When I visited Nottingham Playhouse recently to see my friend Andrea in a superlative production of Aaron Sorkin’s play based on Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird [To Kill A Mockingbird] I felt an immediate sense of nostalgia when I entered the auditorium.
When the Playhouse opened in 1963 I was in the middle of my grammar-school education and by the time we reached the sixth form the following year our English teachers had formed a rota to take us by coach once a month on a Friday evening to see whatever was on in the Playhouse’s opening seasons which were directed principally by John Neville (1925-2011).
Neville shared his role of artistic director at first with Frank Dunlop (b1927), who went on to found the Young Vic in 1969, and the polymathic Peter Ustinov (1921-2004). Between them they brought to Nottingham a broad range of classic drama and a scintillating troupe of talented actors.
Therefore, in our teens, we were privileged to see – live on stage – not only John Neville’s Richard II, Oedipus and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, but the twenty-something Judi Dench as Margery Pinchwife in William Wycherley’s bawdy Restoration comedy The Country Wife, which had us rolling about in our front-row seats, even if some of us didn’t at first twig the pun in the title.
These opportunities were unrepeatable: Neville resigned in 1969 because the theatre’s grant was repeatedly frozen; nowadays theatre seat-prices are elevated beyond most school budgets, especially when big-name performers are cast. Indeed, Nottingham Playhouse runs a laudable 50:50 Appeal, which enables audiences to donate the cost of tickets for local people who otherwise wouldn’t experience live theatre: 50:50 Appeal – Nottingham Playhouse.
I’m pleased to see that Peter Moro’s theatre, with the circular drum of the auditorium prominent above the rectilinear outer shell, has been respectfully restored: Moro had been involved in the Royal Festival Hall project, and for Nottingham created a conventional proscenium theatre that encloses its audience so they share the same space as the actors.
And on the night I was there the To Kill a Mockingbird tour filled every seat in the house as it storms around the country on its way to a West End run in August 2026: TOUR — To Kill A Mockingbird.
The legal stalemate over the leaking roof of the Abbeydale Picture House threatens to bring down the ornate plaster ceiling of the auditorium.
A recent press-release from the lessee of the cinema, CADS [Creative Arts Development Space], stated that the building must be made weatherproof without delay, and the financial loss from the closure of the auditorium is becoming unsustainable: The uncertain future of a century-old Sheffield landmark (sheffieldtribune.co.uk) [scroll to ‘The Big Story’].
A detailed examination of the damage showed that the Apollo ceiling was weakened by the deterioration of hessian ties, called ‘wads’, that anchored the plasterwork to the roof structure: Apollo theatre ceiling collapse blamed on failure of old cloth ties | London | The Guardian. Water ingress was apparently the basic problem, weakening the hessian and adding to the weight of the plasterwork. There’s a partly redacted technical report on the Apollo collapse at Apollo-Theatre..pdf (abtt.org.uk).
There’s been no public statement to indicate exactly what is wrong with the Abbeydale Picture House roof, but it’s clear that if the ceiling collapsed its reinstatement would be costly and would delay plans for a full restoration.
In a recent blog-article I highlighted the successful restoration of Wingfield Station in Derbyshire after years of neglect. This came about because of a combination of forces. Local residents and the Amber Valley District Council worked with English Heritage and the not-for-profit Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust to put the station back in excellent order which will enable it to earn its keep in future.
Sheffield City Council has already played that card by channelling Levelling Up funds from central government to make the Adelphi Cinema, Attercliffe suitable for a lessee’s occupation, but the Abbeydale Picture House is a different proposition.
Firstly, it’s much bigger than Wingfield Station and though it’s structurally complete its integrity is seriously threatened by the ceiling vulnerability.
Secondly, it’s not the only landmark building in the city that presents a major conservation challenge. The Old Town Hall is older, more central, more complex, in far worse physical condition and extremely difficult to adapt to a practical future use.
Sheffield City Council is desperately short of money after years of budget cuts, and to finance non-essential services it’s forced to scavenge for ringfenced grants that can’t be spent on other priorities.
I spoke to someone who knows about such matters, and he said that the only solution was money – more money than ordinary individuals might raise in a hurry.
But the support of ordinary members of the public will help CADS, a not-for-profit organisation with a strong track record in repurposing redundant buildings for use in a variety of art forms.
Update: Within days of this article going online, on February 22nd 2024 CADS announced the immediate closure of the Abbeydale Picture House for lack of resources to make the auditorium safe, though they retain the tenancy agreement and hope to restore the building in the future: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-68371502.
The circus industry has traditionally been peripatetic – we associate going to the circus with a “big top” tent in a field – but there was a moment, early in the twentieth century, when it seemed sensible to build auditoria big enough to house a circus ring.
That moment was brief. The prolific theatre-architect Frank Matcham (1854-1920) converted the Brighton Hippodrome from an ice rink in 1901, but it was rebuilt as a variety theatre the following year. Frank Matcham’s London Hippodrome on the corner of Leicester Square, built in 1900, was adapted as a variety theatre in 1909.
There are two places in Britain where you can still experience circus in a purpose-built hippodrome – Blackpool Tower Circus (1894; interior by Frank Matcham 1900) and the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome(1903), but there’s a third survivor which is one of the largest and grandest of Frank Matcham’s auditoria.
The Olympia Theatre, West Derby Road, Liverpool (1905) was a proscenium theatre with a circus ring and water tank for the briefly fashionable spectacular performances known as naumachiae.
To accommodate the standard 42ft-diameter circus ring projecting into the stalls area, the proscenium is 48 feet wide, and the stage measured 100 feet wide by 41ft deep. The fly-grid is 68 feet above the stage floor.
The base of the ten-foot-deep 80,000-gallon under-stage tank survives without its hydraulic machinery: the basement storey also contained stabling for elephants and horses, and cages for lions.
The original seating-capacity was 3,750.
The Olympia was built by Moss Empires only a couple of hundred yards from their rival Thomas Barrasford’s 3,500-seat Royal Hippodrome (1902; demolished 1984), which stood opposite Low Hill Cemetery (now Grant Gardens).
Ken Roe, in his visit-notes for a Cinema Theatre Association tour in 2000, commented –
The Olympia was provided with 36 separate exits, but the problem turned out to be how to get the people into the place, not out…
Harold Akroyd, The Dream Palaces of Liverpool (Amber Valley 1987), remarked that –
…an asylum once occupied the site of the Olympia, which prompted the comment that Moss & Stoll must have been mad to open a music hall so close to the city…
This story is too good to check, however: The Stage, April 27th 1905, indicates that the site was formerly occupied by the Licensed Victuallers Association almshouses.
Three balconies spread the audience across a wider space than a conventional proscenium theatre. Beneath the Dress Circle were ten boxes facing the stage. The additional proscenium boxes facing the audience were clearly intended only for circus shows. Their onion domes are complemented by the plaster elephant-heads that embellish the side walls. A sliding roof provided ventilation between houses.
Associated British Cinemas Ltd took on the lease in 1929. On February 11th in that year the Olympia became Liverpool’s first sound-cinema when Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer opened. For perhaps the only time in the Olympia’s history, queues stretched out of sight down West Derby Road.
As competition from large-capacity modern super-cinemas grew in the 1930s even the Royal Hippodrome went over to films, and ABC, which operated both buildings, closed the Olympia as a cinema on March 25th 1939.
After wartime use as a Royal Navy Depot, the Olympia was sold to Mecca Ltd and reopened as the Locarno Ballroom in 1949.
This conversion did practically irreversible damage to Frank Matcham’s auditorium. Raising the stalls floor to stage level involved inserting concrete pillars into the basement area; the rear-stalls projection-box was dismantled and stairways were constructed from the stalls to the Grand Circle.
In August 1964 Mecca closed the ballroom and adapted the building as one of their chain of bingo clubs.
Clearance of the surrounding housing led to closure in 1982, after which it remained on Mecca’s hands, listed Grade II, empty and for sale. Its listing was raised to Grade II* in 1985.
It remained dark until Silver Leisure Ltd, owners of the adjacent Grafton Ballroom, bought it in April 1990. Ten years later Silver Leisure reopened the building, impressively refurbished, with a programme of boxing, wrestling and concerts.
It has continued in the same family ownership, renamed Eventim Olympia with standing space in the stalls and seating in the lower and upper balconies. From the outset it was a huge risk to build the Olympia in inner-city Liverpool, but against huge odds, this enormous building has survived and earns its keep in the twenty-first century.
For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.
Wakefield Theatre Royal & Opera House, West Yorkshire
Ken Dodd used to say that you could immediately tell a Frank Matcham theatre simply by walking on to the stage and speaking quietly. You’d be audible at the back of the gallery without difficulty.
Frank Matcham’s smallest surviving theatre is the Wakefield Theatre Royal & Opera House, for many years known as the Opera House and now as the Theatre Royal.
It stands on the site of an earlier Theatre Royal, which had been built in 1776 for the actor-manager Tate Wilkinson (1739-1803).
Under his management John Kemble performed in Wakefield in 1778 and 1788 and Sarah Siddons in 1786; in the following generation Charles Kemble acted at the Theatre Royal in 1807 and Edmund Kean in 1819.
The old theatre went into gradual decline through the middle of the nineteenth century, and in 1871 became a beer house and music hall, licensed by John Brooke, the landlord of the Black Horse pub.
In 1883 it was revived as the Royal Opera House by Benjamin Sherwood, but was denied a licence nine years later because of the condition of the building.
The replacement theatre was built in 1894 in nine months flat at a cost of £13,000 to Matcham’s designs and opened on October 15th that year.
After the failure of Benjamin Sherwood’s marriage in 1900 his wife Fanny and their children took over the theatre as Sherwood & Co.
In the early 1950s their family sold it for £20,000 to Solomon Sheckman, owner of the Essoldo chain of cinemas. He installed a wide screen for Cinemascope in 1954 and operated it solely as a cinema until he leased it as a bingo hall in 1966.
It passed to Ladbrokes and was listed Grade II in 1979.
When Ladbrokes announced its closure in 1980 the Wakefield Theatre Trust, led by Rodney (latterly Sir Rodney) Walker, began a campaign to bring live theatre back to the town.
The restoration involved –
renewing the stage house
strengthening the grid and installing a new counterweight system for flying
re-raking the stalls and lower circle floors
reinstating the front-of-house canopy
removing the projection box
The building is Grade II* listed, largely on the strength of the quality of the auditorium decoration by De Jong of London – bombé balcony fronts, foliage, fruit and flowers on the lower balcony and paired dolphins in waves on the upper circle. The original colour-scheme was gold and blue. The proscenium is intact, and the ceiling has eight decorative medallions of the Muses, reinstated by Kate Lyons, who placed the ninth muse in the central panel of the dress circle front.
It reopened with a gala show on March 16th 1986. Arthur Starkie, who co-ordinated the theatre’s centenary celebrations, founded the Frank Matcham Society at the Theatre Royal in 1994.
The Trust acquired the adjacent street-corner site to create a new entrance and bar. Further grants in 1995, 2002 and 2012 enabled improvements to the auditorium.
The theatre has gained prestige from the appointment as creative director of the playwright John Godber in 2011. He was born locally, at Upton, and taught drama at the nearby Bretton Hall College. His breakthrough play, Bouncers (1977) has become a perennial favourite, and his John Godber Company is resident at the Theatre Royal.
I first saw Bouncers at the Wakefield Theatre Royal. The play is performed by four male actors in black tie, who play the bouncers, the stroppy youths who have to be chucked out and the girls dancing round their handbags. John Godber portrays the bitter-sweet lives of the men who spend their Saturday nights dealing with the clients who create so much noise, aggression and vomit.
At the end of the night, walking out of the theatre on to Westgate was like stepping into the play.
This is an intriguing place, a medieval hill-top castle
documented from 1256 and for centuries owned by the Ricasoli-Firidolfi family,
who sold up only in 1968. The interiors,
on the ground floor at least, are entirely baroque, with an unrestored patina
of faded splendour.
We were treated to a cookery demonstration by the chef,
Elena, who spoke only Italian, translated (or perhaps explicated) by the
hostess Geraldine, who extolled the quality of the Castle’s extra virgin olive
oil, which we were invited to smell and taste.
We were shown how to make an Italian stew, which seemed to me exactly how I would make an English stew with Italian ingredients.
The pasta-making demonstration was more entertaining, and a
great deal of pasta was passed hand to hand around the group.
We were invited out for antipasti
on the terrace, where a classical wing of the house (with a medieval turret on
the end) faces a flat lawn and a wall, from where expanses of hillside
vineyards are visible.
No sooner had we wandered outside than a misty rain began to
fall, and within ten minutes the waitresses shifted the antipasti back into the castle and a loud clap of thunder heralded
a downpour that lasted no more than half an hour.
We tucked into the antipasti
indoors while Geraldine gave lectures first on the Castle’s white wine and then
on the rosé, all the time pouring wine into everyone’s glasses and interrupting
her flow with “I’ll fetch another bottle.”
There was no sniffing or spitting.
This was a straightforward invitation to get trollied.
We weren’t formally shown the downstairs rooms, but instead
trotted off to the cellars which are tricked out with barrels and racks of
bottles.
Geraldine took us from the cellars to a surprise – a tiny,
intact private theatre, dated 1741, complete with perspective scenery and a
balcony. I can find nothing of any
significance about it online, and I’ve never come across it in the
theatre-history literature.
Indeed, I wonder if its provenance and history have been
seriously researched. It is at any rate
a great rarity.
A three-course dinner followed, liberally lubricated with
red chianti and a dessert wine. I sat
back from the conversation and watched the sunset through the trees outside the
window.
Then predictably, “pat,…like the catastrophe in the old
comedy”, came the buying opportunity. My
fellow guests queued up to buy bottles of wine and olive oil, while I sat in an
armchair and watched.
Eventually we began the journey back, of which the first seventy minutes were simply a succession of hairpin bends and a few small villages. We joined the motorway south of Florence, and it took another three-quarters of an hour to reach our hotel in Montecatini Terme.
I reflected on the considerable appeal of the Castillo di Meleto. It’s now owned by a joint-stock company and you can stay there, at rates which are high but not outrageous. However, it’s so remote that it would be impractical to go anywhere: it’s simply a place to enjoy, with extensive gardens, an infinity pool and a restaurant down the drive for lunch and dinner: https://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=http://www.castellomeleto.it/&prev=search.
The launch took place in the fly tower of the Abbeydale Picture House, and Darren
asked me to explain to his guests the history of this unique piece of cinema
heritage.
The Grade II listed Abbeydale Picture House was always a gem
among Sheffield’s suburban cinemas, and thanks to a succession of sympathetic
owners it’s survived to entertain new generations of patrons nearly a hundred
years after its opening.
One of six Sheffield cinemas to open in 1920, its original
proprietors were local businessmen, led by a professional cinema exhibitor,
seeking to capitalise on the demand for entertainment after the First World
War.
They hedged their bets by instructing the architect, Pascal J Steinlet, to build a full-scale theatre fly tower, enabling the cinema screen to be flown out of the way of stage performances, and to use the sloping site to include a ballroom and billiard hall beneath the auditorium and stage, with a café to serve cinema patrons on the first floor above the foyer.
The directors considered that moving pictures alone might
not generate enough trade, and when post-war inflation ate into their original
budget of £50,000 they changed plans and installed an organ by the Sheffield
firm Brindley & Co.
Because Pascal Steinlet had not been briefed to include an
organ chamber, the instrument stood immediately behind the screen, centre
stage, making it impossible to use the stage and dressing rooms for
performances.
Anxious to generate income, they opened the cinema as soon
as they could, on December 20th 1920.
The Lord Mayor, Alderman Wardley, attended the first film-performance, a
costume romance, The Call of the Road,
starring Victor McLaglen.
Their fear that film alone would not support the company
proved correct. In June 1921 the
original board was replaced by the directors of the Star Cinema, Ecclesall
Road, who quickly took out debentures to complete the café, ballroom and
billiard hall before the end of the year.
In 1928, probably as a response to the imminent arrival of talking
pictures, the organ was moved to the back of the stage, where it was barely
audible, to make way for cine-variety performances, which continued until the
first sound film, Janet Gaynor in Sunny
Side Up, played on March 10th 1930.
The organ continued in use until 1940, and the last
organist, Douglas Scott, complained that “the volume was poor, due to the fact
that the organ chambers were placed as far back as possible on the stage and…at
least 20% of the sound went through the stage roof. The screen and tabs took their toll of sound
and when the safety curtain was lowered nothing could be heard in the theatre.”
There’s evidence for this on the back wall of the fly tower, where two rows of holes for the joists of the stage floor are visible, the higher row showing a clear gap where after 1928 the organ would have stood on the original stage floor. The position of the organ meant that only the downstage half of the stage was usable, so presumably the rake was altered to maintain the sight-lines Pascal Steinlet had intended.
I hope that when the building is comprehensively restored
the stage floor will be reinstated so that it can be used for performances.
Park Palace Ponies (the former Park Palace Cinema), Dingle, Liverpool
The Park
Palace Theatre in Toxteth was built for James Kiernan, a Liverpool theatre
proprietor and designed by J H Havelock-Sutton, a Liverpool architect.
The
auditorium is a simple rectangle, with the balcony (now removed) around three
sides. There were two boxes (also now
gone), decorated with tall oval bevelled mirrors and lit with brass gas
brackets. Corinthian pilasters with
acanthus-leaf bases flank the proscenium and support a broken pediment. The proscenium is thirty feet wide. Backstage there were four dressing rooms but
no fly-tower.
Some
accounts mention a gallery, and the Royal Arms mounted above the proscenium
following a visit by King Edward VII in 1903, but there is no present-day
evidence of either.
The
original audience capacity was 1,100 (600 in the pit and stalls, 500 in the
balcony) and it opened on December 4th 1893 as a variety theatre.
Though it
retained its music-hall licence, the building was used as a cinema from
1905. For a time the Sheffield cinema
impresario Jasper Redfern ran it, and the Weisker Brothers took it over and
renamed it the Kinematodrome in 1910.
In 1911,
Peter Dunn acquired it and ran it as cine-variety for nearly twenty years. During the 1920s there was a seven-piece
orchestra. The variety acts and the
orchestra ceased abruptly with the introduction of sound movies on January 8th
1930. By then the capacity had reduced
to 961.
After Peter
Dunn’s death in 1934, the proprietor was Miss Sheila Dunn, presumably his
daughter.
The final
film show – Russ Tamblyn in The Young
Guns and John Payne in Hold Back the
Night – took place on March 11th 1959.
After its demise as a cinema the Park Palace was successively used as a factory, a chemist’s shop and a store for motor-vehicle spares. For a period from 1984 it became the Mill Street Chapel.
Subsequently the building was largely left to deteriorate.
It was briefly revived as a performance space in 2008, and was once used as a location for the Channel 4 soap-opera Hollyoaks, but from 2010 onwards it was advertised to let.
It remained
unused until 2017, when Keith Hackett and his daughter, Bridget Griffin, set up
Park Palace Ponies, to provide a riding school aimed at local children under
ten, bringing them the benefits of spending time with horses and the perception
that horse-riding isn’t only for the affluent.
Hundreds of children from south-central Liverpool (defined as postcodes
L8, L17 and L18) have since taken part in riding lessons at the Palace: http://www.parkpalaceponies.com.
The community benefits of this scheme are palpable, and not confined to the children and their families. The horses graze at the local allotments, where their manure is much appreciated.
For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.
Tunbridge Wells was a staid and respectable spa town, not over-supplied with theatres in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Mrs Sarah Baker’s Tunbridge Wells Theatre, opened in the Pantiles in 1802, was used as a theatre for about fifty years and then converted into a Corn Exchange which still exists.
In the decade when the borough became Royal Tunbridge Wells, thanks to the merry monarch, King Edward VII, the Opera House was promoted by Mr J Jarvis and opened in 1902.
It was designed by John Priestly Briggs (1869-1944) who among much else built the Grand Theatre, Doncaster (1899, with J W Chapman).
The splendid Baroque exterior includes a range of shops on three sides and a balcony above the entrance leading out of the dress circle bar. The central dome was originally surmounted by a nude statue of Mercury which was removed after the First World War.
The intimate auditorium, originally seating 1,100, is lavishly decorated with a dress circle and balcony , and a central saucer dome above the stalls.
The proscenium is 28 feet wide and the stage is 32 feet deep, with a grid 44 feet high. The proscenium arch has brackets in the upper corners and is surmounted by relief figures representing Music and Drama.
The eccentric local landowner John Christie (1882-1962) reopened the Opera House as a cinema in 1925. He had taken over the organ-builder William Hill & Son & Norman & Beard Ltd in 1923, and installed an ambitious five-manual organ with pipework located on stage and the console in the enlarged orchestra pit.
The organ was sold to a New Zealand buyer in 1929 but the stage remained in use for annual amateur operatic performances from 1932 to 1966.
The history of the building after John Christie’s time is conventional – refurbished in 1931, bomb-damaged but repaired and reopened in 1949, taken over by Essoldo in 1954.
In 1966 the local council refused a bingo licence and listed it Grade II. After a couple of years of controversy, the final film-show (Paul Schofield in A Man for All Seasons) took place on February 3rd 1968, and the Opera House reopened as a bingo club in July the same year.
The bingo club, successively operated by Essoldo, Ladbrokes, Top Rank and Cascade, eventually closed in 1995, and after a public campaign to prevent demolition, the Opera House was taken over by the J D Wetherspoon chain in 1996 and adapted as a public house that can be used for opera one day each year.
J D Wetherspoon has an outstanding reputation for transforming redundant historic buildings into enjoyable places to eat and drink. By combining business acumen with sensitivity to the localities in which it trades, the company enables heritage structures to earn their keep and bring enjoyment to customers.
At the Tunbridge Wells Opera House the seating remains in the dress circle and, unused, in the gallery. The boxes are practical but cramped, and the stained glass panels in the doors to each box and the vestibule at the back of the dress circle are restored. The stage house retains its fly floors and bridge, and the original lighting board and the counterweights for the house tabs remain in situ.
And in the meantime, any day of the week, breakfast to suppertime, anyone can walk in and enjoy a complete Edwardian auditorium with good pub food, beverages and a wide range of drinks at very reasonable prices.
I’ve never been able to understand why the borough of Doncaster has ignored its dark, neglected but intact Grand Theatre.
Built in 1899 within sight of Doncaster railway station to the designs of John Priestley Briggs (1869–1944), a pupil of Frank Matcham’s, it’s bolted on to the overwhelming Frenchgate Centre (built as the Arndale Centre, 1967), with the dual-carriageway inner relief road clipping the corner of its stage tower.
Most sources credit as joint architect Mr J W Chapman, the owner and lessee of the Old Theatre on Doncaster Market Place, who according to The ERA of April 1st 1899 “designed the whole of the arrangements, and personally drew the plans, which were passed by the Doncaster Corporation”.
Chapman’s specification made the Grand a thoroughly modern theatre, electrically lit using its own generator, heated by a low-pressure hot water system, with a sprinkler system for firefighting. All eight dressing rooms were fitted with hot and cold running water.
The auditorium has three levels, originally the orchestra stalls and pit, the dress circle and above that a balcony and gallery. The two boxes face into the auditorium and are not practical.
The original terra-cotta, cream and gold decorative scheme was executed by Deans of Birmingham.
The 26-foot proscenium is squarely proportioned, with brackets in the upper corners. The stage itself is 70ft wide, 32ft deep and 50ft high.
The roll-call of performers at the Grand runs from Charlie Chaplin to Ken Dodd and Morecambe & Wise, and includes such Yorkshire favourites as Albert Modley, Sandy Powell and Frank Randle.
It was where Julie Andrews’ debut took place when Ted and Barbara Andrews played in the December 1935 pantomime and carried their two-month-old daughter Julie onstage.
The Doncaster Grand was one of the variety theatres featured in BBC broadcasts in 1930s. Live theatre timing was not as tight as broadcasting schedules, so the outside-broadcast unit had to carry whatever came on while they were live on air: at Doncaster they got Florrie Forde, a paper-tearing act – and a troupe of jugglers.
The Grand was taken over by the Essoldo cinema chain in 1944 and it eventually closed in 1958. It operated as a Mecca bingo club from 1961 to 1990. In 1994, while under threat of demolition, it was listed Grade II.
The Friends of the Doncaster Grand Theatre have campaigned ever since for the restoration of the building, which now belongs to Lambert Smith Hampton, the owner of the adjacent Frenchgate Shopping Centre.
Doncaster Borough Council, meanwhile, has opened Cast, its performance venue “where you can watch incredible shows, share creative ideas and be inspired” – “a key driver for the creative industries and evening economy”: http://castindoncaster.com. It takes a moment to work out why it’s called Cast.
Faced with an intransigent owner and a council facing in a different direction, it must be difficult for the Friends to maintain momentum in their campaign to find the Grand a place in the town’s creative industries: http://friendsofthegrandtheatre.co.uk.
J D Wetherspoon is a pub-chain which specialises in cheap food and drink in warm but often cavernous surroundings. Its pubs are open from early morning to late at night: you can get breakfast, lunch and dinner there, and it won’t cost an arm and a leg.
The company was founded by a New Zealand-educated entrepreneur called Tim Martin, who named it after a teacher who said he’d never be a success.
This highly successful enterprise has a fine record in rescuing buildings in distress, one of which is the Palladium Theatre, Llandudno, a 1920 cine-variety theatre by Arthur Hewitt of Great Yarmouth.
According to the Theatres Trust it was probably designed before the First World War soon after Hewitt’s surviving Great Yarmouth buildings, the Gem Cinema (1908, latterly the Windmill Cinema) and the Empire Theatre (1911).
The Llandudno Palladium has an imposing classical façade with twin domed towers and an elaborate thousand-seat interior with two balconies, four boxes beside the proscenium and a further three at the rear of the dress circle. The stage area covers a width of 55 feet and a depth of 32 feet behind a 31-foot-wide proscenium. There were eight dressing rooms for artistes and a café with a 25-foot-diameter circular foyer for patrons.
Almost all of this survived conversion to cinema use, twinning to accommodate bingo in the stalls in 1972, several subsequent changes of ownership and eventual closure in 1999.
In 2001 J D Wetherspoon took it over and converted it into a sumptuous pub venue, restoring the auditorium and filling the commodious stage area with a viewing gallery, from where you can admire the theatricality of it all on your way to the loo.
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