During the 2020 lockdown, I moved back to my family home in Surrey and used the time to focus on the biggest goal I had set myself after graduating from university: to open a theatre.

 

I began by contacting an exhaustive list of landowners around the South London/Surrey area, and met with the handful who replied to me positively. Among them was Brendan Maye, who ran Mayfield Lavender in Banstead. The iconic Lavender fields had become a local tourist attraction and an Instagram destination, featured in countless London travel guides. It seemed like the ideal backdrop for an elegant outdoor theatre experience. Brendan explained that the original site in Banstead wouldn’t be available for a number of reasons, but suggested that a sister site he was developing ten minutes up the road in Epsom could be a better fit. 

 

The Epsom site, equally resplendent with its rows of lavender stretching down long fields adjoining birch copses and fruit orchards, was to be fitted up with a cafe, gift shop, and, crucially, a link to the National Grid. Situated a short walk from Epsom Downs station, the site also had a regular train link into Central London, and prospective audiences would be able to tap in (thanks to the station’s location in TfL Zone 6) without the need for buying a paper train ticket. The location was perfect.

 

I kept in close contact with Brendan over the following six months, and we decided to join forces to establish Lavender Productions Ltd., with the plan to build a destination theatre set against an idyllic backdrop and the company to produce the shows that would perform on its stage.

 

I moved into the Epsom office in 2022 to begin a year’s worth of preparations for our first show and decided that Annie Get Your Gun would be our inaugural offering. What better way to open our new theatre than with Irving Berlin’s anthem to the arts, “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” ringing out over the rows of lavender? However, it would be a long year ahead and an awful lot of work to get us to that first performance.

 

I was, frankly, unprepared for a lot of the challenges that lie ahead, not least how agriculturally focussed a lot of my work would be; and with very limited resources to achieve our goal, I found myself at the wheel of heavy building machinery before I knew it. A real baptism of fire, and always battling the elements in the greenfield location, I donned my steel toe-capped boots as we broke ground and put in countless hours of work alongside a small but mighty team of builders to create something special out of a patch of uneven grass in front of a huddle of trees.

 

Our Lighting Designer, Adam King, put it well in an interview that was published at the time of the show’s opening; 

 

“On my first visit to the site, there was literally nothing there aside from a dug-out section indicating where the theatre was going to be! The initial site visits for projects like these are always interesting as, unlike a conventional theatre, you are effectively designing for something that doesn’t yet exist. You’re building everything from scratch and need to ensure you take every single thing into consideration.”

 

Adam and his Production LX, Jake Rowe, advised how we might be able to get power up to the theatre site from a distribution board in one of the nearest greenhouses, and so a trench was dug to bury a cable that would run into one of two shipping containers, which would later become the actors’ dressing rooms. This may feel like unnecessary detail, but I think it illustrates the breadth of work that needed to be considered before I could even begin the mammoth task of producing the first London revival of Annie Get Your Gun in almost fifteen years.

 

Over the winter of 2022-2023, the theatre slowly began to rise between the barren branches of the trees that encircled it, and it took an enormous amount of faith to hold on to the vision that by the summer those branches would again be laden with bright leaves and underneath them actors would be singing and dancing to paying audiences in glorious sunshine.

 

With the notable exception of the glorious sunshine, that faith was not misplaced.

 

Tickets went on sale, the creative team was coming together, and an opening night was set. We had a deadline and I worked non-stop to ensure it was met. Among many other things, I learnt that there are, in fact, more than twenty-four hours in a day.

 

In the end, it was painfully close to the wire, with the giant wooden letters (still unpainted) that spelled out the Lavender Theatre name being screwed into place mere seconds before the gates finally opened to the public. The first preview went up late, but not embarrassingly so, and I was relieved when nobody missed the last train back into town. 

 

It didn’t sink in that evening, as the audience rose to their feet in “thunderous ovation” (thank you, Mark Shenton), nor would it for quite some time thereafter, but we had done it. What started as an ambition plotted around my kitchen table in lockdown turned into a real thing. With over forty people employed in the cast, crew, and orchestra, and many more front of house and around the site, the Lavender Theatre remains my biggest project and proudest achievement. 

 

Thousands of people bought tickets, dressed up in their best western outfits, and endured the whims of the Great British summer as we launched the Lavender Theatre with five-star reviews and an incredible buzz. SuRie, who played Annie Oakley in the show, won the Offie (Off-West End Theatre Award) for Best Performance in a Musical, and BroadwayWorld called us the best musical revival of that summer. 

 

Although this probably reads like an exhaustive account of the project, I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what went into bringing the theatre to life, and great thanks are owed to those who guided me along the way, not least Danielle Tarento, Brendan and Lorna Maye, Lisa Masters, Taylor Garrett, and my long-suffering housemates.