(posted 7532 days ago)Times
September 05, 2003Theatre
Trials of a young Turk
By Patrick MarmionUP AND DOWN the country, theatres are thrown up and rebuilt at the cost of millions of pounds. In Dalston, North London, the trailblazing Arcola Theatre was set up by a fearless young Turk called Mehmet Ergen for only a few thousand. And that was barely seven years after he had opened the celebrated Southwark Playhouse for a similar sum. In each case he used nothing more than his own vision, his bare hands and a set of personal credit cards. Almost from nowhere, the result has been two of London’s most acclaimed theatres.
Born in Istanbul, 37-year-old Ergen arrived in this country in 1988 at the age of 22. Having completed a nine-month, part-time acting course in Istanbul, he touted himself as a famous Turkish director. Naturally, everyone believed him, but still he was abandoned to the penumbral recesses of London’s fringe. That was until he found himself rehearsing A Little Weill for the White Bear in Kennington. “We had a budget of £2,000 for the show, and I thought ‘I could open a theatre for that money’,” says Ergen. “We were rehearsing in a room next to what is now the Southwark Playhouse and which used to be a Filipino church. We got the first few months free, and I calculated we could pay the rent with 20 to 30 people a night. I had an old car and I drove round all the West End theatres asking for lights and cable. I found scaffolding pipes for the rigging and I bought church pews in a shop in Stoke Newington. I opened it by directing Machiavelli’s Mandragola.” He makes it sound like a walk in the park, but the course of fringe theatre never did run smooth. Having established a reputation to challenge Notting Hill’s much-vaunted Gate Theatre, in 1998 Ergen fell out with the board at Southwark.
He wound up with a desk job at Hoxton Hall and used his lunchbreaks to find somewhere to open another theatre. Eventually he found a disused clothes factory on Arcola Street. The rent was £10,000 a quarter. He got a bank loan for £5,000 and subsidised the rest with personal credit cards.
“It was much the same story again as Southwark. We got chairs from an Indian restaurant. The warehouse used to be a clothes factory, so we sawed the legs off the cutting tables to make the seating. There was the goodwill of volunteers, and we lived in the theatre for the first year so we had no other rent to pay.”
Financially, Ergen does not pretend that it’s been anything other than a nightmare. Like a character from a Russian novel, he knows all about suffering for his art. “I really live terribly. I wear the same trousers and shirts for 20 days! I don’t eat much and I don’t buy clothes. But I’m questioning it now. My theatre friends in Istanbul live incredibly well. Nobody works for nothing. Here it’s always give, give, give.”
Poverty may have been his best buddy these last few years, but the Arcola has paid off in other ways. Outstanding productions since the theatre opened in 2001 include David Farr’s production of Crime and Punishment in Dalston — a contemporary adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel. Then there was Sacha Wares’s production of Bintou and Ergen’s own production of Macbeth, starring Jack Shepherd. Most recently, he hoped for audiences of 80 people a night for Brecht and Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petty Bourgeoisie, but had to rebuild the auditorium to take 150.
Now, for the first time, Ergen has countenanced renting out the theatre — but only to established troupes such as the Oxford Stage Company and Clean Break. Far from selling out his principles, Ergen sees these companies’ tenure as recognition of the status the Arcola has achieved. And he himself is working in Turkey in what he calls an act of “reverse immigration”. There, he can command serious money, directing Kind of Stranger by Y. Kadir at the Turkish National Theatre and his own translation of Martin McDonagh’s Lieutenant of Inishmore for the Kenter Theatre.
The latest big production at the Arcola is Come Out Eli, based on the tragic Graham Road siege in Hackney last Christmas. “It’s a docu-drama of anecdotes from real people talking about the siege. It was workshopped by the company Recorded Delivery at the Actors Centre and we are hoping to reach a local audience on the anniversary.”
What Ergen wants next for the Arcola is Arts Council funding so they can start planning properly. “I have seasons in my mind from all corners of the world. I want to do one called Revolution, covering the Russian, French, Industrial and Cuban revolutions.” Most of all he’s looking for plays to match his own ambition. “I get sent plays about child abuse and dysfunctional families. They say ‘this can be performed with four people playing eight characters. It only requires a table and chair.’ Why? Enough of that!” Never one to follow the line of least resistance, Ergen chuckles at the idea that he might be a bit of an idealist. But he also recognises that not being paid gives him the freedom to behave like one. In the meantime, his advice to anyone wishing to start a theatre is that they should find a place where there isn’t one already. “Everyone wants to be international, but at the end of the day theatre is always in a local area. You need to capture a local audience.” Think locally and act globally is his message, and if anyone is proof of the efficacy of that maxim, Mehmet Ergen is.
Come Out Eli runs until September 27 at the Arcola Theatre, Arcola Street, E8 (020-7503 1646)