The White Bear, on Kennington Park Road, is a pub of two halves. The front half is an Irish sports pub with lots of regulars and rather an edgy atmosphere. The back half is an extraordinarily intimate, award-winning fringe theatre with a capacity of just 50. It was established in 1988 and actors who’ve appeared there include Emily Watson, Tamzin Outhwaite, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Mark Little, Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and Natalie Imbruglia.

Plays we’ve seen here:

* One about Byron, the Shelleys, and their frantic sex lives.

* A play featuring objectionable middle class couples arguing and cheating on each other over barbecues  – or we saw half of it anyway (the problem with leaving a theatre this small during the interval is your absence will definitely be noticed in the second half – sorry about that guys).

* A good production of Noel Coward’s Still Life, the play on which Brief Encounter was based, which is about an abortive affair.

* Recently we saw Coward, a rather unflattering depiction of Noel Coward and his sex life.

So is the White Bear the theatre equivalent of the Locker Room? No – they had a play by Ayn Rand recently so we’re guessing that was a sex free zone. Check out their programme here and get along.

Here’s a photo of Coward (that’s him, sitting down):