Arcola Theatre is an Off West End theatre in the London Borough of Hackney. It presents plays, operas and musicals featuring established and emerging artists. The theatre building, in the former Colourworks paint factory on Ashwin Street, Dalston, houses two studio theatre spaces, two rehearsal studios and a café-bar. The theatre runs one of East London's most extensive arts engagement programmes, creating over 5000 opportunities for the local community every year. Since 2007 the Green Arcola project has aimed to make Arcola the world's first carbon-neutral theatre.
History
Arcola Theatre was founded by artistic directorMehmet Ergen, in September 2000. Its original location was a former textile factory on Arcola Street in Dalston. The theatre celebrated this with its fifth anniversary production, The Factory Girls by Frank McGuinness. In January 2011 the Arcola moved to a former paint-manufacturing workshop on Ashwin Street in Dalston, after its previous landlord earmarked the Arcola Street site for redevelopment as apartments. It marked the move by premiering The Painter, a play about J. M. W. Turner by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Since its inception the theatre has twice won the Peter BrookEmpty Space Award and was awarded Time Out Live Awards in 2003 and 2006. In 2007, an Arcola co-production of Mojo Mickey by Owen McCafferty became its first West End transfer to the Trafalgar Studios. 2007 also marked the first season of the Arcola's Grimeborn, an opera and musical theatre festival that runs for two weeks in August. In September 2014, Nick Connaughton started the Arcola Queer Collective. Some collective members include Rubyyy Jones , Travis Alabanza, Krishna Istha, Damien Killeen, Miss Cairo and Camilla Harding. The theatre is committed to achieving carbon neutral status and a research project, Arcola Energy, "bringing together the creative mindset and the engineering methodology", is established on the building's top floor to develop and market hydrogen fuel cells, with the profits subsidising the theatre's community arts projects.
