Bring on the new. Nick Hytner, who left the National Theatre in March, and his former colleague Nick Starr have finally found a theatre for their stage company, to be built beside Tower Bridge. Encouragingly, the Two Nicks say their handful of plays a year in the 900-seat auditorium will mainly be new work.
That’s good, because the West End is too full of frequently tedious revivals. Only when there is a megastar such as Nicole Kidman, who appears next month in Photograph 51, does a new play immediately find a central London home, and even this one first had a run in America. Usually, an original drama needs to open on a subsidised British stage before theatre owners pluck up the courage to bring it into the West End — as was the case with The Father, a hit earlier in the year at the Tricycle, in Kilburn, before its deserved staging at Wyndham’s from the end of September.
The Two Nicks will receive no public funding. But, as the St James, in Victoria (opened in 2012), and the Park, in Finsbury Park (2013), have shown — admittedly with smallish auditoriums — you can establish venues simply through commercial backing, with no Arts Council revenue. Both theatres have also succeeded mainly with new plays. By 2020, there will be another theatre, run by Nimax, which already owns five in the West End, on the site of the old Astoria, near Tottenham Court Road station. Plenty of new work there, too, please.
■ Old Flo should be returned to the East End of London. Sculpted by Henry Moore in 1957-58, Draped Seated Woman (known popularly as Old Flo) was purchased by London County Council in 1962 and placed for the next 35 years beside a housing estate in Stepney. Since the estate’s demolition in 1997, the sculpture has been loaned to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Lutfur Rahman, the Tower Hamlets mayor — whose bailiwick included Stepney — outrageously began to try to flog Old Flo, hoping to raise £20m. Thankfully, he was chucked out in April because of electoral fraud. Yet the London borough of Bromley claims ownership of the statue, too, as the residuary body for the old Greater London Council, the LCC’s successor. Though a judge has just ruled in Tower Hamlets’ favour, Bromley is considering seeking permission to appeal.
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I hope it fails. Old Flo should return to east London asap, to sit outside an Underground station in memory of Moore’s evocative wartime Tube drawings of people sheltering from the bombs.
■ Is the BBC considering WeatherAction to replace the Met Office? Times are a-changin’, with the Labour party set to choose Jeremy Corbyn as its leader. So why does the Beeb not plump for his brother Piers’s long-established forecasting firm? Corbyn might have predicted that August 2014 was going to be the hottest for 300 years, when it turned out cool; there was even ground frost in Oxfordshire. Yet the Met Office slipped up by wrongly forecasting a barbecue summer for 2009.