London's Gate theatre will cease trading next month. Rising costs, declining funding and its 2022 move from its original Notting Hill Gate home have combined to shut a venue that, for nearly five decades, served as an astonishing nursery of theatrical talent.

The Guardian's veteran critic Michael Billington, writing on the closure, argues the theatre's achievement deserves celebration rather than mourning alone. The Gate, not to be confused with its Dublin namesake, "has always stood for a defiant internationalism."

"I sometimes think," Billington once wrote, "that one learns more about world drama at the Gate than at any other London theatre."

That ambition belonged to the theatre's founder, Lou Stein. In 1979 Stein took a tiny room above the Prince Albert pub and converted it into a 56-seat theatre. The venue opened with a staging of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds.

Audiences climbed the pub's well-worn stairs and found themselves in a space that embraced the world. The programming ranged far beyond British writing, giving London audiences a window onto international drama that few larger venues matched.

The Gate's reach extended beyond Notting Hill. In 1982 Stein launched an offshoot above another pub, the Latchmere in Battersea. Billington still recalls seeing Susannah York there as the Amazonian protagonist of Kleist's Penthesilea — a production that captures the scale of ambition the tiny stages sustained.

The closure removes one of London's most distinctive small venues at a moment when rising costs and shrinking public funding continue to pressure the capital's fringe theatre sector.