ABSTRACT
At certain times in history neither the architectural nor the theatrical character of theatres is debated to any great extent by those who demand or design them. Usually such periods of consensus tend to coincide with a building boom. The first of the great theatre-building booms took place in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century and the second in the period from the coming of the railways in the 1860s up to the beginning of the First World War in 1914. This boom lasted longer in the United States because of its later entry into the war.
