Lloyd Evans talks to Michael Attenborough, whose star at the Almeida is the theatre itself
The back office of the Almeida Theatre in Islington could do with a major refit. Dowdy, open-plan and scattered with Free-cycled furniture, it looks like the chill-out room of a student bar or the therapy suite of some underfunded weight-watch clinic. The tin chairs are arranged around elderly coffee-tables. The walls have been painted with the ramshackle expediency of a squat — a blue stretch here, some scarlet columns there, a few purpley flourishes. Beneath the roof eaves a beer gut of damp and crumbly brickwork bulges outwards precariously. I’d give it three months, maybe six, before it collapses. A grungy sofa receives my weight with an audible sigh, as if it’s been sat on once too often.
I’m greeted by the theatre’s artistic director, Michael Attenborough, a bustling, compact little man of about 60. He has the same broad, genial face as his father, the film director Lord Attenborough, but he’s less sleek-looking with shaggy wisps of hair swept backwards from the shiny dome of his forehead. We shake hands and his intense eyes scan me briefly. He ushers me past a side-office, where an all-girl team of fund-raisers are busy bashing the phones, and into a boardroom which is fractionally less frumpy than its neighbour. Clearly the creative focus here is on the work rather than the habitat.
He launches into a rapid-fire overview of his forthcoming production Through a Glass Darkly, an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 film. ‘Bergman was implacably opposed to people doing stage adaptations of his films. This is the only one he gave permission for during his lifetime. It’s very tight, claustrophobic almost, only four characters — Bergman called it “a chamber film” — and it lends itself very well to the unities of the theatre.’
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