The Nursery Theatre

Founding (2009)

Jules Munns, Judith Amsenga, Heather Urquhart, and Robin Steegman founded The Nursery Theatre in 2009 as a UK arts educational charity. Munns had trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and was also associated with The Maydays Brighton. Amsenga trained at LAMDA from 2005. The early company operated from a leaky railway arch, then through temporary office units and other transient spaces.

Slapdash International Improv Festival

From 2010, The Nursery co-runs the Slapdash International Improv Festival, which launched at the Old Vic Tunnels and has become London's longest-running improv festival.

Broadgate Theatre

The Nursery opened The Nursery Theatre Broadgate at 2 Finsbury Avenue (via Whitecross Place), London EC2M 2PP, in collaboration with British Land, Broadgate Estates, and Theatre Delicatessen. When British Land offered the space, founders Munns, Amsenga, and Urquhart pursued it as a permanent home after years of transient existence.

Notable Members

Heather Urquhart is also a performer with Showstopper! The Improvised Musical, the Olivier Award-winning company. Jules Munns served as Artistic Director of The Nursery until May 2020 and has cross-pollinated extensively with The Maydays and other UK companies.

The Nursery Theatre is London's long-form improv charity, founded in 2009 and co-producing Slapdash International (London's longest-running improv festival) from its Broadgate home near Liverpool Street.

The Nursery Theatre's central recurring event is the annual Nursery Theatre Festival, which the company has run since its early years as a platform for emerging theatre makers to present new work spanning performance and participatory formats. The venue presents regular improv shows at its Broadgate site near Liverpool Street and at The Green in Southgate, with programming that flows from its training curriculum through to public performances by company ensembles and graduating students.

The Nursery Theatre was founded in 2009 by Jules Munns, Judith Amsenga, Heather Urquhart, and Robin Steegman as a London arts educational charity dedicated to expanding access to the performing arts through improvisation. The company began performing in transient venues including a railway arch before establishing a permanent home at The Nursery Theatre Broadgate at 2 Finsbury Avenue, near Liverpool Street, in a partnership with the property developer British Land, as well as a second base at The Green in Southgate. From its inception, the founders built the organization as a training institution as much as a performance venue, developing a curriculum of improv classes that fed into a public shows program and the annual Nursery Theatre Festival. Robin Steegman served as co-artistic director from 2009 until 2015, departing to establish Robin Linde Productions and the touring Caravan Theatre project.

The Nursery Theatre became one of London's most active improv training hubs during the 2010s, with its charitable status enabling it to center access and community participation as explicit institutional missions. The British Land partnership that brought the company into the Broadgate commercial development was unusual for an arts charity, positioning an improv school and performance space within a major City of London office and retail estate. The organization trained and presented a generation of London improvisers across its Broadgate and Southgate venues, contributing to a broader expansion of improv as both a performance genre and an educational tool in the United Kingdom.