Curtains up

Terence Doyle takes us on a tour of some of Britain’s historic and lesser-known theatres

It would take a daring playwright to do justice to the tumultuous course of Britain’s many regional theatres. The drama would open in the late 1700s with the regions cast as hopeless underdogs trailing behind big, bad London, where playhouses had already been hogging the limelight for nearly 200 years, since Shakespeare and his friends burst onto the stage. The regions started their fight back boldly with the 1,600-seat Old Vic in Bristol opening in 1766, followed by a host of small theatres in the north. These venues looked like they might all run forever but their history wouldn’t make a proper drama if it didn’t feature conflicts. By the 1830s, there was a lull in business and the curtain came down on dozens of them, while others were repurposed as dull…

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Discover Britain (Digital) - 1 Issue, August - September 2024

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