U.K's Empty Space Peter Brook Awards Honor Edinburgh's Forest Fringe and London's Cock Tavern

By Kenneth Jones
November 3, 2009

Edinburgh's Forest Fringe and London's Cock Tavern won two major awards in the annual Empty Space Peter Brook Awards, held Nov. 3 at London's National Theatre Studio. This is the 20th anniversary of the awards; the ceremony was attended by famed director Brook.

There are four awards in all. The main Empty Space Peter Brook Award is awarded for a body of work and in recognition of pioneering concepts and innovations, in the spirit of Peter Brook, achieved by companies that perform in smaller theatre venues and receive little or no public funding. This year, the nominees comprised Chichester's studio Minerva Theatre; BAC; Soho Theatre; The Bush Theatre; Glasgow's The Arches; and Forest Fringe, founded at the Edinburgh Fringe and offering a venue that does not charge rental to its participating companies or admission prices to its audiences.

Each nominee receives £350, with £2000 going to the winner, which this year was deemed to be Forest Fringe.

The Dan Crawford Pub Theatre Award is made to a pub theatre that has made a mark, named in honor of the late founder of Britain's first pub theatre, the King's Head, which was founded in 1970. No nominations are made; only a winner is announced, who receives a cheque for £2,000.

This year, the winner is Kilburn's Cock Tavern in North London.

In his speech giving them the award, judge Mark Shenton (Playbill's London correspondent and theatre critic of the Sunday Express) commented, "The Cock Tavern, with its tiny auditorium of around 40 seats squeezed into three rows, is a quintessentially cramped upstairs pub theatre; but it is also, thanks to the boldness of its producing team, a newly-essential one, both for restoring some past fringe glories and also moving it boldly forward with new work."

The judging panel for both awards also includes critics Dominic Cavendish (Daily Telegraph), Lyn Gardner (Guardian), Fiona Mountford (Evening Standard) and Sam Marlowe (The Times).

There are two further awards. Nominations for the Mark Marvin Rent Subsidy Award, to help fund the run of a production, are James Graham's Win or Lose (at the Finborough Theatre), My Real War, adapted by Tricia Thorns (at Trafalgar Studios 2) and Che Walker's Burnt Up Love and Crazy Love (at the Oval House), with the latter winning the award of £1,500. Nominations for the Peter Brook/Equity Ensemble Award were to the team at the Arcola for their new opera season Grimeborn, to the team of the Little Angel for the Suspense Festival of Puppetry, and to the teams behind the companies Fuel and Filter for their next season's programmes. The award, which includes a cheque for £2,000, was made to Fuel. These awards are judged by producers Thelma Holt and Peter Wilson and the National Theatre's Purni Morrell.

The awards were founded and are run by Blanche Marvin.