Maria Kempinska: stand-up success
Article Date: Oct 11 2006
For 25 years Jongleurs has been the stage on which tomorrow’s TV stars have proved themselves. Paul Merton, Rory Bremner, Graham Norton and Ruby Wax all learnt the art of stand-up at a venue that was created using a £300 overdraft by the daughter of Polish refugees.
Maria Kempinska opened the doors of the first Jongleurs club on a February evening in London in 1983. The bill was a mix of comedy and cabaret followed by dance, drink and food. It was an instant hit. On her first night, she had 400 people trying to get in.
Her timing was perfect. Mother-in-law jokes on TV were finally starting to fall flat, as comedy became more serious and political. Other than the Comedy Club, which had room for a maximum of 100, there were few platforms for the new breed of stand-up, other than in the back of pubs.
Jongleurs was on a different scale. Using an old roller-skating rink above a pub in Clapham, Kempinska could seat 300, as well as giving them something to drink and ending with a disco.
Kempinska had learnt early how to put on a show. She grew up on a council estate in Watford, speaking Polish as her first language. At 11, she won a scholarship to the local convent school, where every Lent she put on a cabaret to raise money for charity. The nuns might not have wholly approved, but Kempinska had found her calling.
After school she became a drama teacher, then worked in advertising, taking theatre classes all the while. For the first two years of Jongleurs, she ran the club on Friday nights and continued to work during the week as an actor’s agent.
‘At the beginning, it was really exciting. You didn’t know what anyone was going to say. It was great fun, though I was flying by the seat of my pants. I just knew that I had to sell all 300 seats. It’s not like a play, when you know after a night whether you have a formula that’s going to work or not.’
By its nature, alternative comedy was anarchic, so Kempinska knew that if her bill had any chance of running smoothly, she had to speak to her acts directly. Even now, she likes to know exactly how a show is being produced. ‘In a live performance, you can’t afford to make mistakes,’ she explains. ‘I like people reporting back to me. I expect hundreds of calls a day.’
Staging it right
She chose the name Jongleurs, a medieval term for wandering minstrels, partly because it was tricky, so she thought people would remember it, and partly because it would be recognised internationally.
‘I have always thought in bigger terms without knowing the steps. My biggest difficulty, however, has always been breaking things down to make it all happen. I know the possibilities, but I struggle with how I get there. I am a great one for using other people’s templates. Just show me the route.’
Through a friend she met John Davy in 1985, who became first her business partner and then her husband. He had a background in retail and together they started to put in place a framework for the business.
She had already started to build up demand at Christmas, putting on shows in other venues during the season. ‘The question was whether we could get enough comedians to sustain a second club. Yes, we could in December, but could we do it full-time?’
Her approach was ‘build it and they will come.’ ‘We are a nation of comedians. England has the best sense of humour ever. Comedy is in the blood. As we opened more venues, more acts came out of the woodwork.
‘We had to devise a system to help them perform to the best of their ability and let them practise. That was the mechanic that we had to put in place. How else could we know that they were going to be good enough?’
