Opened in 1969, the Royal Court’s tiny second stage gave many of our best dramatists their big break. We look back on its history of innovation, and playwrights recall how the Jerwood Upstairs shaped their careers

Strange to think that a small room, 30ft by 40ft, has transformed British theatre. But the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court in London, as it’s now officially known, has had an impact wildly disproportionate to its size. It has kick-started the careers of dramatists such as Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and Polly Stenham, launched directors like Danny Boyle and Roger Michell, and produced a musical mega-hit, The Rocky Horror Show.

Its beginnings were far from promising. The theatre was set up in 1969, at the instigation of Bill Gaskill, in a club-cum-rehearsal room at the top of the theatre. Gaskill wanted the Court to acknowledge the explosion of studio spaces in the late 1960s and provide an outlet for radical, experimental work. But Nicholas Wright, the theatre’s first director, admitted the opening season was “a critical disaster”. And, within the Court, there were hostile voices. Lindsay Anderson scathingly referred to the Theatre Upstairs as “the Gaskill” and dismissed the whole fringe culture as “a self-glorifying ghetto”. Even Gaskill later said that, once you have two theatres, you tend to “siphon off” the really dangerous work.

Yet I would argue that the Upstairs has done infinitely more good than harm. It has provided a shop window for legions of new writers. It has allowed directors and designers to experiment with space. Above all, it has made risk possible, with its “right to fail” philosophy; this can provoke embarrassment in a big space, but seems perfectly acceptable in a small one.

Right from the start, the Upstairs felt – and smelled – different. From those early years, I recall a weird array of experiences. Howard Brenton’s Christie in Love with its murderous hero in a chicken-wire pen full of tattered newspapers; Heathcote Williams’s AC/DC, with its simulated trepanning of the skull of the late Victor Henry; the multi-authored Lay By, which graphically explored the details of a motorway rape. Not least there was Caryl Churchill’s 1972 play, Owners, which dealt with landlord-tenant relationships and announced the arrival of a major talent I signally failed to recognise.

What made the Upstairs special was not merely the eclectic programming. It was the visceral nature of the experience: audience members had nowhere to hide from the sex and violence that inevitably loomed large. Over the years, this sense of direct involvement has proved one of the venue’s greatest assets, as well as the source of periodic problems. It was one of the reasons for the instant success of Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show in 1973. I still recall the opening night, when we sat on rickety old cinema seats to be pulverised by a seductive mix of spoof horror, rock’n'roll and transvestite camp. Long before the term was coined, this was “in-yer-face” theatre. The madcap gaiety of Jim Sharman’s production seemed at odds with the Court’s sober, puritanical image.

Physicality has always been one aspect of the space’s appeal. So, too, have focus and concentration. Athol Fugard insisted in 1973 that Sizwe Banzi Is Dead be premiered Upstairs rather than Downstairs: partly because he was “plain scared”, partly because he loved the idea of playing to 70 or so people. His was one of countless shows that, over 40 years, eventually transferred to the Court’s larger house. One of the most significant was Jim Cartwright’s Road, a 1980s play about the crucifying effect of unemployment that only premiered Upstairs because of a lack of managerial faith. Meanwhile, despite being commissioned for the Upstairs, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse found its way to the main stage because its lead actor, Janet McTeer, in a case of sheer heightism, was considered too tall for the studio space.

For all the diversity of the Upstairs, one period has defined its historic importance: the 1994-95 season of new writing masterminded by Stephen Daldry and literary manager Graham Whybrow. In six months, we were bombarded with work including Joe Penhall’s Some Voices, Nick Grosso’s Peaches and Judy Upton’s Ashes and Sand.

But if any play from that period has acquired legendary status, it is Sarah Kane’s Blasted. I remember still the shock of its first night: the confrontation with what seemed a catalogue of horror as Kane transferred the brutality of Serbian civil war to a British setting. If we critics got it wrong, it wasn’t just because of our collective myopia. It was also because the violence proved overpowering in such a tiny space. I don’t think it’s just the wisdom of hindsight to say that Blasted seemed a better play when revived Downstairs.

Since that heady era, the Upstairs has become more international, and more physically exploratory – sometimes both at once, as in Dominic Cooke’s promenade production of Vassily Sigarev’s Plasticine, where moving scenery let us explore every nook and cranny of an industrial town in the Urals. The space still acts as a showcase for new writers, of whom Polly Stenham, with That Face and Tusk Tusk, is the most famous current example.

And Harold Pinter’s 2006 performance in Krapp’s Last Tape reminded us that the Upstairs, because of its close-up nature, can be a venue for great acting. Like many recent events at the Upstairs, including the highly political My Name Is Rachel Corrie, Pinter’s performance reverberated around the globe. It also proved that you can, if you’re lucky, find infinite riches in a little room. MB

Joe Penhall

If you could make a living out of doing everything in the Upstairs, I’d do it. It’s the most honest space: theatre is essentially watching people doing things in a room, and it’s a really good room in which to see their actions in all their gory detail. In my play Some Voices, someone pours petrol over themselves and tries to set it alight. That’s pulverising when you’re 5ft away.

Theatre in the early 1990s was still stuck in the 1980s: the Royal Court was the only place that realised a new generation of writers was doing something different. Other theatres thought our plays were a bit rough, a bit weird, a bit dark – but that’s exactly what Stephen Daldry and Ian Rickson, the artistic and associate directors, were looking for. What really set the Upstairs apart was its much-vaunted right to fail. It embraced the possibility that a play could be a disaster and strapped itself in for the ride.

Plays staged Upstairs often aren’t slick, or elegant, or in the least bit traditional – but they are meticulous in their breaking of forms. That brutal aesthetic can be a straitjacket: plays would be rejected if they weren’t sufficiently provocative or out of control.

Mike Leigh

I worked in the Upstairs before it was even a theatre. In the mid-1960s, the space was used as a rehearsal room, with a bar at one end. Squaddies from the nearby Chelsea barracks would come to drink after hours. The English Stage Club put on experimental work on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Conditions were crummy: people performing at one end, people drinking at the other end, with the audience in between, struggling to concentrate.

I returned in 1973 with a play called Wholesome Glory, about a couple of po-faced vegetarians, Keith and Candice Marie. They were such great characters, I said we must make a film about them – and that became Nuts in May.

Stephen Poliakoff

The Royal Court was a glamorous, forbidding place for a young playwright in the early 1970s. The people running it were frightening: Bill Gaskill was a stern critic of everything, Lindsay Anderson was ferocious and John Dexter would flit around, saying things like: “All young playwrights’ plays are absolute rubbish, and yours are no exception.” You were supposed to argue – and I did, often. Things were much more relaxing at the Bush.

Even so, I tried hard to get a play staged Upstairs. It meant you had arrived. You never knew what might come out of that tiny room. My most vivid memory is of the first director of the Upstairs, Nicholas Wright, standing in the bar saying: “Does anybody want to see The Rocky Horror Show?” The preview was empty and he was trying to create an audience. And that show ran for year after year after year.

Polly Stenham

The Upstairs has a transformative magic you don’t much get anywhere else. It’s always an intense experience. It takes ages to get into the room: you have to climb all these stairs to this rough-and-ready attic, and once you’re inside, it’s so voyeuristic. As a writer, you can really take advantage of the audience’s closeness. My second play, Tusk Tusk, was written for the Upstairs, and I deliberately went for a realistic set so that people would feel they were perving on the characters. The room is the perfect size to make powerful material even more scary.

I’ve been going to the Theatre Upstairs since I was about eight: my father was a big fan of fringe theatre. What always astounded me was that, every time you went in, it looked like a different room: it could be in the round, it could be promenade. When I saw the Russian play Ladybird there, walking in was like entering a block of flats – it even smelled horrible.

Sam Shepard

I was living in London and working with the Hampstead Theatre Club when some actors I knew – including Stephen Rea and Tony Richardson – convinced me to try something at the Royal Court. In New York, I had been working in converted churches and basements, so the black-box atmosphere of the Upstairs was familiar.

After my play The Unseen Hand was staged there, I was asked if I’d like to try directing something. They said they’d get me some good actors – Rea, Bob Hoskins and Kenneth Cranham. They made the directing job easy, and gave me the courage to do it again.

The Upstairs was a great little laboratory where you could really experiment. It gives a writer a different perspective. You can see right away what’s working: it’s hard to fake anything in a small space.

David Hare

The real reason the Upstairs caught on was because the Royal Court was offered more good plays than it knew what to do with. When I was literary manager in 1970, I remember one admittedly exceptional week when we rejected plays by Peter Nichols, Simon Gray and Alan Bennett.

Early on, the Upstairs even attempted a kind of living newspaper called The Enoch Show. Every Royal Court dramatist was invited to contribute ever-changing material to a revue about Enoch Powell, who could, by coincidence, be seen every morning at Sloane Square station going to work.

Nick Wright was sensitive to younger writers shut out from the main stage: Caryl Churchill and Howard Brenton especially. I championed Howard Barker’s first play for performance. But Nick also wanted what was then called the counter-culture. At its most louche and glamorous, this meant Sam Shepard premieres, but it also meant Heathcote Williams and The Rocky Horror Show. The fringe and the mainstream were at the time viscerally opposed: the Upstairs offered a kind of wobbly bridge between them.

There were downsides. A laziness grew up that meant that if the artistic directorship didn’t really like a play they could always shove it on Upstairs, as a way of hedging their bets. As the years went by, it sometimes seemed as if Upstairs had become a kiddy’s climbing frame for playwrights who were judged “not ready” for Downstairs – whatever that meant.

There came to be something you could recognise as a Theatre Upstairs play: hopeless, socially realistic and violent. But lately its matchless record has been refreshed. A theatre that has just programmed first plays by DC Moore, Polly Stenham and Alexi Kaye Campbell can look any playhouse in the world in the eye.

Interviews by Maddy Costa