'We feel relaxed for the first time': Arcola bosses reflect on 20 years of building a theatre powerhouse

Groundbreaking: Arcola Theatre’s Mehmet Ergen and Leyla Nazli
Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd

It’s hard to believe that the Arcola theatre is 20 years old. The Dalston powerhouse retains a youthful bravado in the work it stages, and still leads the way in defining what a modern London theatre should be. Under artistic director Mehmet Ergen, 53, and producer Leyla Nazli, 48, it was one of the first to operate a café that was a destination in itself; to attempt to make itself carbon neutral; and to aim for a 50-50 male-female split in key creative roles.

Since its early days in the defunct Arcola clothing factory in E8, the ­theatre has attracted high-­calibre actors such as Jack Shepherd and Greg Hicks. Since 2018 it has produced or co-produced almost everything seen on its two stages. It’s also acted as a launchpad for playwrights: Polly Stenham and Mike Bartlett worked there as a stagehand and a director respectively. Zawe Ashton, Aml Ameen and Wunmi Mosaku also trod its boards at the start of their careers. On Sunday, Ergen and Nazli received the Off West End Special Achievement Award at the Offies.

The anniversary is marked with a year’s programming from artists closely associated with the venue, including new plays by Barney Norris, Nazli herself, and David Farr, now best known as the man who adapted John le Carré’s The Night Manager for TV. There’s also an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice, and one of Strindberg’s The Dance Of Death by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, whose first play, Soho: A Tale Of Table Dancers, originally opened the Arcola.

“In the past we did famous plays for people who couldn’t afford them,” says Ergen. “We made a case for European theatre and did new plays relating to the [local] area. Now our new writing has gone global, post-Brexit, and we commission major writers to adapt the classics we do. With a year’s work planned from amazing people who’ve been part of the last 20 years, we feel quite relaxed for the first time.”

Ergen came to London in 1989 as an actor and director and was smitten by the fact that theatre here was driven by performers and writers rather than grand directorial concepts, as in his native Istanbul. Frustrated by the limitations of pub theatres, he looked for an industrial site, and in 1993 co-founded Southwark Playhouse in a printworks. He met fellow Turk Nazli there — she was then an amateur actor who planned “to become a yuppie software programmer and earn lots of money” — but left Southwark after six years when relations soured with his co-founders. A year or two later Ergen happened upon the disused factory on the dead-end of Arcola Street. By opening the Arcola quickly, he thought he could nab the top spot in the capital’s theatre listings from the feted Almeida (then closed for refurbishment) “and fool some Americans into coming. And it worked,” he says. “A lot of people thought we were a legit theatre with a licence, board and management but none of that was there for the first two years.”

Indeed, at the beginning, he and Nazli sublet their studio in Clapton and lived in the freezing, semi-converted theatre building. “There was no kitchen, no bathroom, no hot water, no heating system,” Nazli recalls. The seats were benches from a closed Islington curry house mounted on the factory’s old cloth-cutting tables. An early production, of Peter Weiss’s sprawling Marat/Sade, was lit by table lamps and candles.

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Ergen slowly chivvied Nazli away from her studies until she was effectively at the Arcola 24/7. “After 10 years, I re­­discovered the concept of weekends,” she says wrily. Originally, they were the only two permanent staff members and did everything, from running the box office and bar to producing shows. They mounted Shakespeare, Ibsen and Lorca plays, and seasons of German, American and Turkish work. From the start the Arcola offered an open door to the historically impoverished local population, particularly young, old, Turkish and refugee groups. “If those groups come in, their parents come in, their friends, their partners,” says Ergen. “A lot of people discover the theatre.”

Ironically, they arguably also contributed to the turbocharged gentrification of the area. “We were only the second place to offer cappuccino in Dalston, after the Rio Cinema,” says Nazli. Somewhere along the line, they managed the transition from romantic to purely professional partners.

In 2010 Hackney council offered the theatre a new home in the historic Reeves paint company building. This gave them a larger main space and studio with rehearsal rooms of equal size above, and put them next to the re­opened Dalston Junction station. They launched the new space with The Painter, a play by Lenkiewicz, about Reeves’s most famous customer, J M W Turner. It starred Toby Jones, Niamh Cusack and Denise Gough. Subsequent hits included musical stagings of Sweet Smell Of Success and Little Miss Sunshine, which went on a national tour, and Barney Norris’s extraordinary plays Visitors and Eventide.

Ergen grumbles that their £301,738 Arts Council grant is much less than that of comparably sized theatres, and that he still loses out on the rights to perform Pinter and Tennessee Williams to the Donmar or Almeida. He still acts (usually playing Turkish, Jewish or Greek villains — his most recent role was in Dan Brown’s Inferno opposite Tom Hanks) and directs on larger stages in Europe and in Istanbul, where his actress partner and their son live. Nazli has two children with her husband Dr Ben Todd, the man behind Arcola Energy, which shares the Reeves building, and which installed the theatre’s LED cabling and the eco-boiler they refer to as Terminator Two.

Since their other “child”, the theatre, is now 20, I wonder if they ever think of moving on. “No, because the challenges never get finished,” says Ergen. There are plans to renovate the existing building and to build a more financially sustainable 350-seat auditorium on a nearby vacant lot. Nazli says she wants to write more, but notes: “I’d want to leave a big legacy to Hackney when I leave Arcola. And I wouldn’t know where to start if I went for a job interview, because for 20 years my life has been sucked into this building”.

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