After eight incredible years, Wildcard Theatre Company are deeply saddened to announce our closure. 

Back in 2015, Wildcard Theatre Company was formed by a number of acting graduates from The Oxford School of Drama. We envisioned a company that was all about championing opportunities that took a chance on the unknown talent… aka the “Wildcard”. Since then, Wildcard Theatre Company evolved into a charity which aimed to engage new audiences and provide a home for emerging artists. We achieved this through our multi-award winning productions; our heavily subsidised rehearsal studios; and through our artist development and educational programmes which operated both locally and nationally. Joey Dawson was appointed CEO and James Meteyard was appointed Artistic Director in 2016. Tom Ratcliffe and Jenna Fincken took over as Executive Directors in 2021.

Our aim was to develop stories that promoted positive social change through productions that embraced the liveness of theatre. Our productions were performed across the UK, including the multi-award winning Electrolyte, and Whatsonstage Award nominated Ruckus.

Wildcard Studios, the four-storey listed building located just off Oxford Street in London’s West End, opened in 2019. This had five heavily subsidised rehearsal rooms with a free study space available for artists. The charity saw over 4,000 bookings at the studios during its 3 year period in spite of the pandemic, and engaged with over 1,200 individual companies and artists in the process.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we received support through Arts Council England’s Culture Recovery Fund. This meant that we were able to adapt our programme to go online, launching FULL HOUSE. Wildcard engaged with 7,232 people from March – September 2020 through this programme of work which included free online workshops with Tanika Gupta, James Graham, Anna Jordan, and Simon Stephens. Following this success, Wildcard launched EMPOWERMENT, our education and outreach department, in Spring 2021. Our series of workshops TRAINING GROUND launched with great success, offering 68 workshops to over 600 unique customers in the first year.

Having taken this time to consider our options after the closure of our Wildcard Studios at the end of last year, we feel as a collective we’re not in a position to achieve our aims as effectively and dynamically as we previously have in the current financial climate. This has led to the difficult decision to close this wonderful chapter in our lives. It will take us a few months to complete this process.

Whilst Wildcard will no longer be creatively contributing to the theatre landscape, we’re pleased to announce that we will be working with our great friends and supporters The Pleasance Theatre in setting up a WILDCARD grant to support their Associate Artist scheme, a scheme that really helped Wildcard in our early stages of our company. The Pleasance will release more information about this in the coming months.

Wildcard will forever be exceptionally proud of achieving far more than we ever dreamed of when starting as a graduate company eight years ago. We want to say a huge thank you to all of the incredible artists we have worked with, and all of the wonderful humans that have supported us over the years. It has been a beautiful journey.

With love,

Wildcard 💚