Here the great housewife superstar of alternative theatre measures out her life and its many disasters in packets of food. Ripping them open, she scatters their contents, creating an impressionistic map of the planet. Stephen Harper’s bemused, down-to-earth Northern manner makes him a deliciously incongruous and strangely affecting Vian.From a fresh, left-field approach to biography, we move to a lovely reinvention of autobiography at the Pit, where Bobby Baker is reviving her Box Story. “You’re not black,” objects the ticket lady at the cinema when he explains that he is the author of the original novel. “I could be,” is his enigmatic reply.There’s a ludicrous inversion of these impulses in the cod-hardboiled story of I Spit on Your Graves, in which a black youth (decked out in a blond wig) improbably passes himself off as white so as to infiltrate the affections and the knickers of a rich, racist heiress and so eventually avenge his lynched brother. His craving to become an honorary member of the art form’s royalty is affectionately sent up in deadpan scenes such as the one when he goes to a barber’s with an LP cover and asks to be made to look like Dizzy Gillespie (“This could take the whole afternoon”).

It becomes clear that for such a passionate jazz-lover, being Caucasian was a fate that you strove to live down. As the Left Bank bohemian expires in the fatal attack, fractured episodes from his past and from his horrified recollection of the grotesquely bad film are played out like distorted images of each other. In 1939, Boris Vian – French novelist, poet, surrealist, subversive and jazz musician – died of a coronary while watching a cinematic travesty of one of his novels, I Spit on Your Graves. Paul Hunter fixes on this bizarre fact and makes it the recurring point of reference in I’m a Fool to Want You, the show he has conceived and directed for the physical theatre group Told by an Idiot.
A droll, captivating m?nge of mime, curt dialogue and superbly played jazz (from the pianist/composer Zoe Rahman and the trumpeter Mark Crown), the piece could almost be subtitled Scenes from the Death of Boris Vian. “Even if we have to bus them over the river.”"The most important thing”, Law adds, “is to keep its wonderful communal quality It’s the only theatre like it in London.”.

It’s surely the most heartfelt piece of film criticism on record. He is unwilling to discuss it in detail before the work is confirmed, but emphasises that the theatre will remain in Southwark in spirit, if not always in location “Our audience will still be welcome,” he says. While the theatre is closed, Lan plans to take it walkabout, working with other theatre companies in different places. [You can still see the original green and white tiles in the interior.] We are also keen to ensure the building still makes narrative sense to its audience.

The street can accommodate quite a lot of heterogeneity, and our plans are sensitive to that There will be no sense of the theatre dominating the street. We want people to feel as welcome as ever.”Before that, there is a new, final season to run in the current building, which will open with Lan’s production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth and include a new Martin Crimp play directed by the acclaimed Luc Bondy, as well as neglected plays by new directors. “It’s crucial to keep a sense of where the theatre has come from,” he says “It’s a magical place.”Tompkins agrees. “We are keeping the old butcher’s shop which currently houses the box office, for example. Capacity will increase only through an additional 80 seats in the balcony, with the option for more should a production demand it Law, for one, is immensely relieved. Theatre demands that you recreate and perform a piece over and over again.