The end of Vault Festival: what went wrong?

It is never nice to hear a much-loved arts events is closing for good – but it’s less nice still when it comes out of the blue. There was the bombshell news last year that the owners of the space underneath Waterloo station didn’t want them back again, and the immediate worry was over money. Then the concerns of money grew quieter and focus turned to finding the right replacement venue. A replacement was found. The Vault Festival took on new branding, #SaveVault became #BuildVault, and a big relauch gala was supposed to take place at the end of this month. Surely this was proof more than anything that Vault Festival was home and dry?

But Vault Festival was not home and dry after all. It turned out the original issue of money was their final downfall after all. We don’t know the details, but based on their statement, it looks like it came down one particular funding application that they’d assumed they were going to get. Unfortunately, all of the other funding they were counting on was dependent on this one, and without that, the whole plan fell apart. All relaunch activities are cancelled, the newly-secured space isn’t going ahead, and most of all of the year-round staff are being made redundant. Reading between the lines in this article, it seems that they maybe hadn’t exhausted all options, but they’d run out of energy and are giving up. It’s not completely the end of the enterprise – the year-round space The Glitch that they ran next to the main space is still going ahead, but that’s all. If somebody does managed to rebuild the Vault Festival or something like it, it will have to be good as starting from scratch.

Odds and sods: November 2023 (and a bit of December)

Yes, this is the most behind schedule Odds and Sods I’ve done. December, as you might recall, we chocka full of catching up on reviews. As such, I considered just skipping this. But there were a couple of bit of big news from November, which need a recap. So tuck yourself in, for …

Stuff that happened in November (and a bit of December)

Luckily for me, December was the usual slow news month, which means that nothing I have reported has gone particularly out of date. Some of the things here had minor further developments after November passed, but nothing fundamentally changed.

So, two bits of big news, and two things probably nobody else cares about but I’m raising them anyway as they’re my two bugbears.

Vault festival home and dry?

So we begin with the big news – and for once, the big news is also the good news. Since February, the Vault Festival has been on tenterhooks following the shock news that the Vaults Theatre – who actually hold the lease for the space – decided they didn’t want the Vault Festival back. Unexpectedly losing your premises is very bad news for any business: if failure to find new premises doesn’t bring you down, the financial outlay of an unplanned move might. As 2023 moved on, fears of bankruptcy slowly receded as they continued recruiting for senior positions (something you wouldn’t do unless you were reasonably confident of being able to pay the salary). However, they couldn’t get a new location confirmed in time and conceded that the next Vault Festival couldn’t take place before autumn 2024.

But finally, Vault Festival has done it. They have announced they’ve secured a new venue. No announcement yet as to where it is, but it’s still in Zone 1 and, so they claim, of a comparable size to their old venue. There is, however, one crucial difference: they have rights to the space all year. The Vault Theatre did host a number events outside the Vault Festival – in this new space, however, the Vault Festival will be in charge all year. And, of course, the Vault Festival aren’t going to kick themselves out. I’m not sure how long they have the new venue for; lease renewal is a perilous business in itself and some theatres found to their cost. But we can cross that bridge when we get to it, probably at least ten years away.

Odds and sods: September 2023

So fringe season over and we’re back to doing updates this way.

The big subject, which I’ve been banging on about on Twitter in righteous fury mode, is the allegations against Russell Brand. Even if the criminal allegations are not proven, this really should serve as a wake-up all to the whole arts industry. There again, there have been a lot of scandals that should have been a wake-up call to the arts industry, and they did bugger all about it. If you want to know what I think should be done, read The questions we should be asking about Russell Brand.

But other stuff has been going on too.

Stuff that happened in September

I’m not going to repeat all the Russell Brand stuff here, save that there has been a development in the last few days on a related matter – which is positive, for one. But we’ll save that for last.

Vault festival 2024 is off – or is it?

Let’s start with the disappointing news. Vault Festival have been in a crisis since their landlord Vault Theatre – previously viewed as synonymous with the Vault Theatre – told the Vault Festival they wanted them out. The original panic was money – not so much a threat of bankruptcy, but the prospect of having to lay off its year-round staff – but that seems to have abated. Where Vault is stumbling is finding a suitable new venue. To some extend, this is a quandary of the Vault Festival’s own choosing. They could have struggled on with the five satellite venues they have near the Vaults itself, but the focus seems to have been on finding the right thing for the long term. And, so far, this has not coincided with securing a place suited for them.

However, the Vault Festival has already been blighted by two cancellations, and they’ve proven themselves to be resourceful in this situation, arranging “Fringe Futures” in 2021 and a very hastily arranged “Vault Transfer” in 2022. This time, their substitute festival is “A Pinch of Vault”, a work in progress festival which they’ve done before, but this time they’re upscaling it and moving it winter as their flagship festival. You remember I said they could do a festival with their satellite venues if they wanted to? That’s not too far what they’ve done. Not the exact same venues (Vaulty Towers, for example, seems to be run by Vault Theatre and is loyal to them), but something on a similar scale. And if all goes well, the next Vault proper will happen in autumn 2024 (although still probably on a reduced scale).

Roundup: Vault Festival 2023

REVIEWS: Skip to: Hutchy the Hare, Con-Version, Not Your Grandma’s Folk Tales, The Messiah Complex, Villain Interrupted, Sobriety on the Rocks, Vermin

The Vault Festival deserves a break. They were the first to be hit by Coronavirus and the last to come out of it. But one curtailed festival, one planned cancellation, and one disastrously unplanned cancellation later, Vault Festival has bounced back in 2023 with a full-run festival operating like nothing has happened. So what do they get in return? Their landlord has turned on them. The people who they rent their space from will not be letting the space to them again. No sooner are they out of one existential crisis they stumble into another.

I was planning to open my roundup with my observations of how Vault 2023 was operating in general, to see how this bodes for the future. For example, I thought the Festival Pass was insanely good value for money and I was surprised there wasn’t more uptake. However, that is now just tinkering around the edges, and instead we’re facing more fundamental questions of where the Vault Festival will run next year, and it they run at all.

As such, I’m going to go straight into the reviews, and also give my thoughts on another (unrelated) controversy. Then I will look at what options I can see for Vault 2024 and beyond. But first thing’s first …

The reviews:

Right then. Been quite a long time since I’ve done some Vault Festival reviews. As I only tend to do flying visits of Vault, I only have a few reviews to post so I don’t separate them into Pick of the Fringe and so on, like I do for the fringes. With Edinburgh and Brighton, I’m moving towards reviewing pretty much everything; with Vault, however, I’m only reviews things I enjoyed or saw potential to. If I hated something, I’m quiet. (Usual caveat applies: if you want to know what I really thought of something, my preferred currency for a bribe is beer.)

Hutchy the Hare

This can best be compared to the cult series Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared, itself best compared to Sesame Street, if they let Stephen King write the script and David Lynch direct it.

What’s worth watching: Vault Festival 2023

Skip to: All Falls Down, Salamander, Experiment Human, Police Cops: Badass Be Thy Name, Finlay and Joe, Isobel Rogers, Lachlan Werner, Hide, Notflix, The Dark Room, Criminally Untrue

One year ago, the Vault Festival suffered what was surely the worst possible disaster: with days to go before opening night, the whole festival was cancelled. It was very very very bad news for two reasons. Firstly, with Vault 2021 also cancelled, there was a clear three years between Vault festivals, with no guarantee that the community built up over the 2010s would still exist by the end of it. Worse, however, was the timing. 2021 was at least a planned cancellation; 2022, however, was supposed to be the big relaunch. Financially speaking, the last thing you want to do is cancel a large-scale event after doing all the up-front expenses.

Very easy to say this in hindsight, but an underground festival in London in the winter of 2022 never struck me as a good idea. Had they played it safe and gone for March-May 2022, I reckon it would have survived – but I don’t see how they could have postponed everything at the last moment. In different circumstances we could have been talking about one error of judgement that brought down one of the best loved festival of fringe theatre in the country … But – we are not. Vault 2023 is going ahead, and from the sound of things, it’s going to be as if nothing’s happened. Either Vault has deeper pockets than we realise, have good cancellation insurance up their sleeve, or they have a generous backer come to rescue we don’t know about. Whatever the reason, it’s back to business.

So this means it’s back to business for me too. I’ll shortly be going into my list of recommendations, but first, a recap on what to expect.

Odds and sods: January 2022

Sorry this is late. I do have an excuse for this – the first week of February was solid for me.

Anyway, let’s catch up on what happened since November Odds and Sods.

Stuff that happened in December and January

So this big news from January was the cancellation of Vault Festival 2022. Ouch. Perhaps a bit over-optimistic to commit to this, but precedent shows that cancelling a festival this close to the launch is really bad news financially. I wrote extensively about how this happened and what this might mean. However, we start to roundup of smaller news with a side-effect of this closer to home.

Vault festival cancelled, Laurels steps in

In the short term, the cancellation of the Vault festival leads to an issue over what happens to all the groups who were counting on their Vault slot as their big break. This might not be a big deal for, say, a comedian who had a Vault appearance as one date on a bigger tour, but it’s a huge blow if you were giving it all for a run at the Vault and nothing else. Well, The Laurels have made an unprecedented offer: accommodation and 100% box office income for shows wishing to transfer. And for those of you outside the north-east who have not caught up with this: The Laurels is the new project of Jamie Eastlake, who use to run Theatre N16 in London.

As far as I can tell, this is not a free-for-all: it’s an invitation to pitch. The pitch deadline has only just passed, so we’ll need to wait a little longer to see what we get. It may be difficult to separate who comes forwards from who gets chosen, but this may be or first clue of what sort of work The Laurels wants. Jamie Eastlake should be in a good position to organise this, having presumably had a lot of experience of London fringe theatre from N16 days. Keep your eyes peeled, because this could be very influential. It might be London’s loss is Whitley Bay’s gain.

Vault Festival 2022 cancelled, Vault Festival 2023 in the balance?

With 2021 written off as “2020, the sequel” in theatre, hope were pinned on a better 2022. The last thing anyone wanted was “2020 part 3: the nightmare continues”. Now, we’re barely into the new year, and we’ve got a dose of the latter. With only three weeks before its launch, Vault 2022 has been cancelled in its entirety. Worse, this was supposed to be the big relaunch. Whilst Brighton Fringe 2020 and Edinburgh Fringe 2021 were happy to downplay expectations and carry on with the few acts who still wanted to take part, Vault chose to cancel its 2021 festival back in July 2020 with the intention of a full-scale relaunch for its 10th anniversary year.

The worst news of all, however, is the timing of this. It’s one thing to cancel a big annual event before you’ve even started, but quite another to pull the plug at the last moment. For one thing, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of acts seeing the Vault Festival as the big break only to have it taken away from them at the last moment. That must be gutting. The bigger issue, however, is what happens to the Vault Festival itself. As Stephen Walker observed with relation to Buxton Fringe, most decisions to go ahead or cancel come when a decision has to be made on the money. It’s hard to imagine the Vault Festival could have got this close to a start date without a significant financial investment. Unless they have some very good insurance, that’s not coming back. And, unfortunately, the precedents we have to go on is not good.

But first of all, a look of how we got here.

Roundup: Vault Festival 2020

Skip to: Glitch, Skank, King Boris III

I have one last thing to catch up on for theatre prior to The Event, and that is the Vault Festival. This is going to be a short roundup, because – in order to juggle things around a very congested winter calendar – I split my visit over the last two weekends. And as we all know, the last week did not go ahead. The weekend before was not unscathed either, with one notable casualty being the Sunday performances of 39 Degrees which I wanted to see.

As always, not everything I see gets a review, so we’re down to three. But out of these three, there was an exceptional standard, far in excess of a normal Vault itinerary. Let’s see what we’ve got.

Glitch

This is difficult one to review impartially. It resonated a lot with me personally, and had I been reviewing this for a different publication I would have asked for a second opinion from someone more detached. But sod it, it’s my blog, I can say what I want, and if I don’t say this, I’m not sure anyone else will.

Glitch is set in the world of speed-runs. I actually know what speed-runs are (don’t ask me why, you don’t need to know), but if you don’t, this will need a bit of explaining. Not to be confused with e-sports (don’t get her started on e-sports), this is a special kind of computer game competition where you have to get from beginning to end as quickly as possible, cheating allowed*. Reckon you could quickly defeat all nine bosses in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time? Loo-ser. There are defect in the code that enable you to zip from first dungeon to last. Eight minutes easy. Yes, really. There is even niche following, and it’s when a contest comes to Sutward that Kelly has a chance to take part.

Will Coronavirus clobber the fringe season?

Update 29/03/20: As you are probably aware, pretty much every prediction I have made so far with a resolution one way or the other turned out to be wrong. I will write an update once we have a better idea what’s happening – in the meantime, here’s the original for you to laugh and point at.

It’s not often I do stand-alone news articles. Normally I wait until the end of the month and put it in odds and sods. However, this is a fast-moving situation and what was idle speculation a few days ago is already a serious possibility. So, it turns out that, unlike Sars, Swine Flue, Bird Flu and pretty much every other lurgi where the panic was way out of proportion, with Coronavirus there actually is something to worry about. There’s been lockdowns of various degrees going on all over Europe, and this morning the Scottish Government has announced what appears to be a ban on events with more than 500 people. It’s not clear exactly how that’s going to work, and one important detail is that the reason for the ban is to free up emergency services to deal with Coronavirus cases, rather than preventing the spread. Even as I write this, the English football leagues have announced a one-month delay of their matches.

What’s worth watching: Vault Festival 2020

Skip to: And She, Ask Me Anything, The Future is Mental, Badass Be Thy Name, Skank, 39 Degrees

I know I already have two unfinished articles on the go, but I’ve got to hury out this one because the Vault Festival has begun. And now that I know enough about who’s coming to pick some recommendations, I’d better get a move on before they’re gone.

First, a reminder of what the Vault Festival is about. It is, as some people acclaim, London’s answer to the Edinburgh Fringe? Well, yes and no. It is true that the work on offer in the Vault Festival is quite similar to what you see on the Fringe circuit – indeed, a lot of stuff goes to both – but unlike the Fringe, it’s a curated festival instead of an open festival. And, in all fairness, it’s couldn’t work as anything but an open festival, with applications outstripping capacity something like 6:1. It you’re after an environment where anyone can put on a play and you can choose what you want to see, it’s better to think of the whole of London throughout the year as the “London Fringe”. But if you’re after the festival atmosphere, the Vault Festival is the closest thing you’ll find in the winter months.

For anyone coming to the Vault for the first time, apart from understanding what kind of festival this is, there’s only two things you need to know. Firstly, it’s an evening-only festival on weekdays (not surprising as the bulk of the audience will be coming from work) running Wednesday-Sunday. Secondly, you think Edinburgh Fringe tickets are expensive? Welcome to London. Rest of it you’ll pick up as you go along. For Vault Festival veterans, the biggest change I’ve noticed this year is that they’ve moving away from classifying everything as theatre, comedy or lates and instead adapting a wider list of categories like the fringes to. There should be no more shoehorning of musicals and spoken word into theatre or comedy.

Big disclaimer: this is not a comprehensive list of what to see, just the ones that I know about. This caveat applies to all fringes but especially applies to the Vault Festival, where I’ve only heard of a small fraction of the acts that are on there. I’m also leaving out perennial comedy returners (Dark Room, Notflix and the MMORPG show) as they have more than enough publicity. Other than that, this is a single list. Some I wholeheartedly recommend seeing, others I don’t know much about but I consider notable. So this year it turns out I’ve quite a northern-heavy list.

(All events are in the Vaults itself unless otherwise noted.)

And She

One of the big news stories from the north-east is Northern Stage’s “takeover” of Vault. I reported on this back in December, and (depending on what the new artistic director of Northern Stage chooses to pursue) may replace the Edinburgh Fringe as their preferred presence. But right now I’m only interested in reporting which of these is worth seeing, and the easy pick from here is Bonnie and the Bonnettes. “Bonnie” is the stage name of Cameron Sharp, and their first play, Drag Me To Love, was his story of moonlighting in Doncaster when he was fourteen. The story was mostly told in a very funny way, and the ending was unexpectedly poignant.

However, they are bringing their follow-up play to the Vault: And She, a play about their mothers. I haven’t managed to see this yet so I don’t know how this compares to their debut, but Northern Stage clearly thought highly enough of this one to pick it over their successful first play. Whatever is in store, Bonnie and the Bonnettes is one of the most memorable acts in the north-east, with the ensemble of three all bringing individual characters to the fore. This is on the 8th & 9th February at 6.10 p.m.

Ask Me Anything

Northern Stage isn’t the only Newcastle Theatre turning their attention south instead of north. Live Theatre’s co-production with The Paper Birds is also heading London’s way as part of its tour. The Paper Birds have toured many productions before, but by far the most memorable one was Mobile, a piece of verbatim theatre done inside a caravan with some amazing staging.

Ask Me Anything is just as ambitious, but in a different way. The group asked teenagers from all over the country to write in with questions they have about anything. This means the play has to cater to two very different audiences: teenagers wanting to prepare for the less predictable world of adulthood, and the rest of us who see how things have, or have not, changed for teenagers. It’s currently running at Live Theatre, and I haven’t seen it yet, but I saw the preview last summer that was promising. It’s at it s strongest, however, when they do their innovative staging, and not just making up stage plus auditorium to look like a teenager’s bedroom. See this on 7.15 p.m. on the 11th – 15th February.

The Future is Mental

This one is on my list as something that is interesting and different. When the Vault Festival expanded out of the space under Waterloo station, one venue they took on was the Network Theatre, a nearby amateur theatre. As part of the bargain, they get a slot of their own in the festival. Far from the village hall production from Hot Fuzz, Network Theatre put up a good standard against the professionally-trained actors that dominate the festival. The one thing that does stand out is that their plays are relatively safe compared to what you usually see here. And I like that – in a festival where so many people are scrabbling to be the next best thing with something innovative and different from everyone else, it’s a refreshing change to have a group that stays conventional.

It’s not entirely in the comfort zone – Network Theatre still take on new writing of their own here, and this one is a collection of short-stories set in the near future, drawing, we are told, on Black Mirror, Margaret Attwood and Killing Eve. This shows on the 18th – 23rd February at 7.45 p.m. in the Network Theatre.

Police Cops: Badass Be Thy Name

The Pretend Men had an unexpected hit in 2015 with Police Cops, a parody of basically every 1970s TV cop show ever made. It’s almost like they sat down with a list of every cop show cliche ever used and worked it in into one hour, with a highly energetic show that earned them praise and sell-out Edinburgh Fringe runs. This was followed up with Police Cops in Space, a parody of basically every 1970s TV sci-fi show ever made, which is almost like they sat down with a list of every sci-fi show cliche ever etc. etc. But where do you go from there? There is a downside to the smash hit. Keep going with the same and eventually your audience tires of it. But do something too different and you lose the thing that built your following in the first place.

Well, they’ve gone for a mashup in what seems to be the format of Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights. But instead of our kick-ass martial arts hero teaming up with a cowboy or a knight, he’s apparently teaming up with a rave-loving dude from Madchester. I’m not suer the timeline quite matches up here, but to be fair, neither did the Jackie Chan films. I didn’t manage to see this at Edinburgh but the reaction was very positive. They’ve just finihsed a run at Soho Theatre, but you can catch them again on the 18th – 21st March at 9.15 p.m.

Skank

Now for another play I’ve not seen but I’ve heard a lot about. Skank is on my list because this is a showcase of what we may be seeing a lot more of in the future: the rapidly rising fringe theatre scene in Manchester. In the last few years, Manchester has become noted for both a year-round fringe theatre scene similar to London’s, and an open festival fringe similar to Edinburgh/Brighton/Buxton/etc. So get used to this – we can expect Manchester to have a lot more influence on fringe theatre inside and outside festival season in the future. (This particular play started off in Yorkshire, but it was in Manchester where this really got its name.)

Kate dream of being a successful writer but ends up spending all her energy to try to shag Sexy Gary. Skank is billed as a “Tesco value northern Fleabag”, although the trailers I’ve seen look like the altogether more excruciating humour of Peep Show. It also seems, like the famous play it compares itself to, there’s a lot more Kate’s character than this, and there’s an underlying theme of insecurity throughout this. It’s on the 14th & 15th March in The Horse and Stables at 7.00 p.m.

39 Degrees

Most of my Vault Festival recommendations come from elsewhere, but my last recommendation is on the strength of a group’s performance same time same place last year. I really liked RedBellyBlack’s Tacenda last year, a cleverly-crafted tale where the same day is played over four times, until the two women involved correctly choose the right battles to pick. The real strength in this, however, was their devised theatre making. I’m used to a high standard of devised theatre, this ensemble of three executed it perfectly.

So this year they are doing a play about the heatwave on July, when the temperature reached 39 degrees (except for me – I was in Florence that day and it was 42 degrees, you wimps). The Beano character embarking on his quest to destroy the country in a hilarious slapstick accident may or may not feature in this, but otherwise they’re not giving many clues away. On the 10th – 15th March at 7.30 p.m.

And there’s your list. I’m going to be around on the 14th-15th and 21st-22nd March. Looking forward to seeing how these do.