ABSTRACT
Due to a combination of circumstances, the dominant theatre culture of Sydney takes place in what architects call “adaptive re-use” buildings. Most of the theatres of Sydney are located in disused industrial buildings, large and small: a livery stable, a factory, a boat shed, a finger wharf, a bond store, a railway repair shop. These are not the venues for one-off site-specific productions but are, on the contrary, the location of Sydney's culturally consecrated mainstream theatre practice. Furthermore, no theatre built before the twentieth century still stands in Sydney; even those dating from the early years of the twentieth century were demolished in the brutal period of so-called urban renewal that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. Theatres fared particularly badly during this period, when the Regent, the Tivoli, Her Majesty's, the Theatre Royal, the St. James and others were lost, either demolished outright or incorporated into other developments (some of which were demolished in their turn a decade or so later).
