Published: 26 January, 2012
by JOSH LOEB

It’s not every day you meet a world famous Nobel Prize winner at the opening night of a fringe production at the back of an inconspicuous basement bar.

But theatre company Second Skin’s assistant director Jessica Ruano wasn’t lying when she told me last week that playwright and novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, would be at the Pheonix Artist Club on Tuesday to see the UK premiere of his 1986 play La Chunga.

The Peruvian writer travelled to London to visit the unpretentious club and bar, long treasured as a haunt of Theatre­land’s lowly ice-cream vendors and box office “kids” as well as struggling writers and actors, and the occasional successful one.

Mr Llosa told me La Chung, which is set in a bar in 1950s Peru, had been produced many times “usually in small theatres, more or less marginal or fringe”.

He added: “I like that. I think it’s a kind of vocation for the play. This place is a natural environment for it because it is set in a little bar, cozy and somewhat primitive and dark.”

The writer was involved in politics in his home country for many years and has also worked as a journalist since he was a teenager, and he told me the daily grind of hack work and reporting was a source of inspiration for his fiction.

He also had optimistic things to say about the future of theatre in times of financial dire straits and described London as “the capital of Europe” for the arts. “For culture, uncertainty is very good,” Mr Llosa said.

“So I think that will be an advantage of this crisis. It also provides a very loyal audience for the theatre, because in times of trouble people want to escape the real world and will immediately go to fiction, to the parallel reality of fiction.”