Ken Chubb and his writer wife Shirley Barrie started the Wakefield Tricycle Company in a King’s Cross pub in 1972.
Childhood sweethearts who had met while teaching, they named their endeavour after The Pindar of Wakefield where Ken had popped in for a lunchtime pint.
After chatting to the landlord, he secured the chance to stage one-act plays in the back room at lunchtimes.
Over the next eight years the company – named the tricycle because it had three members – performed new writing and children’s shows in various London venues including The Bush and Kings Head in Islington.
Shirley Barrie co founded the Tricycle Theatre now the Kiln in Kilburn with husband Ken Chubb. (Image: Handout) Then in 1980 local residents Ken and Shirley persuaded Brent Council to open a permanent theatre on Kilburn High Road.
Shirley previously told the Ham&High: “The minute we stepped inside the Forester’s Hall – we knew this was the place! It was divided up into multiple offices with partitions – but the outline of the small proscenium arch and the lovely vaulted ceiling was still there. It felt right.”
The couple were co-artistic directors of The Tricycle for four years, running the building with a small, dedicated team and working with the likes of Janet Suzman, Neil Pearson, Adrian Mitchell, and Prunella Scales.
Shirley wrote some of the plays, their children Alexis and Robin mucked in to help with cables and lights, and future London Mayor Ken Livingstone held meetings in the bar on Saturdays.
“Our policy was to be a theatre in the community and reflective of that community, through the production of new work,” said Shirley, who died in 2018.
“Because of the cultural makeup of Brent, we had a particular interest in promoting plays of interest to West Indian, South Asian and Irish, as well as English audiences. We also actively promoted plays by and for women and produced work for young audiences.”
Ken, who was born in Ontario in 1944, went on to produce programmes for Channel 4 before returning to Canada where he organised writing workshops and became a story and script editor for film and TV.
The couple handed over the theatre that they founded to Nicolas Kent who over nearly three decades forged a reputation for exciting, often political new writing for Brent’s diverse communities.
It was then taken over by Indhu Rubasingham, who oversaw a major revamp into a 300-seat theatre, renamed it Kiln, and cemented its status as a major player on the London fringe with productions transferring to the West End.
Rubasingham left in December 2023 to run The National Theatre, handing over to Amit Sharma.
Ken Chubb died peacefully on March 20 at St Joseph’s Hospital, Toronto. He is survived by his children Alexis Chubb and Robin Chubb.
