Blue Elephant Theatre, Camberwell

On Monday, we announced that we would be surrendering our building back to Southwark Council just before Christmas. Blue Elephant Theatre opened at 59a Bethwin Road in 1999 in a Victorian building which survived the blitz when almost everything else in the area was destroyed. It has been a wonderful home to so much of our work and we are so sad to be saying goodbye to it.

Why are you leaving your building?

We cannot afford to keep it – if we try any longer, we will have to close almost immediately. Although losing Arts Council funding has played a significant role, there has not been any one reason for our financial difficulties, rather a perfect storm of losing regular funding, major life events in staff lives and the challenging climate charities and arts organisations are operating in currently.

Did you consider closing?

Yes, very strongly. Every time it seemed like the wisest option, we would hear so much about the impact Blue Elephant has had since 1999 – from artists whose first professional job was there to participants returning as employees to parents worried about the lack of services and safe spaces for young people in the area.

So, what next?

We want to continue delivering our most impactful projects and we have so many connections locally that we have offers of free and low cost space for these.

After Christmas, we will offer not one but two early years projects, supporting development in 0 – 4 year olds through creative play and offering caregivers opportunities to come together and make friends. These Playing Up! sessions have been described by one parent as “the most inclusive feeling child play group we have been to”.

There will be a term of extra-curricular youth theatre offered from January to March, as we continue to try to secure longer-term funding for Young People’s Theatre to offer the members the consistency of delivery they deserve.

We hope to return to delivering Creative Minds workshops in schools, having paused this term. For the last few years, the focus of these workshops has been on supporting emotional development and well-being and building a growth mindset. “No one else out there offers the support you do to young people” (Headteacher)

We also want to continue creating original pieces of family theatre and bringing them to community spaces. We have had a fantastic time performing in Southwark libraries and they seem very happy to have us back in future.

Will you only be working in Southwark?

We love our neighbourhood in Camberwell/Walworth but we were also very close to Lambeth and have connections and opportunities to develop work there.

Earlier this year, we also had a very successful tour of Way Back When around community spaces in South Ribble in Lancashire. This is an area of the country where the arts are underfunded and so less available and the Blue Elephant has always aimed to dismantle barriers to engaging with the arts. We have been invited back to work in Lancashire and hope to develop these relationships.

Will you still support artists?

Inevitably we are not going to be able to support artists as we did previously as we don't have the same platform to provide – but this has been the case for some years due to lack of resources. We would love to redevelop and relaunch Elephantology and to continue to support early career and disabled artists but it may take a little while to develop the shape this will take.

Will all these plans definitely go ahead?

Everything until March should go ahead. We have a lot of work to do to keep going from April and we desperately need to reach our Big Give Christmas Campaign target by Tuesday 9th December as that is a huge part of our survival plan. Donations to this campaign will be doubled until we hit our target and these can be made here.