventure Theatre is the studio, and is where the stranger work goes: forty-five minutes of paper engineering, a nonverbal voyage to the bottom of the sea. Runs are short - several shows are here for a long weekend and gone - and so are the shows themselves, rarely over an hour.
Polka says it staged the first of what is now called a relaxed performance, in 2006: house lights left up, the sound brought down, and children free to move about and make a noise. The format is standard across British theatre now. The rest of the building is open without a ticket - a cafe, a shop, a sensory garden the volunteers plant, and indoor and outdoor play spaces that cost nothing to use.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.