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© Kenneth Pickering and Mark Woolgar 2009, Theatre studies (companion website), Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

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The importance of explorationThe title of this chapter suggests an active engagement with the consideration of Theatre spaces. We emphasize how important it is to physically explore buildings and spaces or study illustrations of theatres that may have existed in your own location. As you exam-ine the illustration we have provided of the Theatre Royal, Margate, you should ask your-self: Why Theatre Royal?

A recent survey of surviving theatre buildings in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland listed no fewer that 53 Theatres Royal in major towns and cities and went on to detail a further 32 that were known to have been demolished. It also listed another 20 theatres that had the word ‘Royal’ in their title. The majority of these theatres were built between 1830 and 1890. If you are studying in one of the coun-tries mentioned above, this phenomenon is part of your cultural history and is worth taking the time to understand.

During the ‘Commonwealth’ period of 1649–59, the theatres were closed, partly on the grounds of Puritan objection to plays but more especially because theatres were seen as places of potential vice and political discontent. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, King Charles II (who had spent a period of exile in the French court with its entertaining drama) was determined to re-establish the theatre, particularly as a part of the Court circle. Keenly aware of the theatre’s ability to satirize and make political state-ments, Charles inaugurated the post of Master of the Revels, who was responsible for the licensing of all forms of public entertainment, to grant Royal patents, establishing a monopoly on theatrical production in London. The fi rst holders were William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew.

Killigrew established himself at what became known as the Theatre Royal, in Drury Lane, and his company was considered to be part of the Royal household. Davenant’s patent eventually led to the establishment of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (now the Royal Opera House). This monopoly on the ability to produce ‘legitimate drama’ was reinforced by the Theatre Act of 1737. Play performances by touring companies could obtain a licence but were subject to strict control, however, some theatres and companies found ingenious ways of circumventing the Act by presenting what we can now see as the roots of ‘Variety’ and ‘Musical Theatre’.

During the late eighteenth century, royal patents were gradually granted to theatres in provincial towns and cities: Norwich, York, Hull, Liverpool, Newcastle, Manchester,

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R 2 Exploring Theatre Spaces


and Margate were among those to have their Theatre Royal. A further Act passed in 1788 legalized acting in the provinces by enabling local justices to grant licences to players for 60 days at a time and the 1843 Act for Regulating Theatres fi nally ended the monopoly of the theatres with a royal patent to produce ‘legitimate drama’. All this activity greatly encouraged the building of theatres, many of which were called ‘Theatre Royal’ as a generic title rather than having any connection with royalty.

Responses to our discussion of proscenium theatre and alternative space

Consider and discuss the following examples of Theatre practice:

� Writing of Peter Schumann, the founder/director of the Bread and Puppet Theatre, James Roose-Evans says:

He regards the audience that doesn’t go to the theatre as the best one. That is why he has gone out into the streets. His company is a completely fl exible group and its size varies according to need, from fi fteen to a hundred for Bach Cantata. They charge one dollar for a performance indoors but nothing in the streets. They do a show for particular space-the space they happen to be in. The one space they reject is that of the traditional theatre. ‘It’s too comfortable, too well-known. Its traditions upset us. People are numbed by sitting in the same chairs in the same way. It con-ditions their reactions. But when you use the space you happen to be in, you use it all – the stairs, the windows, the streets, the doors. We’d do a play anywhere – provided we can fi t the puppets in.’

(Roose-Evans, 1989, p. 122)

� This is a brief description of the work of the American playwright, Richard Foreman:

Foreman has written some fi fty plays, directing them himself and classifying only a fraction of them as Ontological/Hysteric Theatre. Most of them were produced between 1975 and 1979 in his own loft, with the audience confi ned to seven rows of uncomfortable risers at one end of a long room. His plays of the 1980s have been produced in Paris and several places in New York.

(Cohn, 1991, p. 147)

� The following is a statement from the Radical Theatre Repertory (USA) in 1968:

The member groups, and dozens of others in this country and abroad, are in the vanguard of a new phenomenon in theatrical and social history-the spontane-ous generation of communal playing troupes, sharing voluntary poverty, making experimental collective creations and exploring space, time, minds and bodies in manifold new ways to meet the demands of our explosive period.

(Cohn, 1991, p. 84)

R E S P O N S E S T O O U R D I S C U S S I O N O F P R O S C E N I U M T H E AT R E 11

12 E X P L O R I N G T H E AT R E S PAC E S


Tutor-led activity

Exploring the theatres of a provincial townWe have now established that a vital part of the study of theatre spaces is an active engagement in fi nding, visiting, using or studying illustrations of such spaces. As we have seen in the case of Spokane, many towns and cities contain a variety of actual and poten-tial theatre spaces: some purpose-built and some adapted from other uses.

Suggested activity

1. Devise a performance for presentation in a ‘found space’ as part of a shopping precinct or mall. Consider the differences between performing with a crowd of shoppers present and of performing to an ‘invited audience’ in the same venue.

2. Read the following passage from the opening of a book on playwriting then go in search of a space that inspires you to create a play or theatre piece:

To stir up your sense of theatrical, leave your study for a while and go on a hunt … use any means you like so long s it makes you feel as if you are getting far away. What you are looking for may be indoors or outdoors or both. It’s some kind of charged space. It probably reminds you of a stone bull’s eye or a dancing ring, but it doesn’t have to be circular. It could be a raised platform or a hall inside a weather-beaten church. It could be behind a ledge overlooking the water. The important thing is that the space transports you and seems timeless. A clearing in the woods will do. Any area that just is what it is won’t do. It won’t be quick. It’ll be fl at, like a warehouse rimmed with cartons of beer or a stage with a box set papered with real wallpaper and cluttered with furniture you’ve seen on sale. It won’t have any resonance.

(Frome, 1990, p. 3)

Read and discuss the following statement by Peter Brook and if you agree that ‘the spectator’s imagination be in a constant state of liberation’, fi nd ways to incorporate his ideas into your practice:

An empty space makes it possible to summon up for the spectator a very complex world containing all the elements of the real world, in which relationships of all kinds – social, political, metaphysical,

individual – coexist and interweave. But it is a world created and recreated touch by touch, word by word, gesture by gesture, relationship by relationship, theme by theme, character interaction by character interaction, as the play gradually unfolds. In any Shakespeare play, it is essential both for the actor and the spectator that the spectator’s imagination be in a constant state of liberation, because of the need to move through such a complex labyrinth; therefore the value of the empty space takes on all its importance, allowing the spectator every two or three seconds a chance to wipe his or her mind clean.

(Brook, 1988, p. 191)

Now think about the use of promenade performance and consider:

– Take a narrative poem and devise a play from it in a sequence of episodes that the audience must move from place to place to witness.

– Discuss and experiment with the means whereby an audience can be led to an appropriate part of the studio in order to se a play. Log your fi ndings.

Now extend your thinking to a variety of different ‘studio’ spaces:

– Use your studio to create a number of variations on arena staging, including having the audience on three sides or in a semi-circle. Discuss the results and the advantages of any particular physical arrangement.

– Using the various options mentioned above, analyse the acting process involved in presenting a monologue to an audience.

– Seek out theatre spaces where the audience is placed on a number of sides of the acting area and attend a performance. Log your impressions.


The cultural spaces that a community chooses to construct, designate and maintain are largely determined by the nature of the intended audience and, hence, the kind of performances demanded. We can illustrate this by an examination of some of the thea-tre spaces in the small town of Great Malvern in the West Midlands of Britain and you should use your observations and deductions related to the information provided and illustrations as a guide to your study of your own locations.

ContextGreat Malvern, situated in the picturesque Malvern Hills, the setting for John Langland’s medieval poem Piers Plowman, came into prominence in the mid-nineteenth century with the arrival of the ‘water cure’. Wealthy and fashionable society members fl ocked to this small spa town to ‘take the waters’ and the railways, hotels and gracious build-ings transformed this once obscure place into a centre for visitors and temporary resi-dents. In the twentieth century, Great Malvern became the home of the manufacture of the exclusive, handcrafted sports car, the Morgan, and of a research establishment that made the most signifi cant contribution to the invention of radar. In the nineteenth cen-tury, the new clientele demanded entertainment and the modest Victorian concert room, the Cecilia Hall, soon proved inadequate. A company was formed to purchase some ‘promenade gardens’ and to construct the Malvern Assembly Rooms in 1885. The build-ing, resembling a small Crystal Palace, comprised a large hall with stage, a colonnade of shops, an art school and a covered terrace. Many kinds of touring company used the building and it was also used for lectures, meetings and dancing.

By 1927, Great Malvern had established itself as a centre for the Arts. There were close associations with the great composer Edward Elgar, who had lived in the town at one time and with the substantial English choral tradition of amateur choirs reinforced by the proximity of the Cathedral cities of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester who com-prised the centres for the ‘Three Choirs Festival’. Barry Jackson, who had established the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1913, came to live in the town, along with other lead-ing fi gures in the Arts.

Pressure to build a more recognizable ‘theatre’ resulted in the adaptation of the Assembly Rooms: the Large Hall was refurbished as a theatre with raked seating, a circle and boxes; a recently added cinema was retained and a second hall with platform stage was constructed. Now linked by a central, covered space for refreshments, the new com-plex was named The Winter Gardens in common with several similar complexes around the coast of Britain.

Within two years, the main theatre had become the venue for a Festival entirely devoted to the plays of the most celebrated playwright of the day, George Bernard Shaw, a friend of both Elgar and Barry Jackson. For many years, the Malvern Festival, seeking to emulate the Salzburg Festival established by the director Max Reinhardt, became a major event in the artistic life of Britain; describing the fi rst Festival in 1929, the actor Cedric Hardwicke wrote:

Every hotel and boarding house in Malvern was overfl owing. Every available house had been taken over by the droves of theatre lovers and celebrities from all corners of the civilized world, who had descended on this secluded little town of green lawns and very social sanitaria.

(Quoted in Hall-Jones, 1989, p. 7)

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It is diffi cult to imagine now that an annual Festival could be sustained by the promise of a new play from Shaw, but for much of the remainder of the twentieth century he remained the most widely performed playwright in English besides Shakespeare. How-ever, Shaw’s plays demanded a particular kind of stage and a particular kind of audience and for 20 consecutive years these were found in Malvern.

As with many other arts festivals in Britain, the Malvern Festival underwent many cri-ses and changes, but it had established the town as a centre for theatrical activity, both professional and amateur: its theatre spaces refl ect this fact.

What are now simply known as the ‘Malvern Theatres’ have recently undergone a further refurbishment to create a centre containing the original ‘Festival Theatre’ a much-improved second auditorium for concerts, the cinema, exhibition space and elegant restaurants and bars. Drawing on its proximity to Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city and consider-able local support, the theatres present an all-year-round programme of events, usually as part of national tours by major dance, drama and opera companies but the town has also seen the creation of an attractive new space for its highly successful amateur company.

The Malvern Festival Theatre interior in the 1920sSource: © Roger Hall-Jones

The Malvern Festival Theatre exterior todaySource: © Ken Pickering


A Victorian cultural Space: the Assembly Rooms in 1886Source: (from an engraving)


The Coach House Studio Theatre: interior




The Coach House Studio Theatre: exteriorSource: © Iain M. Young



Questions1. Study the illustrations and re-read the preceding text before answering: (a) From the impression you have gained of Malvern, what kind of audience was the

Festival Theatre aiming to cater for? What effect did that have on the design of the building? What evidence do you see for the provision of ‘cheap’ seating?

(b) What kind of staging is envisaged in most of the plays by George Bernard Shaw? How is this refl ected in the Festival Theatre?

(c) From the exterior shot of the Malvern Theatres, how do you know that the stage is equipped for ‘fl ying’ scenery in and out?

(d) Why would you say that ‘fl exibility’ was the main aim of the design and construc-tion of the second major auditorium?

(e) Why do you think that the amateur theatre movement in Malvern includes a com-pany that designs and constructs scenery for other theatre companies and demon-strates a high level of technical expertise?

(f) Why do you think that the ‘Coach House Studio Theatre’ can co-exist successfully with the main theatres? What are the characteristics of its design and what rela-tionship with audiences may be possible?

(g) What similar spaces to the ‘Theatre of Convenience’ might be possible to utilize in your own town?

(h) From the information provided here, which features of the Malvern Theatres con-tribute to the sense of an ‘event’?

(i) What are the advantages of grouping facilities for the Performing and Visual Arts in a single centre? Where has this been done successfully in your experience?

(j) When the Festival Theatre was fi rst opened, the facilities for members of the cast were so minimal that they had little more than a backstage chair on which to put their clothes. The audience, however, sat in considerable comfort. How would you account for this imbalance?

Extended refl ections on this chapter: plays, players, playhouses and audiences

The distancing of the audience from the performers and the gradual retreat and even-tual loss of the apron (or fore-)stage, leading to the ascendancy of the ‘picture frame’ proscenium arch, unsurprisingly coincided with the rise of Opera, Ballet and various forms of Musical Theatre. Where once diarists of Shakespeare’s time recorded that they had been to ‘hear a play’, their descendants talked (and many still do) of ‘seeing a show’. Moving to lean on the front of the stage as a groundling, drawn by the verbal display and audience-grabbing performance of an actor portraying Shakespeare’s Richard III, is a far cry from sitting in the darkness marvelling at descending helicopters and swinging chan-deliers in Miss Saigon or Phantom of the Opera.


However, the rise of fi lm and its successors served to emphasize those unique qualities of Theatre that we have identifi ed in this chapter: the simultaneous presence of audience and performers in a shared ‘world’, more genuinely ‘live’ surely, than the ‘inter-active’ ‘vir-tual world’ of some electronic media. The strong revival in recent times of the old tradi-tions of story-telling and ‘jesters’ in the guise of stand-up comics has further highlighted the ‘liveness’ of a ‘shared experience’ (a name, indeed, taken by one British theatre com-pany) rather than perpetuate a ‘them and us’ situation. In Britain certainly, this ‘comic’ tradition survived the demise of music hall and variety theatre and hung on in panto-mime, some of whose audience-involving rituals ‘traditionally’ incorporate the raising of the houselights and the hauling of audience members on stage to ‘participate’.

And ‘legitimate’ theatre began to acknowledge the limitations of the proscenium arch, as shown, for instance, in the design for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s famous version of David Edgar’s adaptation of Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby with walkways round the front of the dress circle and action which blurred the division between lit stage and darkened ‘house’. Nor should one forget that (in Britain anyway), quietly ‘conjurors’ never ceased to be invited to perform to encircling youngsters at middle-class children’s parties and the tradition of ‘in-house’ amateur theatricals stretches from Jane Austen’s Mansfi eld Park via Dickens’s frenetic activities to the Windsor Castle pantomimes featuring the future Queen Elizabeth II and her sister Margaret Rose (indeed, a hilarious mixture of professionals and amateurs ‘charading’ is memorably portrayed in Noël Coward’s play Hay Fever).

In attempts to exploit theatre’s ‘liveness’ and interactivity with audiences, purpose-built auditoria have become increasingly ‘fl exible’, not just at Studio Theatre size level, and most new ‘principal’ stages have avoided the proscenium arch. We see this, for exam-ple, in North American theatres of Greek amphitheatre-style (often infl uenced by the director Tyrone Guthrie, doubtless reacting against his British proscenium arch experi-ence). Another famous example would be the original home of Britain’s National Theatre Company, the semi-circular thrust stage Chichester Festival Theatre, whose early pro-duction of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya led to cries of ‘You can’t do that on a stage like that!’ Playwrights and actors themselves have been only too aware of such conservatism and one can imagine the reactions to such attitudes of the character of Konstantin in Chek-hov’s The Seagull or of Tom Wrench in Pinero’s Trelawny of the Wells and of their real-life counterparts and successors!

Signifi cantly, the eventual British Royal National Theatre has three stages (pro-scenium, fl exible studio and Greek amphitheatre style) and at Stratford upon Avon, some years after acquiring a small Elizabethan-style thrust stage (the Swan), and just possibly spurred on by the arrival of the reproduced Shakespeare’s Globe on London’s Bankside, the Royal Shakespeare Company fi nally jettisoned the interior of its 1930s basically pro-scenium arch theatre for a larger version of the Swan. In 2008, in Kingston upon Thames there appeared the Rose at Kingston, an indoor theatre based on the Elizabethan Rose Theatre. The patron spirit of this enterprise was Peter Hall, former director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Britain’s National Theatre. And the opening production was – Uncle Vanya!

But in recent times, conventional theatre buildings have often been bypassed in favour of ‘found spaces’ and ‘site-specifi c’ performances, frequently requiring the audi-ence to ‘promenade’. This experience would not, in fact, seem very strange to the original attenders at Mystery Plays or those who saw the London companies of Shakespeare’s day

E X T E N D E D R E F L E C T I O N S O N T H I S C H A P T E R 19



touring outside London to avoid the plague. They might well have witnessed Herod raging ‘in the street’ or a touring date in an inn yard. Both experiences remain possibili-ties on contemporary summer tours by the numerous British companies who now per-form in the stately homes and ‘heritage’ sites, or for the many revivals of Mystery cycles in medieval cities such as Canterbury, Coventry, or York, where, incidentally, audiences can still walk the route taken in original performances.

Sometimes the audience may become a body, or as a sectionalized representa-tive group, or even an individual, a participant in the performance. Consider these scenarios:

� At Stratford’s Swan Theatre – with ground fl oor seating removed – arriving for The Winter’s Tale one might fi nd oneself ‘announced’ as, and then being treated as, a guest at a party thrown by Leontes for Polixenes and later joining the eating and drinking at the sheep shearing festival.

� At a promenade production of the rarely revived Dido, Queen of Carthage (Marlowe), located in the chapel and various rooms of a former women’s ‘refuge’, arrival in a rather grand dining hall required the audience to be seated and participate in the feast Dido arranges to welcome Aeneas.

� An individual may arrive at a timed moment at the entrance to a huge, deserted nineteenth-century hotel built by an ambitious railway company (wonderfully por-trayed in a famous Frith painting) and then set off alone along the corridors, fl oors and staircases, glimpsing here a gaggle of giggling maids at the far end of a long passage, there a corridor of shoes left outside rooms eternally to await cleaning, hear the incon-solable sobbing of a woman somewhere in the staff quarters, see through an open door a butler’s uniform hanging ready on a hangar, and so on, from gloomy basement to top fl oor views of the spectacular roof of the adjacent station to what seems like the whole of London.

� Arriving by a modest side door at a former Town Hall complex (now an Arts Centre), issued with mask and cloak, for three hours, the individual wanders through rooms and woods at random, passing in the gloom other lost souls, assaulted by sounds, exploring the world of Edgar Allan Poe, rooms meticulously furnished to suggest par-ticular stories, at times in effect ‘installations’, at times peopled and full of lively action, here a fully programmed music hall, there an orgiastic meal, climaxing in a tremen-dous dance sequence magically surrounded by a seemingly vast throng of masked and cloaked spectators.

� A dance company stages a promenade performance in a modern art gallery, itself a former power station. At regular intervals, you glance through windows at a madly capering fi gure loudly denouncing the pretensions of people attending such an event, an event which ends on the top fl oor and, as the dancers depart, blinds slowly rise to reveal a night time ‘backdrop’ looking down at, and across, the Thames.

� Consider also those ballets and operas which once fuelled the need for proscenium arch theatres. Now you can see Swan Lake or operas in the round (London’s Royal Albert Hall) or on a stage fl oating on a lake (Bregenz) or in former amphitheatres of the Classical world (such as in Epidaurus in Greece, Verona in Italy, Ephesus in Turkey or Butrint in Albania).


� Or you may eat and watch plays (dinner theatres) or even infl uence which ‘pathway’ a play now goes down (various plays by Alan Ayckbourn). All readers should be able to think of examples known to them of ‘shared experiences’ which thrive on the specifi c ‘liveness’ celebrated where (hopefully) more than two or three are gathered together in theatrical ‘communion’.

‘Beautiful’ proscenium arch theatres in London mostly have separate entrances for the cheaper seats at the top, inadequate leg room and lavatory provision, cramped foyers, tiny bars, overpriced seats in the back stalls (with a poor view) because they were originally cheap seats, and totally inadequate air conditioning (if any at all). The fi rst level ‘circle’ will be called the ‘dress circle’, because it was assumed that affl uent audi-ences would ‘dress’ to attend performance. Such theatres refl ect the class structure and related requirements (did they need the lavatory less!?) of the high noon of the British Empire.

Actors fi nd they are holding the mirror up to nature in buildings which refl ect a rather different nature from that we live in today. Theatre managers struggle valiantly to revamp structures usually protected by ‘listed building’ status. While happily admitting that a few are brilliant examples of their kind (mostly designed by Frank Matcham), viewed objec-tively, they are, surely, unfi t for purpose.

Theatre has moved on to a period (of unknown length) where a National Theatre’s proscenium arch auditorium can be extensively revamped to accommodate a season which included a production of Aristophanes’ The Birds with an international cast of performers largely from a circus skills background. A circular former engine shed can present a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a cast from the Indian sub-continent which toured successfully worldwide to various auditoria, and an exuberant mixed race company from South Africa can bring a production of The Mysteries, utiliz-ing found objects for music, to brilliantly inhabit the dilapidated grandeur of an old East London music hall (Wiltons).

The ‘global village’ comes together in ‘live’ communion, companies fl itting from con-tinent to continent, setting down their highly fl exible ‘stalls’ in various locations, in the process being enriched (as Peter Brook so passionately believed) by the different per-forming traditions of other races and cultures, including those where proscenium arches are unknown!

QuestionWould the fi rst Queen Elizabeth, of Shakespeare’s day, were she to return, be surprised by all these site-specifi c, promenade, often ‘one-off ’ happenings? Surely not, for she saw many such enterprises as the various nobles she deigned to visit on her tours of England vied to entertain her with original ‘shows’ as she traversed their parks and sat in their halls. Indeed, she liked to participate. And if she could drop by Warwick Castle today, possibly accompanied by her famously unamused successor, Queen Victoria (though she ‘commanded’ many performances at Windsor Castle), what would they make of the treatment of the Castle by the Madame Tussaud’s organization? In one room, an Edward-ian house party is discovered listening to the singing of Dame Nellie Melba, as Daisy,

Q U E S T I O N 21



Countess of Warwick, entertains Queen Victoria’s son, Edward VII. The roof is low and attendants confi rm that the masses shuffl ing through (open every day except Christmas) invariably drop their voices in the presence of such exalted folk. Is this a virtual world or Theatre?

Additional bibliography

Works citedCohn, R. (1991) New American Dramatists (Basingstoke: Macmillan).

Frome, S. (1990) Playwriting: A Complete Guide to Creating Theatre (North Carolina: McFarland).

Hall-Jones, J. (1989) A History of the Malvern Festival 1929–1989 (Malvern: First Paige).

Joseph, S. (1968) New Theatre Forms (London: Pitman).

Roose-Evans, J. (1989) Experimental Theatre from Stanislavsky to Brook (London: Routledge).

Suggested further readingBrockett, Oscar G. (1995) History of the Theatre (Boston: Allyn and Bacon).

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