Louise Owen: "London Bubble"

This contribution to the ASTR working group ‘Dreaming Again: Deconstructing the Categories of Alternative British Theatre’ focuses on a company with which Sandy Craig, author of Dreams and Deconstructions (1980) has been closely associated: London Bubble. London Bubble was founded in 1972 as a GLAA-funded touring company with a specific remit: to take theatre to areas of London that enjoyed little regular cultural provision by using non-theatre spaces for performance. Interested in creating a ‘popular’ theatre for the widest possible audience, it was nonetheless definitively ‘alternative’ in the British theatre culture of the time. Having abandoned, in the early 1990s, the Bubble ‘tent’ (in 1972, the “UK's only completely mobile theatre structure to tour London's parks/open spaces” (Walford 2011)), the company’s complex, evolving programme now features promenade and site-specific performance in non-theatre spaces (public parks, playgrounds, libraries), created with and alongside smaller-scale education and participatory theatre projects in schools, youth clubs and community centres. Once unusual, such interventions in public spaces and what would now be described as an ‘inclusive’ ethic of practice are ubiquitous. In 2008, Arts Council England withdrew its substantial support for London Bubble entirely – a decision that provoked outcry and a lobbying campaign that ultimately proved unsuccessful. The company’s almost forty-year history offers an important opportunity to examine assumptions regarding the ‘outsider’ status of ‘alternative’ practices (‘fringe’, ‘participation’, ‘education’) and the changing material basis of cultural production – represented, for example, by London Bubble’s now more assiduous engagement with the private sector and its development of Fan Made Theatre (a ‘crowdfunding’ model). What constitutes ‘popular’ theatre now? What ideological transformations might this company’s practices witness?