Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time. The right place being the The Donmar Warehouse at the time when Sam Mendes took over the artistic direction of the theatre. In ten years, from 1992 to 2002, he transformed it from its ‘warehouse’ origins into the theatrical powerhouse it is today. A modest theatre with an audience capacity of just 251, for a brief time I was lucky enough to be sat in that 251st seat. I remember it, very much as the actor Eddie Redmayne remembers it (see the link below) as a kind of ‘living room’, sitting so near the three-sided stage that you feel close enough to see every gesture, every nuance.
So, this smallest of theatres has played host to the biggest of stars (for example, Nicole Kidman in ‘The Blue Room’) Yet, no one ‘star’ outshines the red neon light of the Donmar sign seen through the rain of a London street. It’s one of my most treasured memories of the Capital.
