ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2 it was recorded that in 1740 actor, playwright and theatre manager Colley Cibber had complained that at the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket, designed by Sir John Vanbrugh in 1703, ‘every proper quality and convenience of a good theatre had been sacrificed or neglected to show the spectator a vast triumphal piece of architecture’. However, the theatre profession’s present distrust of architects stems from as recently as the second quarter of the twentieth century. In America at this time the architects began to be briefed not by actor-managers but by the owners of chains of theatres designed to maximise box office receipts. In these grand new theatres the actor or vaudeville performer could see that the money had gone into the entrance lobby and into the plasterwork of the ever larger auditorium rather than into the ever smaller backstage with ever less congenial dressing rooms. The latter were even being constructed underground to take ‘advantage’ of new methods of mechanical ventilation. In Britain far fewer theatres were built between the wars. But there was one which was to become a cause célèbre, the new Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon which opened in April 1932.
