Angel spreads her wings in Theatreland

A new impresario may revolutionise the West End stage, writes David Lister

Investors in West End theatre are known as "angels", but rarely do they descend and work a financial miracle as unexpectedly as Donna Knight.

She has rescued one of the year's most acclaimed dramas, which was served with closure notices, is putting it on at a different theatre, plans to buy that venue and hopes to revolutionise the West End.

And until this month no one in British theatre had heard of her.

Donna Knight is putting pounds 140,000 of her own money into staging David Greer's play, Burning Blue, at the Ambassadors Theatre. The searing drama about anti-gay prejudice in the American navy was forced to close at the larger Haymarket Theatre. Next week she will have talks with the owners of the Ambassadors, which is for sale, about buying the theatre, on the market for pounds 450,000.

Mrs Knight, like David Greer, the author of Burning Blue, is a New Yorker, who has now moved with her family to London. Her husband runs the London Office of the American finance company Bear Stearns, and money the two of them have accumulated can now fulfill her dream of championing new writing in the world's best-known centre for theatre.

At 42, Donna Knight is strikingly elegant, her designer clothes out of the latest editions of Vogue making a sharp contrast to the dingy offices at the Ambassadors, where she is supervising the new opening of Burning Blue tonight. Her father ran a New Jersey printing company and her mother was a Montessori teacher. After a brief career as an actress, she moved into film production, working at MGM, as PA to one of the company's top moguls, the late David Susskind, and ran a theatre group in New York.

As well as producing plays in London she also intends to make films in Britain.

"My passion is championing new writers," she said yesterday. "I want to work with them over here, develop new works and put them on. I want quality as opposed to commercialism. I'm very sad that producers don't always support quality theatre. Why does theatre in London and New York underestimate the intelligence of the public?

"I try to see everything, and love discovering new actors. And the business is so much easier in London than New York. I can put on five plays here for the cost of one play on Broadway. Also the environment is friendlier here and audiences more literate."

Mrs Knight is vague about where the money for her ventures comes from, referring only to "private money, money my husband and I have accumulated over the years, money we have put aside".

Some of that money will now go towards setting up her own film production company. She plans to produce a film by an American writer, possibly starring Hollywood's rising star, Sandra Bullock, but with British actors and technicians.

For now, some of the differences between London and New York theatre still surprise her. One reason Burning Blue had to close at the Haymarket, she said, was because of the hot summer and the fact the theatre had no air conditioning. "Every theatre in New York has air conditioning."

If Mrs Knight keeps to her pledge of championing new writing, London theatre could change radically. Janet Holmes A Court, who owns 11 West End theatres, plans to put on more European drama. The pre-eminence of the musical in the West End may be threatened.