33-634: The Old Red Lion ( ORL ), also known as the Old Red Lion Theatre ( ORLT ) and The Old Red , is a pub and fringe theatre , at Angel , in the London Borough of Islington . The theatre was founded in 1979 as the Old Red Lion Theatre Club . The pub was Grade II listed in 1994 by Historic England . The pub in itself is one of the oldest in London, having first been built in 1415 in what
66-549: A common organising group that handles ticketing, scheduling, and some overall promotion (such as a program including all performers). Each production pays a set fee to this group, which usually includes their stage time as well as the organizational elements. The organising group and/or the venues often rely on a large pool of volunteers. Ticket pricing varies between festivals. At UK fringe festivals, groups can decide their own ticket prices, and some sell tickets at fixed rates in one or two tiers, or in groups of 5 or 10. Although it
99-557: A fringe theatre show permit audiences to attend multiple shows in a single evening. Performers sometimes billet in the homes of local residents, further reducing their costs. Sebastian Barker Sebastian Smart Barker FRSL (16 April 1945 – 31 January 2014) was a British poet notable for a visionary manner that has been compared to William Blake in its use of the long ecstatic line and its "ability to write lyric poetry which used simple words to encapsulate profound meanings". His The Dream of Intelligence (1992)
132-643: A name panel inscribed with lettering in Arts and Crafts style: "THE OLD RED LION 1415 REBVILT 1899". The pub retains several identical pairs of original glazed doors with glazing, wrought iron wall lanterns on pillars, and much of its original interior. In 1979 the pub became a family-run pub theatre, run by the Devine family. A small studio theatre opened on the pub's first floor as the Old Red Lion Theatre Club. Under artistic director Charlie Hanson , it became
165-658: A new theatre in 1969. In 1969, Haynes created the Arts Lab in London , but it only lasted for two years. Peter Brook along with another American Charles Marowitz opened the Open Space Theatre on Tottenham Court Road in London in 1968. Young British writers, after the May 1968 events in France , wrote agitprop plays, including David Hare , Howard Brenton , David Edgar . Meanwhile, in
198-450: A place for actors, directors, designers, writers, and technicians to experiment. After the King's Cross fire in 1987, the theatre was threatened with closure due to the tightening of fire regulations. Artistic director Ken McClymont raised funds to install a fire escape , to keep the theatre from closing. The pub was Grade II listed in 1994 by Historic England . The Old Red Lion's address
231-422: A ruin in a village called Sitochori ("Wheat Village"), Messenia , in the mountains of the south-west Peloponnese. Little by little, he rebuilt it in traditional style with the help of local people. The place became his home-from-home for almost 30 years. There he composed his late visionary sequence A Monastery of Light , described by William Oxley as "a pleasurable antidote to a reductive secular world". Barker
264-533: Is 418 St John Street . Damien Devine has been the landlord of the Old Red Lion (ORL) for 21 years, and is as of 2024 executive director of the theatre. Daughter Róisín Devine and wife Helen Devine are associate director/consulting producer. Another daughter, Mary, is also in the family business. Damien's niece Helen Devine was artistic director between 2004-2010. It is the main pub for the Capital Canaries ,
297-709: Is the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club , Jerzy Grotowski 's Theatre of 13 Rows, and Józef Szajna 's Studio Theatre in Warsaw. The Adelaide Fringe in Adelaide , South Australia, now second-largest annual arts festival in the world (after Edinburgh Fringe), started in 1960 as an adjunct to the main Adelaide Festival of Arts . Haynes, while at the helm of the Traverse, was receiving state support and even got
330-507: Is the method used to choose participants. Typically, conventional festivals use a jury selection process, whereas many fringe festivals do not use a jury process in their selection criteria, hence the descriptor unjuried or open-access. There are exceptions to this; some fringe festivals (e.g., New York International Fringe Festival ) do employ a jury-based selection process. All performers are welcome to apply, regardless of their professional or amateur status. No restrictions are made as to
363-437: Is unusual for the organising group to choose any winners of the festival, other organisations often make their own judgements of festival entries . Productions can be reviewed by newspapers or publications specific to the festival, and awards may be given by certain organisations. Awards or favourable reviews can increase the tickets sales of productions or lead to extra dates being added . The limitations and opportunities that
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#1732858419557396-584: The Bush Theatre and King's Head Theatre , both of whom survived the crash. 7:84 and Red Ladder Theatre Company were some of the surviving touring fringe groups. Fringe theatres were attractive to people in the 1960s due to their adventurousness but became less wild in the 1970s while the standards of production rose. In 1982, the first fringe festival in North America was started in Edmonton , Alberta. It
429-709: The 1960s, similar to the United States' Off-Off-Broadway theatres and Europe's "free theatre" groups. The term came into use in the late 1950s, and the show Beyond the Fringe premiered in Edinburgh in 1960, before transferring to Broadway and is the West End . One of the early innovators in fringe theatre was an American bookseller, James Haynes , who in 1963 created the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Also noted in this period
462-600: The Greater Manchester Fringe Festival in 2019. Nina Raine , winner of the 2006 Most Promising Playwright Award, staged her first show, Rabbit , at the Old Red Lion Theatre in March to April 2006. Who is Eddie Linden , a play based upon Sebastian Barker 's biography of poet and editor Eddie Linden , was staged in 1995. Fringe theatre Fringe theatre is theatre that is produced outside of
495-499: The Old Red Lion was a small brick house with three trees in its forecourt, visited by William Hogarth (who portrayed it in the middle distance of his painting "Evening", with the foreground being Sadler's Wells ), Samuel Johnson and Thomas Paine (who wrote The Rights of Man in the shade of the trees in its forecourt). The Old Red Lion was rebuilt in 1899, designed by Eedle and Myers for Charles Dickerson and John William North, adding two exits onto different streets. This gave
528-885: The Rocks (Martin, Brian & O'Keeffe 1977), and A Nuclear Epiphany (Friday Night Fish Publications, 1984) were brought together in a volume of selected poems, Guarding the Border , published by Enitharmon Press in 1992. More recent collections include The Dream of Intelligence (Littlewood Arc, 1992, a long poem based on Nietzsche ’s life and works), The Hand in the Well (Enitharmon, 1996), Damnatio Memoriae: Erased from Memory (Enitharmon, 2004), The Erotics of God (Smokestack Books, 2005) and A Monastery of Light (The Bow-Wow Shop, 2012). In August 2010, Barker contributed to an eBook collection of political poems entitled Emergency Verse – Poetry in Defence of
561-556: The Roman Catholic faith at the age of 52. He defended a vatic or mystical view of poetic creation, and in a poem such as "Holy the Heart on which We Hang Our Hope" he explored "the way a mortal may interact with the divine, in which the obsessive attention demanded by the subject is mirrored in the use of a form developed from the repetitions of a villanelle." In 1983, inspired by modern Greek poets such as Odysseas Elytis , Barker bought
594-473: The United States, experimental theatre was growing due to the political protest of the Vietnam War . The Living Theatre , founded by Julian Beck , is considered the leader of the " flower power " and "hippie" movement. By the early 1970s, many fringe theatres began to receive small subsidies. After the 1973–74 stock market crash , many fringe companies were forced to close. New playwrights were established at
627-574: The Welfare State edited by Alan Morrison . At Oxford, he knew the Scottish writer Eddie Linden , who went on to become editor of the poetry magazine Aquarius , and was encouraged by Barker's mother Elizabeth. Barker later wrote a biography, Who is Eddie Linden . The book inspired a stage play, which was produced at The Old Red Lion in Islington , North London , in 1995. Barker was baptised into
660-529: The fringe festival format presents lead to some common features. Shows are not judged or juried. Depending on the popularity, some fringe festivals may use a lottery system to determine which shows are selected. Shows are typically technically sparse. They are commonly presented in shared venues, often with shared technicians and limited technical time, so sets and other technical theatre elements are kept simple. Venues may be adapted from other uses. Casts tend to be smaller than mainstream theatre; since many of
693-551: The main theatre institutions, and that is often small-scale and non-traditional in style or subject matter. The term comes from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe . In London , the fringe are small-scale theatres, many of them located above pubs, and the equivalent to New York's Off-Off-Broadway theatres and Europe's "free theatre" groups. In unjuried theatre festivals, also known as fringe festivals or open-access festivals , all submissions are accepted, and sometimes
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#1732858419557726-497: The mass gathering at the festival. In 1948, Robert Kemp , a Scottish journalist and playwright, described the situation, "Round the fringe of official Festival drama, there seems to be more private enterprise than before ... I am afraid some of us are not going to be at home during the evenings!". Edinburgh Festival Fringe was founded under the name "Festival Adjuncts", in 1947 . The fringe movement in Britain has been said to start in
759-535: The nature, style or theme of the performance, though some festivals have children's areas with appropriate content limitations. Festivals may have too many applicants for the number of available spaces; in this case, applicants are chosen based on an unrelated criterion, such as order of application or a random draw. The number of performances varies among different fringe festivals. Larger festivals may have thousands of performances (e.g., Edinburgh's 2013 festival had 45,464 performances). Fringe festivals typically have
792-478: The official London fan club for Norwich City F.C. , and live matches are screened for the supporters. The literary department reads over 1,000 scripts each year, under an open submissions policy. Jack Robertson, originally from Manchester , has a master's degree in playwriting , but has spent most of his career doing sketch comedy , with directing, producing, and acting as extra-curricular activities. His company, Medium Rare Productions, won "Best Comedy Play" at
825-517: The participating acts may be chosen by lottery, in contrast to juried festivals in which acts are selected based on their artistic qualities. Unjuried festivals (such as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe , Edmonton Fringe Festival , Adelaide Fringe , and Fringe World ) permit artists to perform a wide variety of works. In 1947, eight theatre companies showed up at the Edinburgh International Festival , hoping to gain recognition from
858-646: The performing groups are traveling, and venues (and thus potential income) tend to be fairly small, expenses must usually be kept to a minimum. One-person shows are therefore quite common at fringe festivals. Fringe festival productions often showcase new scripts, especially ones on more obscure, edgy, or unusual material. The lack of artistic vetting combined with relatively easy entry make risk-taking more feasible. While most mainstream theatre shows are two or three acts long, taking two to three hours with intermissions, fringe shows tend to be closer to one-hour, single-act productions. The typically lowered ticket prices of
891-444: The pub the nickname "the In and Out", since taxi passengers could avoid paying their fare by entering it through one door and disappearing through the other. The architectural style is Free-Classical style, but includes Neo-Jacobean and Renaissance elements. The building is four storeys high, with residential accommodation in the floors above the pub. The parapet is balustraded with
924-770: Was also the recipient of awards from the Arts Council, the Society of Authors and the Royal Literary Fund . He worked for the Nietzsche Society of Great Britain, and the English College Foundation in Prague . His career included stints as a furniture restorer, carpenter, fireman and cataloguer at Sotheby's , and is summed up by his autobiographical poem "Curriculum Vitae". His earlier collections, which include On
957-520: Was married three times. His first marriage was in 1968, to Julie Ellis, and the couple had two daughters: Chloë, a website designer, and Miranda, a wife and mother of three. The marriage ended in 1980, and in 1986, he wed psychotherapist Sally Rouse. Barker and Rouse had a son, Daniel, and a daughter, Xanthi. Daniel is an actor, comic writer, and voice artist, who has appeared in the 2020 revival of Spitting Image . In 2021, Xanthi's memoir of her relationship with her father, Will This House Last Forever? ,
990-522: Was named as a Book of the Year in both The Independent and The Spectator , and The Erotics of God (2005) was The Tablet ′s Book of the Year in 2005. The son of poets George Barker and Elizabeth Smart , Sebastian Barker was educated at The King's School, Canterbury , Corpus Christi College, Oxford (MA), and at the University of East Anglia (MA). He was on the executive committee of P.E.N. and
1023-865: Was the Chairman of the Poetry Society from 1988 to 1992. In 1997 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature . In 2002 he took over editorship of the London Magazine , from which he resigned in 2008 after the Arts Council England had cut the magazine's funding. He was director of several literary festivals, including the Royal Berkshire Poetry Festival, and held writer-in-residence positions in Berkshire and Lincolnshire ; Barker
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1056-616: Was then a theatre component of the larger Summerfest but evolved to become a stand-alone event, the Edmonton International Fringe Festival , one of the largest annual arts events in Canada and still the largest fringe in North America by attendance. The oldest fringe festival in the United States is Orlando , FL, founded in 1992. There are more fringe festivals in North America than any other continent. One distinction between fringe festivals and conventional arts festivals
1089-465: Was then the rural village of Islington in open countryside and fields. A house called Goose Farm and some nearby cattle pens (for herds being driven to Smithfield Market ) were the only structures to adjoin it, and St John Street (then called Chester Road) was a country lane. In the late 18th century Chester Road became notorious for highwaymen, with patrols being provided to protect those travelling along it at night. At this time descriptions state that
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