ALEXANDER GIFFORD IN PROFILE

The artistic director of the Marylebone Theatre on modelling for Gaultier, seeking spirituality, and opening a significant new venue in the heart of London

Words: Janet Tyler

Images: Orlando Gili

A confession. When I first heard last year that a new theatre, the Marylebone Theatre, was opening its doors, I had two overwhelming thoughts. My first was to ask what mad hubris this was, to launch an off-West End theatre in the wake of a pandemic that had wreaked such havoc on small performance venues the world over. The second thought, which quickly followed, was that I’d better book tickets to the opening play, Dmitry, in support of “local theatre”. It was – and this is my confession – an act of patronising patronage. As a regular theatregoer to the behemoths of London – the National, the Almeida, the Donmar – I had embarrassingly low expectations. What I encountered blew me away.

In the elegantly designed theatre space, embraced by natural wood, Dmitry was a spectacle of scale and power. Adapted by award-winning playwright Peter Oswald from Friedrich Schiller’s last and unfinished play, this propulsive political thriller catapulted the audience into the world of a ruthless regime and its powerful young opponent who may or may not be who he thinks he is. The play’s political deception and manipulation roared large in this intimate space – as did the performances from an impressive cast, which included established actors such as Poppy Miller (Line of Duty, The Second Best Marigold Hotel) and relative newcomers like the brilliant Tom Byrne (The House of the Dragon, The Crown). The night I was there, the performance ended with a standing ovation. I needed to know who was behind this bold new venture.

One month later, I’m meeting the theatre’s artistic director, Alexander Gifford. He greets me exuberantly at the theatre’s friendly box office with a warm handshake, his dark foppish hair swept absent-mindedly off his forehead, his stylish thick-knit cream cardigan looking for all its worth a little like a comfort blanket – which might well be needed given the frenetic year he’s spent getting a new theatre up and running.

The ambition of the theatre has been writ large. Alexander has pulled together a heavyweight team, from Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance as patron to ex-Young Vic artistic director Tim Supple as associate director. From the big-stage spectacle of Dmitry to an intimate evening with novelist Ben Okri reciting TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, to the successful run of a new Christmas play, A Sherlock Carol, Alexander has transformed a small, moth-gathering space in the (beautiful) Rudolf Steiner building into a vital, public-facing theatre that is clearly going to make its mark on London’s cultural scene. How? Well, he answered a job advertisement.

Let’s rewind 20 years, because Alexander’s story is an extraordinary journey that makes this end point at the Marylebone Theatre (which also feels like a starting point) seem both improbably and entirely inevitable. It begins (in my condensed version) when Alexander is 17, wandering High Street Kensington market when he feels a tap on his shoulder. He doesn’t recognise the gentleman at first, until he leans in closer. “Are you… Jean Paul Gaultier?” It is. Two weeks later, literally, Alexander is in Paris in a sequined shirt on a catwalk with the top models of the day – Helena Christensen, Carla Bruni... “It was a bit overwhelming to be honest. I couldn’t believe what was going on, but I did my stuff,” he says, laughing. “I strutted up and down.”

His photograph from the Gaultier show appeared in GQ magazine, which of course sent his profile at school through the roof. He signed to a modelling agent, was photographed by fashion photographer Mario Testino, and was subsequently cast in a major Indian feature film. “It was funny because I got this script and I thought… I don’t want to do this. But there were loads of famous actors in it, including this actor called Naseeruddin Shah – the Robert de Niro of India – and Naveen Andrews, who’d just been at the Oscars for The English Patient, and Roshan Seth who played Nehru in the film Gandhi. So I thought, okay well, I’d better do it.” He went to India, stayed with family (he’s of Indian-Zoroastrian heritage on his mother’s side), and filmed Bombay Boys, all the while continuing to study for his A-levels. “I had my 18th birthday when I was there – it was fabulous. I was having a whale of a time.”

When I ask if he worried that he’d hit his peak at too early an age, Alexander laughs. “Poetry and literature were also a big thing. I was reading a lot of poetry and novels, so I went back and did my A-levels and then went to Oxford to read English.” It was while at university, following “the usual emotional struggles, ups and downs”, that he had a “kind of breakdown and spiritual awakening”. It saw him give up meat and alcohol, become celibate for a time, and intently focus on spiritual development. While completing his studies and embarking on his career, he regularly went back to India to live in an ashram, rising at four in the morning and meditating for six or seven hours a day. He was, as he calls it, “a classic seeker”.

It was around this time that he heard about “this place called Rudolf Steiner House” in Marylebone. He ventured to its bookshop and was “completely blown away”. “In Steiner, I found someone who I felt bridged East and West. Steiner fully acknowledged the deep richness of Eastern mystical culture but he said the really important thing was that we in the West discover our own mystical religious tradition. And in a way, that is the journey that I myself went on.”

Alongside his career as an actor, and inspired by Steiner’s expansive but inclusive, non-dogmatic philosophy, Alexander trained as a Steiner teacher. It was while he was teaching part-time at a Steiner school in Gloucestershire that he became involved with the ASHA Centre, a nearby interfaith cultural and educational organisation. Through the centre, he and his friend Adrian Locher founded a programme that involved them travelling first to Israel and then South Africa to work on theatre projects with teenagers. On the back of that work, Alexander and Adrian were invited to take over the management of a theatre in Gloucester, from which they founded the Gloucester Theatre Company. “That was it. We were suddenly up and rolling. We were doing big shows, we were getting Arts Council Funding. That’s where I cut my teeth in theatre directing, theatre producing, running a venue.”

“So Adrian and I have sort of travelled as colleagues right from the beginning,” Alexander explains. “We’ve had these three big metamorphoses – the ASHA Centre, the Gloucester Theatre Company and now the

Marylebone Theatre, which is the biggest and the best by far,” he says. “In my opinion,” he hastens to add, laughing.

Which brings us full circle, back to the job advertisement for the artistic director role for a forgotten theatre in Rudolf Steiner House. “I was one of the few people who worked professionally in theatre who had a connection to Steiner,” Alexander says. “It was a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity for me, because I’d been living with this sense of a split in my life, between my love of and grounding in Steiner and spirituality, and then the mainstream world of work, feeling that I wasn’t connecting the two as fully as I would have liked. This was just the perfect opportunity to blend the two.”

His pitch to the board was that they could do this on a grand scale: open the space out into a public, professional venue, producing high quality work that could be recognised and enjoyed by large audiences. “If we continue to invest a little bit, if we get this right, there’s no reason that this shouldn’t be a really significant new venue for London and also a major producing house.” A big part of his vision – because the stage is so large – is for the theatre to be a powerhouse for new writing and a place to incubate shows that can go to the West End.

The job to date has involved a number of indelible moments – from Mark Rylance’s enthusiasm to be the theatre’s patron (“of course that super-charged the whole thing”), to attaching theatre luminary Tim Supple (“I thought it was a bit of a bold move! My hand was slightly shaking as I called his agent up”), to the point during the opening season when they knew that the venue could sell out. “So, there has been a sequence of moments where we’ve realised: this is working, we’ve done it.”

Following that successful first season, the second season is even more packed. The theatre programme includes Grenfell: System Failure, a sequel to Nick Kent’s critically acclaimed play Grenfell: Value Engineering. Using transcripts from the Grenfell Tower inquiry, powerfully edited for dramatic effect, the sequel focuses on the inquiry’s later stages – the testimonies of the victims, government ministers and the company responsible for installing the cladding. “It’s an incredibly potent mixture of testimonies that you get on stage and I think it’s – oh my god – it’s sort of a laser point into the dysfunctional heart of our political system. The Daily Telegraph said about the first one, this is state of the nation stuff – and it really is, it gets to the heart of things.”

The second play for the new season is The Dry House by Irish writer Eugene O’Hare. “Eugene erupted onto the scene a couple of years ago,” Alexander tells me. “He had two plays produced at the Park Theatre in one year and was rightly hailed at that moment as being a powerful and important new writer who is also growing and evolving. And I think now he has written a truly great play.”

Set in modern Ireland, The Dry House is about two sisters, one of whom is promising, after one last drink, to go to a clinic to overcome her addiction. “The beauty is it absolutely head-on confronts the trauma of our times. It goes to this incredible rock-bottom, and then it goes through it to a hope and a transformation. For me, that’s what I want theatre to do – to get so honest and deep but to come through it.”

Alexander’s personal belief is that audiences are tired of the “Beckettian-Pinterish” mode of theatre – of isolated individuals trapped in a world where they can’t communicate with each other and where no redemption ever comes from the outside. He believes that we want to feel that we can move through that. We want hope, I say. “Yes,” Alexander replies. “And not only that we want hope but that there is hope.”

The second season also includes more spoken word events, stand-up comedy and film screenings, and –importantly – music programmed by Grammy Awardwinning Robin Tyson. “Robin announced the programme and there were gasps from the audience – they’re really top names.” Those names include Rachel Podger, described by The Times as “the unsurpassed glory of the baroque violin”; and baritone Benjamin Appl, a BBC New Generation Artist.

When, as Alexander is walking me back out, I ask about the trials and tribulations of transforming this small forgotten space into the Marylebone Theatre, he tells me, with a humble and slightly dazed pride: “Change takes commitment and force and investment of many kinds. The thrill has been to see it work.”

MARYLEBONE THEATRE

Rudolf Steiner House, 35 Park Road, NW1 6XT marylebonetheatre.com