by & Zerowidthspace; Ken Chubb, who is 80 years old, founded the Wakefield Tricycle Theater Company over a pub in London in 1972. They only presented new letters and quickly established themselves as a force with which they should count on the British stage, and by 1980 the company had created a permanent home in the tricycle theater in Kilburn with 200 seats.
Both the aspiring directors, Chubb and his wife Shirley Barrie had arrived in London in 1971 when the madness for the “lunch theater” was in full swing, with the sale of food and drinks subsidized low productions of short, often esoteric new games at small events, typically pubs. It would soon have its own union: the union of the lunch meetings (old).
Chubb appeared in the Pindar von Wakefield, a music hall pub on the Gray’s Inn Road, hoping to see such a lunch show, just to determine that the run was canceled by the publican because the crowd was too lean. Chubb claimed that he could do it better, and the public part replied that he could try freely as long as his three regular guests could drink undisturbed again and again.
The Canadian couple called his new company Wakefield after the pub and added tricycle to turn the “Wakefield cycle” of medieval Mystery games. Her opening gambit in 1972 was the Red Cross, a game by Sam Shepard, a name that was still relatively unknown in London. This happened to be reviewing the attention of the time -out, whose office was just in Grey’s Inn Road.
The Wakefield trial then switched to the absurd, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Tardieu and Fernando Arrabal. After six months, a man of the Arts Council appeared to offer them a scholarship.
Chubb remembered as a Halcyon time to make the theater in London: the audience was susceptible, the rents were cheap, the artstrate was generous and the actors would work almost nothing if the material were interesting.
“We would share every revenue with the people who worked on the show,” recalled Shirley Barrie. “Sometimes there was no [any proceeds]Sometimes people have enough for the bus driving price, and sometimes they have a little money. “One of her actors, Anton Phillips, received a role in the television series: in 1999 after he was discovered in one of her productions.
The Guardian’s Michael Billington admired the Wakefield trial “preference for Gut Kaste, somewhat old-fashioned productions in which tiny skeletons come out of the closet”. They often played in a variety or quasi-musical style, a remarkable hit is the Hoagy, Bix and Wolfgang Beethoven Bunkhaus (1979) filled with jazz.
Some because the grants for the provincial work were more generous, they started touring in 1974, played studio theater at university studios and working men’s clubs -once had to be in the middle of the act so that the 9 o’clock -Bingo could do. They had to be frustrated when they had to reduce their sets when they returned to London’s tiny pub, and were looking for a bigger constant home, initially under the arches of the Westway in Notting Hill (Kensington and Chelsea Council would not build enough money) before they shed light on the Foresters Hall in their homeland.
This beautiful meeting and dance hall from the 1920s, which was built by the old order of the Foresters Friendly Society, was recorded by Brent Council and the Citizens Advice Bureau in offices with cardboard cabins, but Chubb could see how the old proscenium sheet floated above her head: “You knew that a theater could be dropped there.”
With Tim Foster as an architect and Iain Mackintosh as a theater consultant, they opted for an intimate and stacked courtyard that was based on the Georgian Theater Royal in Richmond, Yorkshire. The auditorium was built from a scaffolding from a catalog of the company’s carpenter with rail slippers for foundations for saving money and was finished in three months at a price of only 130,000 GBP. At Brents, they dropped the name “Wakefield”.
The result was a 200-seater, who filled the gap between tiny alternative venues and the smaller westend houses with 350 seats. The opening of the tricycle theater in 1980 in the teeth of a recession was widely celebrated.
Their commitment to the avant-garde in December 1980 was aggressive against the standard Christmas award and organized a show on nuclear power by the women’s company Cunning Stunts. Shirley Barrie won cheap reviews for her pieces for children. However, the financing became a political struggle in which the tricycle even organized a piece called Show Trial, in which actors put the Arts Council into the dock.
The ax fell in 1984 when the tricycle’s grant was withdrawn £ 87,000. Brent North’s colorful MP, Dr. Rhodes Boyson, was happy about her misfortune because “she produces plays, as I was told, on the destruction of the social structure of our society”.
Although Chubb successfully led a petition of 4,000 signatures to reset the scholarship, he resigned as an artistic director this year, his creative energies, which were pushed by the administrative battles. After staging more than 40 games in London, he returned to Canada with his wife.
The tricycle survived to become an internationally respected name in the theater. When it was controversial in 2018, Chubb and his successor, as artistic director Nicolas Kent, headed the outcry.
Kenneth Richard Chubb was born on May 18, 1944 in Hamilton, Ontario, the son of Laurence, a Baptist Minister, and Gladys, born Penny. After school in nearby Tillsonburg, he visited the Waterloo Lutheran University and then the Carleton University in Ottawa, where he and Shirley Barrie ran a theater group called Sock ‘N’ Buskin.
When she returned to Canada in 1984, he became a story and screenwriter for film and television, but continued to run.
Shirley Barrie died in 2018. He is survived by her children Alexis and Robin.
Ken Chubb, born on May 18, 1944, died on March 20, 2025 & Zerowidthspace;
