London’s Gate theatre, not to be confused with its Dublin namesake, is no more. A combination of factors, including rising costs, declining funding and its move in 2022 from its original home in Notting Hill Gate, means that it will cease trading next month. But it is worth celebrating its achievement over five decades. It has been an astonishing nursery of talent and has always stood for a defiant internationalism. “I sometimes think,” I once wrote, “that one learns more about world drama at the Gate than at any other London theatre.”
That was the dream of its founder, Lou Stein, who in 1979 took a tiny room over the Prince Albert pub and turned it into a 56-seat theatre that kicked off with Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. You climbed the pub’s well-worn stairs and found yourself in a space that embraced the world. Not only that. In 1982 Stein launched an offshoot above another pub, the Latchmere in Battersea, where I still recall Susannah York as the Amazonian protagonist of Kleist’s Penthesilea.
