By James Hadley in London
 
A West End transfer is what almost every theatre artist or producer in the wider London industry hopes for. Walking down Shaftesbury Avenue it's easy to dream of seeing the name of the show you're involved in in lights above a big Victorian theatre's entrance. Even though you may never really intend to make the sort of commercially viable productions that will make it there, it's still an alluring pinnacle of recognised success.
 
The big West End venues are almost always fully programmed, with shows jostling in the wings to try and get a venue, even though it's only big musicals and plays which operate as a star vehicle for some film actor that tend to make it into most of them. The fact that quite a few of the big theatres are hosting musical like 'Phantom of the Opera' and 'Lion King' that run for decades and decades puts obvious pressures on what venues are available.

But there are also a few centrally located smaller venues which host shorter length runs of shows which have had such success in London's Fringe venues that a producer decides to back a West End transfer (even if technically you might term these smaller venues as Off West End). The Trafalgar Studios is one such venue; just a stone's throw from Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square.

I just recently saw a production of such high quality that, despite premiering in a small venue above a pub, had West End transfer written all over it, and it's just about to transfer to the Trafalgar Studios, so I thought it would be interesting to look at what marked the production out for that 'badge of success'.
 
The originating venue was Theatre503, a venue long run as a typical pub theatre called the Latchmere because that's the name  of the pub it's above. Like many pub theatres, it has about 100 seats (in rather cramped conditions), and a small black box stage, with minimal backstage space. Many of these venues are given minimal peppercorn rent leases from the pub they're above, in return for bringing extra punters into the venue to buy drinks. Theatre503 is just a few blocks from Clapham Junction in South London, and most pub theatres are in suburban parts of London, drawing partly on a local audience, though it's surprising to what degree these small venues will draw its regular audience from across the wider London landscape of theatre-lovers.It seems if the review has enough stars attached to it, then people are willing to travel.

Theatre503 has only been running for a few years, branding itself as a home of 'fearless new writing' in order to try and carve out a distinctive niche for itself. It's gradually building a reputation for itself, and the productions I've seen there have varied between graduate student-level pre-Edinburgh Fringe try-outs, to works that are completely professional and polished but of limited audience appeal due to weighty subject matters or tones. Theatre503 produces several productions a year itself, the rest of the time programming the space with outside hires, so doesn't have complete quality control over everything presented there.
 
Up till now, they've never had anything close to a West End transfer, but that's all about to change with their world premiere production of The Mountaintop by Katori Hall. It's a wonderfully charged and imaginative portrait of Martin Luther King's final evening in a Memphis motel room, the night before his assassination. The playwright Katori Hall is US based, and I understand the director, James Dacre, had recently returned from America and brought the script to the theatre, convincing them to programme it.

In hindsight, this was clearly a shrewd move, as he got the resources of the venue, and their producing support, for the trial of the work in a four week run. Based on the strength of the script, and that its two parts are wonderful roles to play, the production was able to attract established film and TV actor David Harewood to play the part of Martin Luther King. It's certainly not rare to see familiar faces from TV when you go to see a show in a pub theatre here - indicative perhaps of just how many excellent actors are vying for roles in the industry - but actors of Harewood's profile are less regular pub theatre frequenters.

Harewood was in the recent film 'Blood Diamond' and in the 'Robin Hood' English TV series, but this was my first experience of his acting, and it was a compelling channelling of a historical figure. Not to say that he imitated Martin Luther King entirely, but his performance was impressively committed to the energy of the man throughout. And no less engaging was the performance of Lorraine Burroughs as an apparent maid in the motel.
 
So the quality of the actors is one factor in the production's commercial potential, but it's mostly about the quality of the material. Thoroughly dramatic and alive scripts are rarer than most of us care to admit. It's only once in a while that you experience a piece of new writing that feels like it will be presented in numerous other productions for years to come. But this is very much the case with Katori Hall's play.

I had expected stirring docudrama that would be enlightening about the character of Martin Luther King, and there were certainly aspects of this. But the piece had made that crucial leap into being much more than just a historical portrait. It's written to be a dynamic interplay between two dramatically complex characters who strike exciting sparks off each other due to the situation they find themselves in. Initially there's flirting and playfulness, as we get a feel for the characters and the tensions going on around King's civil rights preaching. But where things really get creative and genuinely surprising is the point where our charming motel maid reveals she's actually an angel sent from God to escort King to heaven. Out of context, you'd think this hard to believe, or preachy, but in reality it was exciting and humorous - rather in the innovative vein of magic realism that set Tony Kushner's 'Angels in America' plays apart.
 
The originality and quality of the script and the dramatic experience which it provokes is of a strength that led to strong reviews, but also excellent word of mouth. It's definitely the kind of show you're still thinking about the next day, and likely to mention to your workmates. This translates into increasing audience demand, the run in the small fringe venue quickly sells out, and you find yourself in a situation where there are far more people wanting to see the show than can possible attend during its run. If you can demonstrate this, it makes a reasonable case to a producer that the work can generate the kind of demand that warrants a transfer to a West End space with a larger auditorium - but also higher rates so a higher risk around having to programme commercially successful productions. The programmer of Trafalgar Studios was duly invited to attend the production, and a West End run was then offered to the production.
 
As I mentioned, such transfers are not common, as your average sold out run in a Fringe venue is still far below the scale of demand that will fill a larger West End venue reliably. But if the production can demonstrate such a winning formula as 'The Mountaintop' then that pinnacle of London theatre success just might be within reach.