Otherplace moves to The Basement

ONE constant companion to Otherplace Productions over the last ten years is a red wingback chair.

Now looking a little threadbare, the chair has been sat upon by comedy icon Daniel Kitson, and seen a dancer spring through its insides as part of a vaudeville show staged by Chris Cresswell.

It took pride of place on stage at The Marlborough Theatre, in Princes Street, travelled with them in 2007 to Upstairs At The Three And Ten in Steine Street, and is now centrestage in their new home at The Basement.

Earlier this month Otherplace moved to the new space, based in the former Argus print rooms, ten years on from Otherplace founder Nicola Haydn taking over the programming of The Marlborough.

“Initially The Marlborough was about providing a platform for emerging companies and taking a risk on people who didn’t have a lot of money,” says Haydn, who had brought some of her own productions to the theatre in 2004 before being offered the chance to programme the space.

“From my own experiences as a performer and director I knew to put on shows you had to pay big hire fees to venues.”

Since those early days at the Marlborough, the company has staged ambitious programmes in ever-larger venues, including The Importance Of Being Earnest at Brighton’s Grand Hotel, Dario Fo’s The Open Couple at The Master Mariner at the Marina and programming the pop-up space The Warren during Brighton Fringe.

Throughout, Otherplace has kept those same principles at heart – learned from Haydn’s own experiences trying to stage her own productions.

In her tenure programming The Marlborough she hosted a new comedy night Rabbit In The Headlights, which is also celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, as well as two more long-running city institutions: the improv group The Maydays and experimental music night Spirit Of Gravity.

After a summer in Edinburgh, running the Roman Eagle Lodge venue in 2006, she added stand-up comedy to the programme at the Marlborough, launching the first Brighton Comedy Fringe that autumn.

Comics who played their first Brighton shows at The Marlborough, and Upstairs At Three And Ten, are the aforementioned Kitson, Angelos Epithemou, Tim Key and Josie Long; household names Sarah Millican, Josh Widdicombe, Joe Wilkinson and Sara Pascoe; Brighton comics Seann Walsh and Romesh Ranganathan; and BBC Three stars Nick Helm and Pappy’s.

They join theatre successes including Lewes-based Long Nose Puppets who launched their touring show Shoe Baby at the Marlborough Theatre, Joe Bone, whose Bane Trilogy made the move from the Fringe to the Festival for its third instalment and John Osbourne whose cult hit John Peel’s Shed premiered at the Three And Ten.

Multi-platinum-selling musician Passenger also played an early show at The Marlborough.

Otherplace took on The Basement earlier this year as the former managers Helen Medland and Tim Harrison turn their focus on the Sick! Festival which returns to Brighton in March.

Now Haydn and her team are now programming two underground spaces with a combined maximum capacity five times the size of their previous home, as well as running the venue’s bar.

As such the size of Otherplace’s managing team has expanded. Haydn was joined by Tom Arr-Jones, who is in charge of operations and finance back in 2006.

And technical director Josh Carr, producer James Turnbull and commercial director Richard Carter had all joined by the time The Warren opened in 2012.

“We all have our different strengths,” says Haydn. “But we can all manage an event, set a venue up, look after the front of house, work on the technical side, and pull a pint behind the bar.”

What makes it even more impressive is all five do the job in a voluntary capacity – backed by a team of enthusiastic helpers.

“Over the last ten years we have had something like 200 volunteers,” says Haydn, adding that the 30 paid technical staff during the Brighton Fringe are augmented by the same number of volunteers during the four-week festival.

Many have gone on to do bigger and better things.

“The comic Seann Walsh used to flyer for us,” says Haydn. “Angela Barnes [now a stand-up star in her own right after winning the BBC New Comedy Award] used to do admin and venue management for us.

“We’ve had lots of actors and performers that have come to work with us, then gone on to become working actors in their own right.”

Other alumini include Mark Allen, who now takes his comedy panel show The Humble Quest For Universal Genius on tour around the country; artistic director of touring theatre company Rhum And Clay, Christopher Harrison; and Alex Brown who was an assistant director on the National Theatre production Great Britain.

“There’s a real sense of community,” says Haydn, whose day job is as a drama teacher at Varndean College. “There isn’t anything we would ask the volunteers to do that we wouldn’t do ourselves.

“The experience has helped a lot of my sixth form students get onto acting and technical theatre courses – they come here and learn a trade.”

This year Otherplace are not only programming The Basement, but they are also creating a brand-new pop-up space for this year’s Brighton Fringe.

“The Warren site will now be north of St Peter’s Church,” says Haydn.

“We are running a 200-capacity theatre tent, and a 70-capacity blackbox theatre.

“This May we will have somewhere in the region of 150 visiting companies from all over the world as well as Brighton.

“The Basement is a beautiful space, in a great location, which is both really versatile and really cool. We will be able to say ‘Yes!’ to a lot more as we have the space to take it.”

Ten years of The Catalyst Club
Latest Music Bar, Manchester Street, Brighton, Thursday, January 29
For more information visit www.catalystclub.co.uk
Starts 8pm, tickets £6. Call 01273 687171

OF all his many projects over the last decade – ranging from alternative guide books to Brighton, to his musical project Oddfellow’s Casino – David Bramwell admits The Catalyst Club is the one which has given him the least headaches.

“Maybe eight years ago I remember sending an email asking whether anyone wanted to do a talk,” says Bramwell, who is launching a new podcast to mark The Catalyst Club’s tenth birthday.

“Now we always seem to be booked up three months in advance. In a sense it is one of the easiest projects I have ever undertaken.”

Part of that may be down to The Catalyst Club’s simplicity. A typical night sees three people talk for 15 minutes about an interest they feel passionately about. The remainder of the night is spent in a Q and A session – reminiscent of the French debating salons of the 19th century.

The subjects of the talks can range wildly, from hypnosis to canned meat, swearing to shark attacks, the origins of Christianity to why reunions are a bad idea.

Bramwell believes the essence of a good Catalyst Club talk is having a focus and a genuine love of your subject.

“It’s important not to try to pack too much into one talk,” he says. “Less is more. If you’re a fan of Nick Cave and want to do a talk on him it’s best to focus on one album or his moustache. It gives much more scope and time to be playful.

“It’s good to speak from the heart too – all the good talks have a personal connection with the subject matter. Sometimes when we have professional scientists speaking you get the feeling there’s an emotional disengagement with the material as they have been exploring it for so long.”

Bramwell is among those who have used the format to test out his own projects and ideas, with his recent book The No 9 Bus To Utopia starting life as a series of talks, and its forthcoming sequel and show The Haunted Moustache also developing through the club.

“With a 15-minute talk you need a beginning, a middle and an end,” he says. “It really helps put a book together and can be a good platform for people to try out something bigger.”

In recent years Bramwell has taken the format out on tour to summer festivals and into London – although he admits without the local link to the area it can be hard to build a new audience.

This is part of the thinking behind the new Odditorium podcast, which will be launched on Thursday.

“We thought if the podcast becomes popular people may start their own clubs of their own accord,” he says. “There’s no copyright on the name – I don’t want to own it. It should be shared.”

Bramwell will present the podcast accompanied by sidekick Dave Mounfield of Count Arthur Strong’s Radio Show fame. The aim is to focus on the less visual talks, and include edited post-presentation discussions too.

“We had a wonderful talk in November called the Cabinet Of Curiosities,” he says.

“It was about a collector who showed us 100 slides from his collection – the novelty was that it was a mixture of fantasy and fact. He had an object he claimed was a tool Neil Armstrong used for picking things up on the moon – but you didn’t know if it was false or true. It was all about our relationship with objects and how our perception changes with what people tell us about them. It was so heavily driven by images though it would never work as a podcast.”

Launching the tenth anniversary podcast are a pair of Catalyst Club regulars – Colin Uttley who will be talking about the history of ghost trains, and musician Sarah Angliss on 1980s armageddon enthusiasts.

Already available on the website at oddpodcast.com are Rob Brandt on the History Of The Martini, George Egg talking about Anarchist Cookery, Mathilda Gregory on Werewolf Erotica and John Higgs making the case for St Albans being made the patron saint of England.

As well as a further Ten Years show on Thursday, March 26, Brighton writer Marcus O’Dair will be hosting a Catalyst Club special on Thursday, February 5, talking about his new Robert Wyatt biography Different Every Time.

As for the future of the Catalyst Club Bramwell wants to leave the format well alone and stay where he is.

“It’s so easy to kill things,” he says. “I’ve seen it happen before in Brighton where events have grown their audiences and received Arts Council funding, but something essential has been lost.

“We have a sense of intimacy in the Latest Music Bar, which has always treated us well and with respect. There are different ways to grow and be successful – by offering more to audiences rather than moving on to somewhere new.”