It’s the Gate Theatre’s 35th birthday! We’ve asked artists who have worked here over the years to send us 35 words that sum up their time at the Gate. So please read on, add your memories, or come visit us to celebrate.
Here's to another 35 years…
Give us your 35 words - and
enter a draw to win tickets!
Dear Gate, 35 years and still swinging…So when I was 41 there was no Gate? That's hard to imagine. Long may continue the promise at the top of the stairs. With affection.
I cut my teeth as a director in your tiny claustrophobic room, memories of painting walls, planting trees, being welcomed, nurtured, radicalised by the artistic powerhouse that you are. Happy birthday, dear Gate.
We squeezed into one room to change, then squeezed into another to perform. Tight, true and tremendous we popped out of ourselves and expanded with passion, pain and song. Defining times. Thank you.
Dear compact courageous Gate. You are older than me but far more adventurous. Every time I visit you there is a different world at the top of the stairs. Happy birthday old friend!
Creativity blossoms where there are restrictions. This tiny, inspiring room is the biggest, smallest restriction around. Long live the ever-growing collective imagination that The Gate theatre's short walls just cannot hold back!
A Theatre works through the intensity of its grip and the Gate's is as vicelike as any I’ve been lucky enough to work within. It’s a place of limitless ambition and rightful chaos.
I'll never forget standing nervously on the steep stairs awaiting our first preview, audience brushing by like in a student party, nor the stifling get-in where we mixed paint with sweat. Happy birthday!
Stepped into this protean alchemical oven as a theatre voracious ingénue in 1994 ...You still surprise delight provoke - the worlds you so skilfully conjure make your tiny dimensions feel enormous. Bottoms up, Gate.
Life ‘With An Idiot’ in 2001 was a total thrill, thanks to an international cast of three, live piano, and a ketchup food-fight on an all-white set. Congratulations to our national pub theatre.
I've played, audienced, directed, within those walls. I love it from every angle… Thank you Gate. Necessity, mother of invention - within that tiny space, people rise to the restriction and make much magic! Wishing you more!
Not surprised I had to go so far to find, and to be found by, a theatre with such verve, purpose, ambition, courage. I couldn’t feel much luckier. Keep changing the world, Gate.
A Detroit born NYC girl in a British world was full of open heartedness on your London stage speaking on Black revolution, universal love and freedom – and these are the gifts you give.
I was 21. Came to London to meet Stephen Daldry of "The Gate". Couldn't find it for an hour, that's how small it was. Once I found it, I stayed for ten years.
Although located in London's millionaire’s district, the Gate still manages to put on surprisingly subversive shows. It doesn't always play it safe which is increasingly a rare quality. A privilege to have worked there.
Gate, tell me the secret of your eternal youth? Is it your wonky walls? Your adventurous artists? Or your audience's insatiable appetite for your risk-taking? Whatever it is just don’t age gracefully.
Pioneers of Inglestadt, The Ubu plays, Valle de Inclan, The Decameron, The Boat Plays. Some of the surprises I have had at the top of those stairs.Thank you for celebrating theatre beyond our shores.
The Gate is the home of the epic. Thirty of us in a promenade production of “Hunting Scenes..”, thirty more of us as revolutionary Silesian weavers the following year. Vivid and proud memories of microcosmic chaos.
Only twenty steps from the street to Heaven's Gate. Where else can you step from your dressing-room straight onto the stage? Many happy returns to the wonderful Gate; may you be forever young.
The first time I worked at the Gate it was full of sand; the second time, water, roses, squashed cherries & balloons. Always full of electricity, limitless possibilities, life.
Pigs! Live bacon frying! Revolving kitchens! Is there nothing you can't do? What a brilliant place to make and experience theatre. Thanks for taking a risk with us and helping it (them?) fly.
From luminous showering peas to human size fish tanks, real trees, mud, and live piglets, it has always been an incredibly diverse experience working at the Gate, long may it continue! Happy Happy Birthday!
The first theatre that truly captured my imagination: a tiny, shape-shifting, kaleidoscopic space at the top of a staircase, with the scale of ambition, ideas, and questions to take on the world. Happy Birthday Gate!
Whether I am watching or working on a show, The Gate has always felt fresh and vital. Creating movement for it’s intimate space offers up a unique intensity like nowhere else. Dance on!
Consistently adventurous output, mouse-traps in the dressing-rooms, audience so close you can touch them…there is nowhere quite like the Gate. The result of good people doing what they do best. 35 more please!