Review: Twenty Theatres to See Before You Die, Amber Massie-Blomfield

Published in The TLS on August 22, 2018

In 2016, the arts producer Amber Massie-Blomfield began “plotting an adventure”: a freewheeling trip around Britain’s “most remarkable” theatres. Each would need to have an unusual story, or a distinctive setting.

Massie-Blomfield canvassed the opinion of a hundred friends and colleagues as to which venues to visit; the nominations were heartfelt, and often for youth theatres, community theatres and improbable passion projects rather than more generally esteemed cultural institutions.

Squeezed in around her job as executive director of the Camden People’s Theatre (a tiny fringe venue in Euston, ramshackle but committed to radical work; it features on the list, naturally), the subsequent tour of Great Britain constituted what Massie-Blomfield considers to be a kind of theatrical “anti-canon”.

The rest of the review is here, although only for TLS subscribers…

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