Ross Thorne

Theatre in Campbell Street, opened as New Theatre Royal or New Theatre, 6 March 1837. Designed by Peter Degraves. Seated 500-600 on two levels. Later called Royal Victoria Theatre for a time. Auditorium rebuilt as three tiers seating about 800, 1856. Architects: W. Coote and E. B. Andrews. Renamed Theatre Royal. Major alterations in 1890. Interior rebuilt to design of William Pitt jnr 1911-12. Damaged by fire 18 June 1984. Reopened 6 March 1987 with auditorium restored to 1911 design.

The Theatre Royal in Hobart stands on the oldest theatre site in Australia. A theatre has stood there since 1837 and the present structure contains fragments of the original theatre. This grew out of enthusiasm for the first public theatrical season in Hobart, presented by Samson Cameron in December 1833. Next month Henry Degraves sought shareholders to build a theatre designed by his father Peter Degraves, a brewer and entrepreneur. Building was slow after the foundation stone was laid on 4 November 1834, because of tardiness in paying for completed work. The exterior of the theatre measured about 30 metres long by 15 metres wide. The width has not changed over 150 years, although the length has. The two-storeyed exterior looked almost like a house, with three bays of Georgian multipaned windows defined by modest pilasters. The auditorium was on two levels, possibly similar to a small Georgian theatre in the English provinces. 

The New Theatre Royal was temporarily fitted up on 17 January 1837 for a farewell to the Administrator of Van Diemen's Land. On 6 March it was still not quite finished but Cameron presented Thomas Morton's comedy Speed the Plough and The Spoiled Child. Cameron was a poor manager and James Belmore, John Meredith and J. Moses came in to share the management until the first season closed on 31 July 1837. Meredith and D. P. Grove were the managers from 25 September 1837 to March 1838. From April 1840 to February 1841 the theatre, then known as the Royal Victoria Theatre, was controlled largely by Anne Clarke. She returned from England in February 1842 with actors, dancers and singers and by July 1842 she had resumed control of the theatre. Anne Clarke and her husband held the lease until 1846, after which various companies leased the theatre from Degraves. He died in 1853 and the theatre was sold to Richard Lewis, a local merchant, who leased it to John Davies and F. B. Watson from 1853 to 1856. In 1856 a new three-tier auditorium was squeezed into the old envelope, and some public space was added in a lower extension to the front. The improvements also included gas lighting. The building was now called the Theatre Royal and Davies was the sole lessee. The tragedian G. V. Brooke was a notable performer in the 1850s, when stock companies had generally given way to touring companies playing a limited repertoire for a short period.

Some minor changes to entrances and removal of boxes at the rear of the pit increased the capacity in 1862. In 1882 the stage was extended rearwards by 4-6 metres to produce a total depth of 16.8 metres. C. J. and David Barclay and C. E. Davies, son of John Davies, bought the Theatre Royal in 1889 and carried out major alterations in 1890. The stage was fitted with a new floor and traps, and with a new roof to produce a fly tower. The auditorium was modified to improve sight lines and comfort. The Theatre Royal housed many public events, including political rallies, religious gatherings, boxing matches, film screenings and the first Hobart demonstration of Edison's phonograph in November 1890. It has been a popular venue for amateur theatre since the 1890s, when the Hobart Operatic Society regularly performed there.

The last major alteration to the auditorium and front of house was made in 1911-12. The architect William Pitt Jnr gutted the interior, raised the walls and spanned them with a new roof, and constructed a new Edwardian-style, three-tier auditorium complete with dome. The renovations also included electric lighting and decoration in Louis XV style picked out in gold and silver. There was no substantial financial benefit, however, because of the First World War and a change in shipping routes that excluded Tasmania from the Australasian theatrical circuit. Nevertheless, the theatre thereafter saw notable artists, including Noel Coward, Harry Lauder and Allan Wilkie. It also provided an initial base for the Hobart Repertory Theatre Society.

C. E. Davies owned the theatre until his death in 1921. It had a private owner until the Theatre Royal Company, formed by a few local shareholders, bought it in 1923. This company still owned the theatre in 1948, when Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, heading the Old Vic Theatre Company, performed in it. With their support the theatre was saved from demolition for road works and a car park. The state government set up the National Theatre and Fine Arts Society to buy and control the theatre in 1949, and gave it financial help to redecorate the dilapidated building extensively for a proposed royal tour in 1952.

The Tasmanian Theatre Company was established as a resident in 1971 but by 1977 it functioned as entrepreneur rather than producer. Declining financial success resulted in a government inquiry which set up the Tasmanian Theatre Trust in 1984. The trust's initial problems were compounded on 18 June 1984, when fire destroyed the stage, except for its 1837 stone side walls, and heat, smoke and water damaged the auditorium. The Tasmanian government decided that the theatre was an important inheritance and rebuilt the stage to present-day standards and restored the auditorium to the 1911 design. The Theatre Royal was officially reopened on 6 March 1987, 150 years to the day after its original opening, and Speed the Plough, the inaugural play, was performed again. That year the trust was replaced by the Theatre Royal Management Board under the direction of John Unicomb. There are more modern venues in Hobart but the Theatre Royal has strong sentimental appeal for audiences. The development of Backstage, at the rear of the main theatre, for intimate and alternative theatrical fare has introduced the Theatre Royal to yet another generation of theatregoers.

Theatre in Spring Street, opened as Astley's Amphitheatre 11 September 1854. Redecorated and renamed Royal Amphitheatre February 1856. Renovated and reopened as Princess's Theatre and Opera House 22 April 1857. Further modified 1861. Closed 1863. Reopened after major alterations 2 December 1865. Demolished 1886. Replaced by Princess Theatre, opened 18 December 1886. Architect: William Pitt jnr. Auditorium rebuilt and theatre reopened 26 December 1922. Architect: Henry E. White. Theatre reopened 1990 after stage rebuilt and building restored and refurbished.

This century-old theatre, restored as a lyric theatre for commercial productions of major musicals, stands on a site that has been occupied by a theatre since Thomas Mooney opened Astley's Amphitheatre there in 1854, under the direction of George Lewis. Astley's Amphitheatre, named after a famous circus in London, was designed for both stage and equestrian events. In September 1855 a newspaper complained of the transformation of Richard III into 'a monopolylogue' on horseback. By the next month the competition from two new theatres, the Olympic Theatre and the Theatre Royal, caused loss of patronage in the 2000-seat Astley's, and it was auctioned off. 

George Coppin leased Astley's in February 1856, lit it with gas, remodelled it slightly and renamed it the Royal Amphitheatre, but after eight weeks it closed for lack of support. John Black took over the building to reconstruct the interior for presentation of lyric drama and reopened it after minor alterations as the Princess's Theatre in April 1857 with Anna Bishop in the title-role of Bellini's opera Norma. After two further leases the Princess's Theatre again fell on bad times. James Simmonds took it over from Achilles King, who then supervised reconstruction for the new lessee, transforming the inelegant and disproportionate auditorium into a 'perfect gem of a house'.

The Illustrated Melbourne Post of 25 November 1865 shows substantial timber posts continuing up to a deep cornice supporting a slightly domed ceiling, painted with nymphs floating in a cloudy sky. The proscenium was 2.4 metres deep and contained doors giving onto an apron of the same depth. The proscenium opening was 9.9 metres wide, the stage being 17.4 metres deep by 23.7 metres wide. The gross dimensions of the auditorium were 23.7 metres wide, 23.1 metres deep by 9.6 metres high. It was lit by gas and decorated in white, blue and gold. The fronting building, which housed a hotel, the theatre entrances and shops, was substantially built in masonry, but the auditorium appears to have been externally clad in weatherboards.

By 1886 the theatre was neglected, and Williamson, Garner and Musgrove commissioned William Pitt Jnr to design a new one for the site. The substantial Princess Theatre was built in less than eight months. It was favourably compared to major European theatres. The three-level auditorium was lit by electricity and there was ventilation through a central sliding section of the ceiling dome, which opened to a 7.2 metre diameter tube (still in existence) rising to a sliding segment of the roof. The exterior is still almost as it was built, in an Italian Renaissance style with French overtones, although the open terraces were enclosed in 1901 to form a coloured glass wintergarden.

After buying the theatre in 1915 Benjamin Fuller and his brother John entered into partnership with Hugh J. Ward in 1922 to rebuild the auditorium to eliminate the forest of cast-iron columns supporting the two tiers above. Henry E. White designed a new auditorium in Adam style which is not out of place with the remainder of the building. It opened on Boxing Day with an American musical comedy, The O'Brien Girl. Ward left the partnership but Fullers' maintained the theatre until 1929, when they leased it to Union Theatres for talkies. The lease then passed to F. W. Thring, who presented musical comedies and Efftee films.

After the Second World War the Princess returned to live theatre under Carroll-Fuller Theatres Pty Ltd. Garnet H. Carroll took over full control of the freehold and entrepreneurial activity in 1951. He leased the theatre for short terms until he died in 1964, when his son John took control through Carroll Freeholds Pty Ltd.

From 1969 to 1985 the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust leased the theatre. David and Elaine Marriner bought Carroll Freeholds in 1986 and renamed the company Princess Theatre Holdings Pty Ltd on 3 May 1990. After a conservation study, the company had the stage rebuilt to suit the requirements of the entrepreneur Cameron Mackintosh and the remainder of the theatre restored and refurbished. Leased to the Mackintosh organisation, it reopened with the musical Les Miserables in 1990.

Performing-arts centre in King William Street, Adelaide. Architect: Hassell Pty Ltd. Includes Festival Theatre, opened 1973; Playhouse 1974; Space 1974; Amphitheatre 1977.

The Adelaide Festival Centre has provided an optimal combination of low cost, workability and audience enjoyment. The idea for it emerged in 1960, the year of the first Adelaide Festival of Arts, when it became clear that future festivals would need a first-class venue for leading attractions. The Adelaide City Council set up a cultural committee in 1963 to consider the city’s needs, and the state government announced that it would join in financing a hall. An act passed in 1964 incorporated the Festival Hall and provided for the council to construct and operated it.

A design was produced in 1965 but inadequate finance but delayed the project. There were fundamental objections that the hall could not be used for ballet or opera, and after talks with performing-arts groups the council proposed a multipurpose hall with full stage facilities. A New York consultant, Thomas De Gaetani reviewed the scheme and recommended that a drama theatre, experimental theatre and workshop be attached. The council instructed Hassell Pty Ltd to design a multipurpose theatre, remembering that the project could be extended as proposed.

Building of the Festival Theatre began in 1970 on the northern edge of the central business district, facing Elder Park and the Torrens River. In August 1971 the South Australian Premier, Don Dunstan, announced that the drama theatre and the experimental theatre would be added in a separate building. At the end of I971 the government and the city council agreed that the Adelaide Festival Centre Trust should be set up to operate the centre.

The Festival Theatre, completed first, is a lyric theatre with a proscenium stage and a fly tower. With a removable orchestra shell and an organ, it is convertible to a concert hall. It seats up to 1978 on three levels. The second stage was the Playhouse and the Space. The Playhouse, seating up to 612 on two levels, has a semi-thrust proscenium stage and a fly tower, with flying over the full stage, including the thrust. The Space Theatre (originally named The Space) is a square, flat-floored flexible space with pull-out bleacher seating for up to about 350 in theatre-in-the-round configuration, and fewer in thrust-stage, corner-stage, or end-stage configuration.

The centre, which cost $21 million, was completed in 1977 with the plaza and the car park. The Playhouse and Space building appears to be connected to the Festival Theatre beneath the plaza. Entrances from car ‘drop-off points’ here and from the car park are rather bleak, but seem to be the only disadvantages of the centre. In 1978 work began on adding a restaurant, a banqueting room, a brasserie and a piano bar at a cost of $2 million. Allowing for inflation and the lack of a separate concert hall, the cost of the centre, facility for facility, was one-quarter to one-third the cost of the Sydney Opera House and about half the cost of the Victorian Arts Centre to its second stage.

The Festival Centre functions better than the Sydney Opera House in several ways. There are some disadvantages in attempting to produce an auditorium that can double as lyric theatre and concert hall, such as the Festival Theatre, but it was wise to build a good, large lyric theatre that can be converted to a concert hall by constructing a heavy acoustic shell within the proscenium stage. The acoustic shell can be removed and the proscenium adjusted to the lyric-theatre format within three hours. Reverberation times are changed as required for theatrical or concert modes by positioning acoustic curtains and banners. A 13 tonne pipe organ can be moved to the front of the stage for organ recitals, to the rear for orchestral or choral performances, or backstage for use in an opera. The stage - the largest in Australia until the State Theatre of the Victorian Arts Centre was built - is very workable with ample wing and rear space. The auditorium combines the rectangular plan of a traditional concert hall with the three tiers and side boxes of a traditional theatre.

Intimate theatre

The Playhouse is also cleverly designed, with a wide auditorium crouching over the stage for an intimate actor-audience relationship. The design maximises the combined effectiveness of a thrust stage and a proscenium stage. Stage entrances surmounted by Juliet balconies in front of the proscenium wall on each side permit a performance style approaching that practised in the Georgian, Regency and early Victorian eras.

The Space was the first square, boxlike space built in Australia for experimental or alternative theatre. At 21 metres square it is as large as this type of theatre can be and still have satisfactory acoustics. The room echoed until absorbent banners were hung above the surrounding walkway balcony. Between the Festival Theatre and the Playhouse is the Amphitheatre, an outdoor thrust-stage theatre with stepped seating for 800. An overflow crowd of 400 can be accommodated on the steps and walkways above the Amphitheatre. At the back of the stage there are vine-covered fences, trees and shrubs. On the eastern and southern sides of the two buildings is an open plaza 1.4 hectares in area.

State Theatre is resident in the Playhouse, which is also used annually by Australian Dance Theatre and for a summer comedy season. The Festival Theatre is used by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for concerts, by the Australian Ballet, and by touring opera and modern-dance companies. The Space is used regularly by the Stage Company and for alternative-theatre productions from other states, chamber music and children's theatre. The trust also conducts community arts activities in the Plaza and the amphitheatre, particlarly in summer.

Theatre in Collins Street, Melbourne, opened as Melbourne Mechanics' Institute and Hall of Arts 1843. Rebuilt in 1885-86 and renamed Athenaeum Hall. Rebuilt as 880-seat, three-level Athenaeum Theatre, designed by Henry E. White for Frank Talbot, 1922-24. Used as cinema 1929-70 and 1970-77. Includes small hall converted to 100-seat Athenaeum 2 studio theatre in 1977 and to150-seat end-stage theatre in 1987.

A few master builders in embryonic Melbourne formed a mechanics' institute on 4 October 1839. The institute erected a two-storeyed building in Collins Street on a 19.8 metre-wide block extending to Little Collins Street. It had a library and reading room downstairs and a 'hall of arts’ upstairs, where the town council met and lectures were given. The present hall was built in 1872 on the vacant, rear half of the site to house concerts and occasional theatricals. 

After major rebuilding on the front portion in 1885-86, the Mechanics' Institute building was renamed the Athenaeum Hall. Like any institutional or town hall, it had an end stage and a small gallery at the opposite end. A smaller hall was on the top floor in the three-storey front section of the building. In 1882 the Athenaeum Hall became one of the first public spaces connected to electricity.  

In 1924 Henry E. White completed alterations to produce a Bijou-style drama theatre with fly-tower stage, stalls, circle and gallery. White used his current Adam style of decoration, but in a more austere manner than in his larger theatres. After five years of plays the Athenaeum Theatre began showing films with Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer. 

There was an interlude of live drama for six months in 1970 but the theatre did not permanently return to it, origins until the Melbourne Theatre Company took over in 1977. The company at first presented classics in the theatre. Then it modified the small hall at the front of the building to make a studio theatre, Athenaeum 2. After the Melbourne Theatre Company moved to the new Victorian Arts Centre in 1984, Athenaeum 1 continued as a live theatre, beginning a new era which included its lo running show, Wogs Out of Work. In 1987 the lessees Elston, Hocking and Woods, refurbished Athenaeum 2 as an end-stage theatre. In 1991 the remainder of the building was refurbished as a heritage conservation project, with larger foyer and bar spaces, and restored auditorium. It reopened with a revival of Hair.  

Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney. Converted from factory by Nimrod Theatre Company. Main theatre, seating 320 persons, opened 1 June 1974 as Nimrod Theatre. Downstairs theatre, seating 110, opened 7 February 1976. Building bought on 19 June 1984 by syndicate now called Belvoir Street Theatre Ltd and renamed Belvoir Street Theatre.

When the Nimrod Theatre Company needed a theatre larger than the Nimrod Street Theatre - now the Stables Theatre - a developer offered it rent-free leasehold of a two-storey factory on a site for which low-rise office buildings were planned. The architect Vivian Fraser designed a theatre occupying the whole top floor, using the diagonal of the plan as the axis for a corner thrust stage and wide fan of seating around it. The lower floor contained a rehearsal room, dressing rooms, offices and a foyer and bar in which poster-covered walls and brick paving hinted at the informality of Nimrod Street. The rehearsal room was opened in 1976 as Downstairs, an open-space theatre which has been used in several formats. Robyn Archer used it as a cabaret for her Kold Komfort Kaffee and Gordon Chater performed Steve J. Spears's The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin on an end stage. For a decade the theatre stood alone on a large cleared site. In 1982 the Nimrod company converted its 15-year lease to ownership of the building and one metre of land around it for $1. In 1984, the company, facing insolvency, decided to sell its theatre and move to the Seymour Theatre Centre.

Theatre above Victoria Arcade, opened as Academy of Music 6 November 1876. Architects: Read and Barnes Renamed Bijou Theatre 1880. Destroyed by fire 22 April 1889. RebuiIt and opened 5 April 1890. Architect: George Johnson. Demolished 1934.

The Bijou Theatre, always praised as comfortable and intimate, was above the Victoria Arcade which ran from Bourke Street to Little Collins Street. Stairs rose from an entrance in Bourke Street to a gallery, 36 metres long by 5.7 metres wide, that gave access to the theatre. Along the full length of the gallery, overlooking Royal Lane, was a 19th-century version of a glass curtain wall in arches and filigree cast-iron. The opposite wall repeated the arch motif in mirrors. The space was replete with statuary, urns, tessellated flooor and large basket chandeliers on the ceiling. Next to the gallery was an even longer billiards saloon.

The theatre appears to have been a three-and-a-half level house, seating up to 1500 persons, with a modest stage which backed onto Little Collins Street. There was no pit, but only stalls surrounded by a dress circle at stage level – half a level above the stalls floor. Posts supported a family circle and gallery above. An alderman, Joseph Aarons, built the theatre and leased it to the entrepreneur George Lewis, who managed it as the Academy of Music. The Italian actor Eduardo Majeroni took it over and renamed it the Bijou Theatre in 1880. The theatre was the Brough-Boucicault Comedy Company’s Melbourne home until fire reduced it to bare walls. After a coroner’s inquest into two deaths caused by falling bricks, Lorgnette magazine attacked the Victorian Board of Health, which licensed theatre. It also condemned fire brigades for ‘their petty squabble, their concentrated detestation of each other, their puerile punctiliousness, their contemptible intriguing, their peculiar appropriation of funds granted by Government, their drunkenness, thievery and insubordination’. All this indicated why fires were rarely brought under control.

The Brough-Boucicault company returned to the rebuilt theatre, which seems largely to have retained its original features, though the auditorium was now on three levels, with the stalls extending beneath the dress circle, and the capacity was 1700-1900 persons. The proscenium was 9 metres wide by 13.8 metres deep, with small dressing rooms in the flies. The old groove system of scenery, with its many ropes and pulleys, had been discarded.

In the early 20th century the Bijou had no long-term lessee until Fullers’ took it over, together with the smaller Gaiety Theatre in the same building. Fullers’ decided in 1929 to convert both theatres to cinemas, with the aim of eventually demolishing them and building one or more new theatres. Then a company of unemployed actors performed at the Bijou until it was demolished in 1934. No theatre was built on the site.

Theatre at corner of Conness and Main Streets, Chiltern (Vic.), opened c.1859 as Star Theatre. Destroyed by fire. Rebuilt in brick 1866. Renamed Chiltern Theatre and used for motion pictures in early 20th century. Now antiques shop.

The barn-like brick theatre at Chiltern is the only remaining hotel hall of the type that was fitted up for theatre in goldfields towns in Victoria in the mid-19th century. During the gold rushes in Queensland in the late 19th century similar halls behind hotels were built in timber. There was a gold rush in the Chiltern district in the second half of the 1850s. In 1859 the Chiltern Standard was advertising the Star Theatre attached to the White Star Hotel. Like most early theatres in gold-mining towns in Victoria, it was a hall built of flimsy temporary materials, fitted up with a stage for visiting entertainers. It was a separate building, linked to the hotel in front. There was no box, circle or gallery. 

In 1866 the hotel was rebuilt in brick after a fire. The new Star Family and Commercial Hotel had a 'splendid hall adapted for concerts, public meetings and theatrical programmes', according to the Federal Standard of 2 January 1867. During the year the hall was described as 'a splendid theatre', but few theatrical entertainments were advertised apart from an occasional solo show, such as Edith Palmerston in Wanted, a Star, dioramas and a 'grand moving panorama of a voyage round the world with hosts of novelties in melody'. The theatre doubled as the Star Assembly Rooms for balls. It remained an all-purpose theatre and hall until it became the Chiltern Theatre for films. The hotel is now a museum and tourist information centre and the theatre is an antiques shop.

Theatre on corner of Park and Pitt Streets, Sydney, opened 27 December 1886. Architect: George Johnson. Partially rebuilt 1892. Architects: Backhouse and Laidley. Closed 13 July 1935 and demolished.

For almost 50 years the Criterion Theatre was Sydney's major intimate playhouse. When it opened in 1886, with the operetta Falka, it was noted that the stage curtain was gold-fringed, dark red plush instead of the green baize of Georgian-Regency convention. The Sydney Morning Herald said the theatre 'made the spectator feel far nearer to Lon­don than usual', the nearest approach being the 'pretty little' Bijou Theatre in Melbourne. It was 'a great advance in Sydney theatres'. The NSW Government Architect thought otherwise in 1887, when he inspected it as a post­script to a royal commission on the safety of theatres. He complained that the smell from poorly ventilated dressing rooms and their lavatories was so overpowering as to make him sick. He described a forced ventilation system that seemed to move air from this malodorous basement into the auditorium and expel it into the stalls urinals whence 'it must find its way back to the parts of the theatre from which it was drawn, carrying with it a proportion of the vitiated air from the urinals and closets'. 

George Johnson, the architect who designed the theatre for John Solomons, had previously produced a nightmare for officialdom in Melbourne, the Opera House in Bourke Street. The Sydney Morning Herald claimed a capacity of 1500-1700 for the Criterion, but the Government Architect calculated seating for only 991 persons on the three levels of the auditorium-stalls, dress circle and a combined family circle and gallery. After only five years another firm of architects was commissioned to redesign the auditorium, push back the proscenium wall, raise the roof by 3.7 metres, build new dressing rooms that could have light and air, and improve the foyer space. The high proscenium was lowered and widened, opening onto a stage 11 metres deep by 17.7 metres wide. The ceiling of the auditorium was raised and a dome with a sliding roof was inserted. Now the interior was in keeping with the solid, deeply modelled Victorian, neo-baroque Renaissance exterior.

This work was undertaken for the Brough-Boucicault Comedy Company, which leased the theatre for a few years. Later, The Kelly Gang was performed with sensational stage effects in 1898, and William Anderson presented Australian melodramas, including George Darrell’s The Land of Gold and Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan's The Squatter s Daughter in 1907. Modifications in 1905 increased the seating capacity beyond 1300. Frank Musgrove bought the theatre in 1913 and in 1915 it passed to J.C. Williamson's and as the Firm's Sydney outlet for West End comedies from London. The Criterion also housed the Australian premiere of the musical comedy Irene in August 1920 and specialists such as Dante the Magician in 1933. It closed in 1935 with The Patsy by Barry Connor.

Theatre in Newtown, Sydney, opened 2 June 1917 as Majestic Theatre, seating 1642. Architect: Henry E. White. Reopened as Elizabethan Theatre 27 July 1955. Destroyed by fire 19 January 1980.

The Elizabethan Theatre housed many major productions of drama, opera and ballet before the Sydney Opera House opened. The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust reopened the old Majestic Theatre because the two other live theatres in Sydney were tied to prosperous commercial circuits. As the Elizabethan Theatre it saw the Sydney premiere of Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, touring shows organised by the Trust and Garnet H. Carroll, and such stars as Judith Anderson, Lewis Casson, Ralph Richardson and Sybil Thorndike. It has been claimed that the Majestic, which was built in an inner suburb for Fullers’ was a music-hall or a variety house. It was near Harry Clay's Bridge Theatre, a low-class vaudeville house that became the Hub cinema, but Benjamin Fuller’s son remembered the Majestic as a stock-company melodrama house with a weekly change of program. Agnes Dobson was the leading lady and Frank Neil was the producer, Benjamin Fuller jnr said, and 'the cast received the play on Friday and had it off by heart by Monday. When audiences flagged East Lynne always dragged them back... '. 

Fullers employed Henry E. White, who had renovated the National Amphitheatre in Melbourne for them, to design the Majestic. The stage was adequate, with an 11-metre-wide proscenium and 11·3 metres of useable depth behind a 760 mm apron. The full stage was 18·3 metres deep by 22 metres to the fly floor and there were four floors of dressing rooms immediately behind. For a suburban theatre the Majestic was elaborate. White's auditorium was typical of his Louis XV style, with Baroque moulded panelling, cartouches, flourishes and bellied balcony fronts. The site was tight and the foyer spaces were little more than lobbies because, said Benjamin Fuller jnr, 'women would not go out into the foyers to stand about, smoke, or even go to the lavatory'. Social mores had changed in 1954, when the Trust leased the rundown theatre - a cinema for some 20 years - and it removed seats from the back stalls to provide a promenade space. The theatre was cleaned and stage improved, but the auditorium was left in pastel blue. The Trust moved its operations to city theatres early in 1961, but leased the Elizabethan Theatre again in 1970 after fire destroyed Her Majesty’s Theatre. To suit patrons of the Australian Ballet and the Australian Opera the auditorium was transformed into an Edwardian joy in warm white and gold. Every available inch of space was taken to enlarge the original foyers for patrons of the stalls and the dress circle. But those in the gallery had only an unadorned stairway leading directly to the street, as in the more class-conscious era when the theatre was built.

Theatre in Castlereagh Street, Sydney. Built as National Sporting Club 1902. Converted to theatre and opened as National Amphitheatre 26 December 1906, seating 1410 on one level. Renamed Fullers’ National Theatre 1912. Converted to two-level theatre 1919, seating 1382. Architect: Henry E. White. Renamed Roxy Theatre cinema 28 February 1930. Renamed Mayfair Theatre 1932. Demolished 1984.

The National Sporting Club, with a large hall seating 2000 persons for boxing and other athletic entertainments, was built on the western side of Castlereagh Street, a little south of King Street, in 1902. In 1906 James Brennan converted the hall to a one-level theatre for variety performances and called it the National Amphitheatre. Fullers' took control of the Brennan Vaudeville Circuit in 1912 and renamed the house Fullers' National Theatre. The licensing authorities noted it as 'antiquated and dangerous' in June 1912 but rebuilding was not approved until September 1918. 

The architect Henry E. White converted the amphitheatre into a two-level theatre with twin stage boxes at each side on both levels. It had a shallow fly-tower stage. In the 1920s it was a popular vaudeville theatre. Fred Bluett, Mike Connors and Queenie Paul, Edgley and Dawe, Stiffy and Mo, and George Wallace performed there. But on 24 February 1930 the Sydney Morning Herald announced the end of Fullers' vaudeville and closure of the 'Nash'. Quickly redecorated, it reopened four days later as the Roxy Theatre, showing a film, Hollywood Revue. In February 1932 the Roxy briefly returned to live variety under Frank Neil, who was touring Ada Reeve. But at the end of the year Fullers' Theatres Ltd decided to show British films. The theatre, its auditorium refurbished in Art Deco style, was renamed the Mayfair. Later Hoyts Theatres bought the Mayfair and from the mid-1950s it showed major widescreen films. In 1977-78 there were live shows, including a revival of the rock musical Godspell, Q Theatre's rock show St Marys Kid and Peter Williams's production of Crown Matrimonial, starring June Salter and John Hamblin. After this rediscovery of its potential there were protests when demolition threatened the theatre and the NSW government indicated that efforts would be made to retain it. As usual, the protesters were lulled into false security. In 1980 the foyers and dress-circle stairs were converted into shops and in 1984 the building was demolished.

Theatre in Grote Street, opened as Rickards Tivoli Theatre, 6 September 1913, seating 2160. Architects: Williams and Good. Renamed Prince of Wales Theatre 1920. Renamed Tivoli Theatre 1930. Remodelled to seat 1200 and reopened as Her Majesty's Theatre 1962. Remodelled and reopened as Opera Theatre, March 1979. Renamed Her Majesty's Theatre 1988.

After the death of Harry Rickards in 1911, Hugh D. Mclntosh bought his Tivoli vaudeville circuit and formed Harry Rickards Tivoli Theatres Ltd to lease an unfinished theatre in Adelaide. The owners intended to call it the Princess Theatre but when McIntosh leased the building in 1913 he decided to name it Rickards Tivoli Theatre. It had a 25·9-metre-wide four-storey frontage and a stage that was 24.3 metres wide, 18·9 metres deep and 15·9 metres high to the grid. The original proscenium was narrow at 9 metres. The auditorium - equipped with an early example of mechanical ventilation - seated 622 in the stalls, 238 in the dress circle and 1300 in a deep gallery. 

From 1920, when the building was renamed the Prince of Wales Theatre, various entrepreneurs used it, presenting mostly plays. It was in the Fullers' circuit until 1929. The theatre returned to variety as the Tivoli in 1930. From 1940 Adelaide Repertory Theatre leased the Tivoli for 14 years, staging its own productions and letting it to commercial entrepreneurs. Then the owners leased it to a sporting club.

J. C. Williamson's bought the rather derelict Tivoli before closing its own Theatre Royal in 1959. The Firm had the interior remodelled in the nondescript functional style of the time to produce a two-level auditorium. The theatre reopened as Her Majesty's Theatre. Upon the demise of J.C. Williamson's in 1976, Her Majesty's came under threat of redevelopment, although it was the city's only medium capacity theatre and it was needed for the Adelaide Festival of Arts. The South Australian government bought the theatre and remodelled the interior to be reminiscent of Scandinavian modern style in its combination of simplicity and adequate richness. It reopened in March 1979 as the Opera Theatre and housed the State Opera of South Australia until 1988.

Theatre, opened 7 June 1875 as Academy of Music. Architect: George Browne. Altered and renamed Her Majesty's Theatre 1898. Architect: William Pitt jnr. Leased as cinema from 1938. Bought by Royal South Street Society in 1965 and renamed South Street Memorial Theatre 1966. Given to City of Ballarat and restored. Reopened 7 November 1990 as Her Majesty's Theatre, seating 931. Architects: Clive Lucas. Stapleton and Partners.

One of the finest Australian theatres is Her Majesty's in Ballarat (Vic.). No other has as many extant 19th-century architectural elements in the auditorium and stage. The theatre belongs to the second generation of the gold town's development. Within five years of the initial Victorian gold rush three significant theatres were built in Ballarat – the Charles Napier Theatre in 1854, the Victoria Theatre in 1856 and the Montezuma Theatre in 1856. All were associated with hotels and the Academy of Music in 1875 was exceptional in not having bars or a hotel in front. A patron, Sir William J. Clarke, built the theatre and for its first ten years it was run by community leaders, mostly lawyers interested in promoting the performing arts. The opening program included W. S. Lyster's opera company. 

The building was a substantial brick structure on a steeply sloping site which allowed for future expansion into the basement space. There were shops in front of the auditorium, which was a lofty two-level hall. The circle was partly supported by four cast-iron posts but largely hung by iron rods from the roof trusses. The roof continued over the raked stage. About 10.5 metres above the stage the grid was fixed to the bottom of the trusses. The stage itself was generous at 18 metres wide by more than 15 metres deep. The hall was 18 metres wide by 22 metres long by 12.3 metres high. Within this height, in 1898, the architect William Pitt Jnr managed to rebuild the existing circle and add another above it, utilising the same balcony-front design. He cut a large hole in the old coffered ceiling and inserted an opening dome to provide ventilation through a new sliding segment in the roof.

The brick wall between stage and auditorium was extended to the roof line as a fire wall, and a new grid was inserted about 1.5 metres above the bottom of the truss line. As a result, full-height scenery could be flown between the roof trusses. The stage was cleared of dressing rooms and the paint frame. New dressing rooms and a scene dock were housed in an extension at the side of the building. Pitt also raked the stalls floor. Renamed Her Majesty's, the theatre now rivalled some in the capital cities. At first it was under the direction of Williamson and Musgrove, who toured major productions and personalities. In 1911 the Plimmer-Denniston Company was so popular that the crowd blocked the street and women were knocked down in the rush for tickets. Touring companies played in the theatre until the 1930s but it was mostly used as a Hoyts cinema from the Great Depression until the Royal South Street Society, which had held competitions and performance in the theatre since 1896, bought it in 1965.

Alterations in 1906, 1912, 1927 and 1943 resulted in minor changes to the auditorium and undistinguished lobby and foyer accommodation, which left nothing of the original front of house. In the 1980s restoration the entrance was given a quasi-Victorian canopy and front doors. A new lobby replaces all the original shops and offices on the second floor have been sympathetically converted to the foyer-bar. Pitt's large dome has been reinstated in the auditorium, which has been restored close to the 1898 version. The stage has been re-equipped with mechanised fly lines. The theatre now presents local and touring productions with entrepreneurial flair.

Theatre in Queen Street, opened 2 April 1888 as Her Imperial Majesty's Opera House, seating 2200. Architect: Stombucco and Son. Originally owned by G. Byrne and leased by C. H. Holmes. Leased by Harold Ashton and reopened as His Majesty's Theatre 23 March 1901. Rebuilt and reopened 30 March 1929, seating 1387. Architect: Cedric Ballantyne or George McLeish. Later renamed Her Majesty's. Demolished 1983.

Until the Queensland Performing Arts Complex was built the only Brisbane theatre with a stage that could take the scenery of productions toured from Melbourne or Sydney by subsidised companies was Her Majesty's Theatre. When it was built as Her Imperial Majesty's Opera House, with a hotel in front, it looked grand indeed. It rose high above all other buildings in Queen Street, palatial, almost voluptuous, encrusted with more heavily modelled decoration in the Victorian Italianate style than any of them. The theatre was designed to seat 1200 persons on the ground floor - 500 in the stalls and 700 in the pit. Closely spaced, substantial cast-iron posts supported the 400-seat dress circle and above it the 600-seat 'family circle', which was not initially called a gallery. The daughter of W. H. Wallace, who managed the theatre from 1901 to 1928, remembered 'packers' being employed to squeeze patrons into this uppermost balcony. A good packer could squeeze in an extra 50.

The stage measured 18 metres by 19 metres. The proscenium was decorated with gold-painted Corinthian columns, but the auditorium was otherwise almost devoid of decorative plasterwork. The theatre opened with the new style of maroon velvet house curtain instead of the traditional scenic act-drop and green baize curtain. The auditorium lighting was originally gas but converted to electricity about two years later. Earthenware pipes and windows provided ventilation until 1901, when the architect William Pitt was commissioned to undertake minor alterations, including a sliding roof.

In 1929 His Majesty's Theatre reopened after major rebuilding of the auditorium and foyers. Reports are not clear on who was the architect responsible for the design, which provided a more comfortable theatre, in many ways more like a picture palace than a traditional theatre. There was now a single deep balcony, unsupported by posts in the stalls below. Two decorative but rather useless boxes were cantilevered from the side walls near the proscenium. All was decorated in a deeply modelled Renaissance-rococo style. The Brisbane Courier said the theatre presented a 'charming spectacle'. It quickly became the venue for major lyric and dramatic performances, especially those toured by the large entrepreneurs. The AMP Society bought the site from Byrne Hart and his sons in 1973, promising that it would build a new theatre when it developed this and adjacent sites. But in 1980 AMP sold the theatre to another developer, who demolished it in 1983. At that time there was criticism of the seating rake and backstage conditions.

Theatre in Exhibition Street, opened as Alexandra Theatre 1 October 1886, seating 2500 Architect: Nahum Barnet. Renamed Queen's Theatre 1897. Altered and reopened as Her Majesty's Theatre 19 May 1900. Architect, William Pitt. Renamed His Majesty's Theatre 29 March 1924. Auditorium gutted by fire 1929. Rebuilt and reopened 1934 Architect: Walkeley.and Hollinshed.

Theatre in Pitt Street, opened 10 September 1887, seating 1650 on four levels. Architects: Morell and Kemp. Interior burnt out 23 March 1902. Rebuilt on three levels and reopened 1 August 1903. Architect: William Pitt. Closed 10 June 1933. Converted to variety store and offices 1934. Finally closed 2 March 1970 and demolished to make way for Centrepoint.

The most elaborate and best-equipped theatre in Sydney before the Sydney Opera House was Her Majesty's Theatre. It was the first theatre built in strict conformity with regulations that resulted from the NSW Royal Commission on Theatres in the early 1880s. Fire-resistant iron doors protected connections between the auditorium and the public spaces of the theatre, which were in a hotel in front. A thick brick firewall, a 'fireproof’ asbestos drop curtain at the proscenium opening and iron doors in other openings all separated the auditorium from the stage. Every effort was made to use fire-resistant materials, and any inflammable materials were coated with fire-retardant liquids. The auditorium and stage were lit by both electricity and gas. Scene-changing was by the continental European system of flat wings moved along slots in the stage floor on wheeled carriages at the mezzanine level of the stage basement. The Builder and Contractor's News of 22 October 1887 gave the width of the stage as 25.6 metres and the depth as 15.2 metres, but published dimensions varied. The proscenium opening was 11.6 metres square. Iron trusses spanned the width of the stage, supporting a grid for flying scenery, 33.2 metres above the basement. The building was 31 metres in front, 38 metres wide at the rear, and 51 metres deep. The facade was elaborately modelled in a baroque-Renaissance style with applied Corinthian columns, surmounted by a carved pediment and a roof pavilion in French Renaissance style. The building was designed for the Grand Opera Company, which leased the site from the William McQuade estate. The theatre was near completion when financial difficulties saw the site owner take it over. George Rignold then leased the theatre until 21 September 1895 and opened it, some four months late, playing Henry V in his famous production. He interspersed spectacular Shakespeare productions with comedies. 

Theatre in Quay Street, opened 28 February 1927 as Empire Theatre, seating 2515. Architects: Kaberry and Chard. Closed mid-1929. Reopened 7 December 1929 as talkies cinema. Used for live theatre from 27 December 1948. Bought by J.C. Williamson's 1949. Closed for major alterations 1954. Reopened 10 June 1954, seating 1728. Renamed Her Majesty's Theatre 21 May 1960. Destroyed by fire 31 July 1970. New Her Majesty's Theatre opened 30 November 1973, seating 1492. Architects: John W. Roberts and S. A. Baggs.

The Empire Theatre - the third of that name in Sydney enriched the city after the Second World War by its very existence, though it was a mean house for performers and audience. The theatre had been built in 1926-27, with optimal capacity and minimal facilities, by Empire Theatres Ltd, whose governing director was Rufe Naylor. The building was designed on a diagonal axis across the site. The proscenium stage, with fly tower, was tucked into the southwest comer and a wide two-level auditorium fanned out to the opposite comer. There was a minimal entrance lobby but no foyer. Press reports claimed that the Empire housed 3000 persons, but it was licensed for 2515. It opened with the musical comedy Sunny. Marlow-Rolls Theatres Ltd took over the Empire in December 1928 but after six months of stage shows it was closed. At the end of 1929 it reopened as a talkies cinema. The lessees, Empire Talkies Ltd, bought the building in 1934 and dedicated it to B-pictures and second runs. 

After the Second World War there was a resurgence of theatre but a lack of venues. Most live theatres had been closed, demolished or converted to cinemas since 1929. To allow J.C. Williamson's to present an opera company at the Tivoli Theatre, the Tivoli Circuit went to the capacious Empire, then a poorly attended cinema, in December 1948 to stage its Christmas shows. These were Take a Bow, a twice-nightly revue starring Two-Ton Tessie O'Shea, and Babes in the Wood, a twice-daily pantomime with Rex Dawe and Jenny Howard. In 1949 J.C. Williamson's bought the Empire and opened it with a 53-week season by the Kiwis Revue Company. The hypnotist Franquin, Hellzapoppin, Oklahoma!, Ice Parade and a Gilbert and Sullivan season followed. The theatre was much altered in 1954. New side walls were installed to narrow the extremities of the auditorium, reducing the capacity. The proscenium was modified and traditional boxes were installed. A portion of the back stalls was walled off to become a stalls foyer.

Shows after the alterations included the musicals Can-Can, Kismet, The Land of Smiles, Paint Your Wagon and The Pajama Game. A change of name to Her Majesty's Theatre and more improvements in 1960 heralded the arrival of My Fair Lady. During the next decade the theatre also housed Camelot, Hello Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof and Funny Girl. During an opera season in 1970 fire destroyed the theatre.

The architects John W. Roberts and S. A. Baggs cleverly designed a new theatre on the tight site. They shifted the axis of the auditorium to run down the middle of the lot from front to back. To provide foyer space of modem standard they reduced the capacity of the stalls to 660, less than that of the 832-seat dress circle. They enlarged the stage, however, to some 26 metres wide by 14.3 metres deep, with a 12.2 metre-wide proscenium placed almost centrally. The new theatre opened with the musical A Little Night Music, with Taina Elg, Jill Perryman and Anna Russell. It had a slight downturn after J. C. Williamson's faded away and sold its properties, but it has remained a major commercial theatre, mostly presenting musicals.

Theatre at corner of Hay and King Streets, Perth, opened 24 December 1904, seating 2584. Architect: William Wolf. Closed 1976. Bought by Western Australian government 1977. Restored and reopened as general-purpose lyric-drama theatre, 28 May 1980.

An Edwardian delight, carefully modified to meet 1980s requirements in function, comfort and sense of occasion, His Majesty's Theatre is testimony to the Perth theatre architect, Peter Parkinson, who restored it. Thomas Molloy, a land speculator built the original theatre, combined with a four-storey hotel, near his Theatre Royal in Hay Street on a quarter-hectare site. The architect of the new theatre was William Wolf, a German-trained American who emigrated to Australia m 1877 and began to practise in Perth in the mid-1890s. In His Majesty's he followed the current English model but, perhaps showing European influence, gave it a fly-tower stage, which at 20 by 23 metres was larger than tradition suggested. The three-level auditorium had two waterfalls to help to cool the air and a sliding dome and roof for ventilation. 

The theatre opened with The Forty Thieves. Later lessees - William Anderson, Fullers', J.C. Williamson’s, Edgley and Dawe and Michael Edgley successively – presented many major productions from the eastern states, from Nellie Stewart in Paul Kester's Sweet Nell of Old Drury to My Fair Lady. Other famous performers who appeared in the theatre included H. B. Irving, Sybil Thorndike and Vivien Leigh. When Michael Edgley's lease ended in 1976 His Majesty's closed. Its owner, Norman B. Rydge, chairman of the film-exhibiting Greater Union Organisation, asked $2 million for the theatre, which he had bought from Edgley in 1973 for $825 000. The theatre was threatened with redevelopment until the Western Australian government bought it for $1 ·9 million in 1977 with the intention of restoring the auditorium and refitting the stage.

Parkinson made structural modifications to reposition posts supporting the two balconies to give the audience a better view and hide new air-conditioning ducts. The old hotel with its ground-floor bars and shops, first-floor public rooms and dining-room, and 48 bedrooms and bathrooms on the upper floors was converted to provide the theatre with comfortable foyers and bars, new toilets, administrative offices, rehearsal space, and improved dressing rooms and orchestra rooms. The complex houses the West Australian Opera and Ballet Companies and the Theatre Collection.

Theatre in Russell Street, opened 11 November 1908 (sic), seating 2200. Architect: William Pitt jnr. Reopened 11 March 1959 as Barclay cinema. Demolished for construction of multiplex cinema 1977.

The 'essentially Australian and patriotic' entrepreneur William Anderson staged melodrama at the King's Theatre in Melbourne. It was built for him in 1908, when he was operating two dramatic companies and had been unable to lease the large Theatre Royal. The King's had a fly-tower stage 19.2 metres wide by 15.2 metres deep and the first production, a revival of the melodrama Man to Man, demonstrated its capacity for spectacle by showing a prison escape and a railway collision with burning carriages and injured passengers. Anderson's repertoire largely comprised bush dramas. 

The King's Theatre, described by Table Talk of 16 July 1908 as the most beautifully decorated theatre in Melbourne, had a three-level auditorium in gold, cobalt blue and royal blue. To the western side of Russell Street it presented an imposing asymmetrical three-storey facade in Edwardian style with a French Renaissance flavour. It comprised a pavilion at the Bourke Street end and five equal bays. The three central bays opened into the usual small vestibule, in which there were stairs to the dress circle and entrances to the stalls. There was no vestibule for gallery patrons, who climbed stairs to their seats from lanes on each side of the building.

After Anderson other managements, including J. and N. Tait Ltd and J. C. Williamson's used the theatre for drama, pantomime and variety. When a Williamson lease expired the Gaiety Theatres company of Garnet H. Carroll and Benjamin Fuller leased the King's and in 1942 installed movie projection equipment. Warner Brothers screened films there until Carroll, in partnership with Aztec Services, reconverted the theatre to stage presentation in 1949 for the variety entrepreneur Harry Wren as sub-lessee. In 1951 the King's reverted permanently to films, and in 1959 it was renamed the Barclay cinema, after remodelling of the interior and facade for Norman B. Rydge, who now owned the freehold.

Theatre-restaurant in Darlinghurst, Sydney, opened 4 September, 1982, seating 240. Built as three-storey draper's shop and offices 1910. Remodelled as funeral parlour 1933. Architect: Bruce Dellit. Converted to restaurant and theatre restaurant 1982 Architects: Michael Davis and Glen Murcutt.

Comedy revue returned to Sydney for about four years in the 1980s at Kinsela's, a theatre-restaurant named after an undertaker. Charles Kinsela leased the ‘Mansion House’ building in 1932 and had the architect Bruce Dellit remodel the ground floor in angular art-deco style. In 1981 Kinsela sold the building. In a clever and sympathetic conversion the ground floor became a restaurant, with the lofty chapel, a superb example of Art Deco, preserved as required by a heritage order. A stair rose to bar, dressing rooms and toilets on the first floor, and the theatre-restaurant on the second. The audience sat at tables stepped up slightlv toward the rear of an almost square room, facing a narrow open stage stretching the length of one wall.  

The Sydney Theatre Company prepared the first cabarets, which began with The Stripper, and other revues or variety in late-night second shows. On 23 November 1982 Four Lady Bowlers in a Golden Holden brought back John McKellar and Lance Mulcahy, the writer and the composer of many Phillip Street Revues some 25 years before. Max Gillies was among the performers in the new wave of revue. The restaurant licence, requiring food to be consumed with alcoholic drink, created problems and after four years the proprietors closed Kinsela's and sold the property. The new owners changed to a hotel licence, converted the chapel into a bar and reopened in 1988, with mainly musical shows. There was a major production Forbidden Broadway, in mid-1991.

Theatre in King William Street, Adelaide, opened in 1856 as White's Rooms. Architect: George Kingston. Altered to form Garner's Theatre, seating 1326, 1880. Renamed Hudson's Bijou Theatre 1892. Altered and reopened as Tivoli Theatre 20 June 1900. Architects: Backhouse and Backhouse, in association with English and Soward. Renamed Rickards's New Tivoli Theatre 1901. Renamed Star Theatre for films in 1913. Rebuilt and returned to live shows as Majestic Theatre 1916. Architects: Williams and Good. Became Celebrity Theatre Restaurant 1967-69. Returned to films as Warner Theatre 1969. Demolished 1981.

In 1856 an Adelaide architect designed a development consisting of two shops, offices and a large assembly room for concerts and balls. The front part of the building became the Shades Hotel and Restaurant. The entrepreneur Arthur Garner took over the hall in 1880, added a dress circle with rear amphitheatre and generally remodelled the interior to produce Garner's Theatre. Thomas Hudson renamed it Hudson's Bijou Theatre in 1892 for his vaudeville acts which within a few years included moving pictures. Harry Rickards leased the theatre in June 1900 and the architects Backhouse and Backhouse remodelled the theatre for him, adding a sliding roof. After Rickards's death, the theatre was renamed the Star Theatre for films in 1913.

Fullers' leased the theatre for vaudeville and instigated a major rebuilding in 1916. A fourth storey was added to the hotel and both the theatre and the hotel were widened and renamed Majestic. Only fragments of the original walling of White's Rooms were retained. The new auditorium was typical of small intimate theatres of the time. Two banks of private boxes, two boxes high, were adjacent to the proscenium at each end of the orchestra pit. The single tier above the stalls extended between the boxes on each side in a tight horseshoe. In 1928 Fullers' bought the theatre together with the hotel and other buildings in the block between Grenfell and Pirie Streets.

During the 1930s Greater Union showed films at the Majestic. Films and live shows alternated after 1942, when Fullers' again took over the theatre. After a period as the Celebrity Theatre Restaurant in the late 1960s it became a cinema again in 1969 as the Warner Theatre. The historic theatre building, only slightly modified since 1916 and in good condition, was demolished for a multistorey office block in spite of efforts in 1980 to save it.

Theatre in Orwell Street, Kings Cross, opened 18 May 1939, seating 1016 on two levels. Architects: Guy Crick and Bruce Furse; Bruce Ward. Became cinema as Metro Theatre 29 April 1950. Returned to live theatre 5 June 1969. Converted to shopping market 1979. Now film studio.

Possibly the finest modern theatre built in Australia in the 1930s, the Minerva Theatre was intended to have a companion but this was never built. Minerva Centre Ltd aimed to build two theatres on facing sites at Kings Cross, according to the Sydney Morning Herald on 27 August 1937. The company's managing director was David N. Martin, formerly managing director of Imperial Theatres Ltd, which owned the Liberty Theatre, designed in 1934 by C. Bruce Dellit, an exponent of the fashionable Art Deco style. A share prospectus published on 7 September 1937 showed Dellit' s design for the Minerva Theatre. It would be erected in Orwell Street opposite the rather monumental Paradise Theatre Building, which would face Macleay Street and include a dance hall and a restaurant as well as a theatre. 

Other architects, Guy Crick and Bruce Furse, prepared the Minerva Theatre drawings that were submitted to the Sydney City Council and the licensing authority, but the two designs showed similarities of style. Crick's Moderne interior demonstrated his interest in German expressionist theatre design. The resulting theatre was very comfortable, with lounge chairs throughout a cocoon of sweeping, wide plaster troughs washed with indirect lighting. The foremost lighting trough curved down to the stage floor on each side of a striated proscenium frame. The stage apron extended to a rarely used small side stage on each side.

The theatre, grandly opened with Robert E. Sherwood's play Idiot's Delight on 18 May 1939, brought the number of professional theatres in Sydney to three-the others were the Theatre Royal and the Tivoli Theatre. It was initially managed by David N. Martin Pty Ltd in association with J. C. Williamson's. Then there were several changes of management until Martin's company resumed control. Some 25 plays were performed, including Shakespeare at matinees, until 1 May 1941, when Whitehall Theatrical Productions took over the lease. Under this management the Minerva became the only commercial playhouse in Sydney producing comedies, thrillers and mysteries, usually starring actors who were well known on radio, such as Lyndall Barbour, Neva Carr Glyn and Lloyd Lamble.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the building and used it as the Metro cinema from 29 April 1950 and later sold it to the Greater Union Organisation. It was not a success as a cinema and on 5 June 1969 Harry M. Miller reopened the Metro as a live theatre with the rock musical Hair. It had a long run but the theatre generally would have been unprofitable for large-cast shows. In 1979 Greater Union flattened the floor of the stalls and converted the space to a shopping market. This was also unsuccessful and the Kennedy-Miller organisation finally took over the building as a film studio.

Theatre at University of Western Australia, Perth, opened 29 January 1964. Architect: Marshall Clifton.

The first attempt in modem times to reproduce the dimensions of the stage and auditorium of a public theatre of the time of Queen Elizabeth I of England was the New Fortune Theatre. It is a square quadrangle with a thrust stage, pit and three galleries inside the arts faculty building at the University of Western Australia. It conforms in general to the layout of the surrounding galleries and tiring house, or dressing room, of the Fortune Theatre that Edward Alleyn built in London in 1600. It does not replicate a 17th-century London theatre but simply provides the same actor-audience relationship as a theatre of Shakespeare's time. 

Allen Edwards, professor of English at the University of Western Australia, promoted the idea of following the Fortune dimensions when the architect was designing the arts faculty building. He saw it as a tribute to Harley Granville-Barker, who had advocated a replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre as essential to any university department of English that specialised in performance studies. Members of the English department, including Jeana Bradley, Philip Parsons and Neville Teede, supported Edwards.

The dimensions of the Globe Theatre do not exist but the basic measurements of the Fortune are on record. The stage platform, 13.1 metres wide by 8.4 metres deep, projects into the yard, which is 21 metres deep by 19.8 metres wide, including the depth of the 'galleries'. These are verandahs, which in the New Fortune conform to the three levels of the arts faculty building rather than to the heights of the galleries in the original theatre. Cutting across the quadrangle to provide access from one side of the building to the other is a three-level walkway, which has been modified to supply the principal theatrical requirements of a tiring house. The university banned rehearsal and performance during the academic year because tutorial rooms overlooked the quadrangle. The actor-audience relationship has nevertheless led to significant research, particularly by Parsons and Collin O'Brien, into Shakespeare's use of the stage.

The New Fortune opened with Hamlet during the Festival of Perth in 1964, the quadricentenary of Shakespeare's birth. John Gielgud, who was visiting Perth, recorded Ben Jonson's tribute to Shakespeare as a prologue. It has been regularly used during the festival and in February 1968 there was a memorable production by Aarne Neeme and Parsons of Richard III, with Martin Redpath in the title-role. Dorothy Hewett wrote her early plays This Old Man Comes Rolling Home (1966), The Chapel Perilous (1971) and Catspaw (1974) for the New Fortune. On the university campus the New Fortune Theatre complements the proscenium-stage Dolphin Theatre, the thrust-stage Octagon Theatre and the open-air Sunken Gardens Theatre.

Theatre at comer of Lonsdale and Exhibition Streets, Melbourne, opened 30 July 1855, seating 1150. Architect: C. F. Ohlfsen Bagge. Prefabricated in cast and corrugated sheet iron by E. and T. Bellhouse, Manchester. Became dance hall 1857, theatre during 1859, Turkish baths 1860 and finally warehouse. Demolished 1894.

In England in 1854 George Coppin signed the tragedian G.V. Brooke to give a 20-week season in Melbourne for £10 000. Knowing that the young town had few theatres, he bought one from a Manchester ironworking company known for prefabricated buildings, including a theatre and ballroom for Prince Albert at Balmoral Castle. Brooke laid the foundation stone on 18 April 1855 and in six weeks the theatre was erected.  

Possibly the largest prefabricated iron building assembled in Australia until then, it seated 700 in the pit and stalls and 450 more in a rectangular dress circle, which had boxes in the side legs and rear of the auditorium and seats immediately facing the stage. Six gilded, fluted Corinthian columns supported a 10-metre-wide proscenium arch. William Pitt Snr decorated the interior, which was fitted out in timber. It had a pitched roof of corrugated iron, painted blue on the inside and dotted with gold stars. A couple of reviewers thought the theatre resembled a chapel. The iron roof made the building hot in summer, cold in winter and noisy in rain. Its two off-street sides were also covered in corrugated iron. The two street frontages, consisting of shops and entrances to the theatre, were framed in decorative cast iron, filled in with large sheets of glass - a precursor of the curtain walls that have been popular with architects since the 1950s.

Theatre in Bourke Street, opened 6 April 1912 as Brennan's Amphitheatre, seating c.2000. Renamed National Amphitheatre 1912. Redesigned by Henry E. White and reopened 4 November 1916 as Palace Theatre, seating 1700. Interior redecorated by White 1923. Became cinema as Apollo Theatre c.1929. Redecorated and renamed St James Theatre, November 1940. Renamed Metro Theatre. Returned to live musical theatre in early 1970s. Renamed Palace Theatre 1973. Became church. Metro Nightclub in late 1980s

When Brennan's Amphitheatre opened on Easter Saturday 1912 the auditorium was a plain white room with a single rake of seating with a 'balcony' at the rear. The theatre 'could seat 2000 people any night they care to pay the price of admission', said the Bulletin on 2 May. “The cost of the land and the building is set down at £32 000 and none of the money was wasted on interior decoration.’ Fullers’ obtained a controlling interest in the Brennan Vaudeville Circuit shortly after the theatre opened and renamed it the National Amphitheatre. In 1916 Fullers' employed their architect, Henry E. White, to redesign the interior as a three-level auditorium, similar to theatres he had designed or redesigned for them in Sydney (the Adelphi), Brisbane (the Tivoli) and Wellington, New Zealand. Renamed the Palace Theatre, it opened for vaudeville, revue and musicals but became the home of Fullers' melodrama companies. In 1923 Fullers' commissioned White to redesign the plaster decoration of the auditorium in the more elegant Adam style he had just used in the nearby Princess Theatre. 

With the onset of the Great Depression Fullers' turned their theatres over to talking pictures. The Palace became the Apollo Theatre. Snider and Dean showed films there from March 1936 until 1940, when Fullers' Theatres renamed it the St James Theatre. Then Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the theatre and renamed it the Metro. Under this name it briefly returned to live performance with the rock musical Hair. A new owner renamed it the Palace Theatre in 1973. In 1978 it was bought by a revivalist Christian organisation, which moved out in 1986. Then it was turned into a technologically elaborate disco nightclub, still with White's 1923 interior decor.

Theatre in Pitt Street, opened 19 December 1896, seating 1000. Architect: Clarence Backhouse. Remodelled to seat 872, 1923. Architects: Ballantyre and Hare. Closed late 1969. Demolished 1970.

The small Palace Theatre was truly theatrical in its architecture. The brick-and-plaster exterior was an eclectic mixture of baroque arches and cornices with a French-style roof pavilion topped by an Indian-style cupola. Heavily modelled baroque was the style for the lobby, toilets and a small dress-circle foyer, which had a ceiling painting of diaphanously attired young women floating in a misty sky. The original auditorium was unique in Australia. Eight posts rose from the stalls floor to support the fronts of two circles above and then the roof by way of vaults in 'Hindoo Gothic' style. This amalgam of Mogul and Hindu detail continued in an ogee-arched proscenium and side boxes in the form of cupolas with onion-dome 'roofs'. Most of the auditorium was ornamented in sheet steel embossed in elaborate patterns designed and painted by Philip W. Goatcher, one of the last scene-painters to follow the custom of designing the interior decoration of a theatre. Many of the decorative elements he used in the Palace Theatre appear to have come from the Broadway Theatre built in Denver (Colorado, USA) in 1890. 

Goatcher was also the first lessee and director of the Palace Theatre. Its owner was George Adams, who built it as part of his Tattersall's Hotel complex. He intended it to be a palace of varieties - as close to an English music hall as NSW laws would allow. Until 6 p.m. closing of bars was introduced in 1916, patrons could leave the theatre by side exits, cross a narrow private alley and enter the hotel by side doors almost opposite. This satisfied regulations that theatres and hotels had to be on separate sites. The Palace had many later lessees, mainly minor entrepreneurs finding a short-term home or major managements needing an overflow theatre, and it housed entertainment of all kinds. Redesign of the auditorium in 1923 removed most of the posts and converted the decor to a more sedate European Renaissance style. The Palace became a full-time cinema during the Great Depression. After the Second World War it fluctuated between film and live theatre until its demise. The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust and Garnet H. Carroll sub-leased it from Hoyts it from Hoyts Theatres in 1960-61 and 1964.

Theatre in St Kilda, Melbourne, opened 11 November 1927 as cinema seating 2968. Architect: Henry E. White. Converted in 1960 to opera theatre seating 2854.

For nearly a quarter of a century from 1960 Melbourne's venue for large-scale musical theatre and dance was the 2854-seat Palais Theatre in suburban St Kilda. Since the opening of the Victorian Arts Centre the Palais has been more used for concerts but it remains the largest-capacity theatre in Australia. Henry E. White designed it for Harold, Leon and Hermann Phillips as a palatial suburban cinema, in a composite French and Oriental style, to replace the New Palais Pictures, opened in 1922 and destroyed by fire in 1926. The new cinema originally seated 1630 in the stalls and 1338 in the dress circle and it had a large stage and orchestra pit suitable for the variety acts that supplemented de luxe film presentations in the 1920s, but it was devoid of dressing rooms for performers. It showed films until 1960, when it was used for an opera season. The pit was enlarged to take the orchestra, reducing the stalls seating to 1516. Dressing rooms were built in 1962. The Palais housed the Melbourne season of Jesus Christ Superstar. 

Theatre in Phillip Street, Sydney, opened as St James Hall seating 650, 17 December 1903. Architect: Burcham Clamp. Seating reduced to 447 by new stage and proscenium 1916. Called Mercury Theatre 28 February 1952 to 19 December 1953. Redecorated and reopened 7 May 1954 as Phillip Street Theatre, seating 368. Closed 14 January 1961. Demolished and replaced in late 1963 by 15-storey building, including new 300-seat St James Hall, sometimes known as Phillip Street Theatre. Architects: Peddle Thorp and Walker. Closed for renovation of building, 7 October 1989.

The theatre where William Orr presented the acclaimed Phillip Street Revues for nearly seven years was originally the St James Hall, built by Church of England on a site it has owned since the nearby St James Church was built in 1820-24. The three-storey brick building was erected in 1903. Above a semi-basement for church offices were a concert hall and, on the third level, a school. The church hoped to repay large borrowings for the building by frequent letting of the hall, which was praised for good acoustics, harmonious proportion, central location and lack of noise from trams. The gallery, which had an intricate cast-iron balustrade, extended along the side walls. The original bare platform was replaced with a miniature stage in 1912, when the Sydney Stage Society produced Prunella. In 1916 the stage was rebuilt and enlarged, though a new proscenium reduced the seating capacity. The hall then became a popular venue for amateur, semiprofessional and professional theatrical groups, including the Modern Theatre Players and the New Sydney Repertory Society.

Theatre in Phillip Street, opened as Macquarie Auditorium 1941, seating 306. Became Playbox Theatre 1968. Demolished 1973.

Radio 2GB in Sydney fitted out new studios, including a theatrette on the ground floor, in late 1941. The raked auditorium, with well-upholstered seats, was lined with sound-absorbing soft fibreboard, the geometrically cut edges of overlapping sheets providing late Art Deco decoration. The radio shows it housed gradually disappeared after television came to Sydney in 1956, and in 1968 Harry M. Miller began live theatrical presentations in the little theatre. For the second stage production - Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band, produced by Miller and Phillip Productions - the small stage was converted to a fixed two-level apartment set. The Playbox proved to be popular for well-proven overseas plays not taken up by larger commercial managements and, under Miller, it remained a live theatre almost until it was demolished in 1973. 

Theatre in Castlereagh Street, Sydney, opened 12 March 1855, seating 3250. Architect: Henry Robertson. Burned down 3 October 1860. New theatre opened 23 May 1863. Architect: J. F. Hilly. Burned down 6 January 1872.

Joseph Wyatt sold his Royal Victoria Theatre and leased it back in 1849. In 1854 he could not renew the lease so he commissioned the theatre's architect, Henry Robertson, to design another. The result was the Prince of Wales Theatre, a large and well fitted-out house by contemporary standards. The auditorium was 21.3 metres to the orchestra by 18.3 metres across and had four tiers - a pit holding 1500 persons, a dress circle for 500, upper boxes for 750 and a gallery for 500. The fronts of the tiers were in the old style of flat wooden panelling. The ceiling, with a 4.6-metre diameter dome, was 17.7 metres above the pit floor and painted to represent a bright Italian sky. The proscenium opening was 11 metres wide and the stage was 18.3 metres wide by 26.5 metres deep from the gas footlights. Beneath it were the male actors' dressing-rooms, with neither natural light nor ventilation. At first Wyatt leased the theatre to Andrew Torning, who was also lessee of the Royal Victoria. He concentrated on shows there to the neglect of the Prince of Wales, which Wyatt sold in 1858. In 1859-60 the theatre saw a yearlong dispute between Samuel Colville and Charles Poole, who had interlocking leases of Sydney's two theatres, and the actors, who went on strike for a time over pay and conditions.  

In 1860 fire broke out in a bakery in King Street and wind sent the flames into the pine-framed roof of the theatre. Three Sydney insurance companies' fire brigades and two volunteer fire companies arrived, but their efforts, even in heavy rain, could not prevent two deaths, several injuries and almost total destruction of the theatre. R Fitzgerald bought the site and commissioned the architect J. F. Hilly to design a second Prince of Wales Theatre. Hilly is little known today but in his time he was considered a better architect than the famous Edmund Blacket. Hilly reused the front wall of the first Prince of Wales in the new theatre, which opened in 1863. Like its predecessors, it accommodated the audience on four levels. The auditorium was three metres shallower than in the previous building but the stage was now 30.5 metres deep, framed by a proscenium opening only 9.1 metres wide. The stage equipment was possibly the most up-to-date in Australia. Wing and back flats and borders in grooves were operated by shafts and purchase wheels, drums, winches and pulleys to provide maximum flexibility and simultaneous changing of all flats from scene to scene. There was a mezzanine floor beneath the stage for the operation of traps and a stage cellar below that. The second theatre opened under a firmer arrangement than the first, with W. S. Lyster taking a three­ year lease and alternating seasons of opera and drama. Fire destroyed the second Prince of Wales Theatre on 6 January 1872. The front wall survived again. A new Theatre Royal opened on the site in December 1875.

Theatre at corner of McKenzie and View Streets, opened 1874, seating 2000. Architect: George R. Johnson, superintended by Vahland and Getzschman. Also called New Sandhurst Theatre or Royal Princess's Theatre. Altered to form cinema and theatre 1936. Architects: Cowper, Murphy and Appleford. Demolished 1963.

Soon after the first gold rush in 1851 a few theatres were built in Bendigo, then called Sandhurst. The first was the Royal Theatre in 1854. The Royal Victoria followed in the same year and soon closed. The Criterion Theatre, reported to seat only 350, opened in 1856. All were associated with hotels. In 1874 it was reported that there was no regular theatre in the town but a new one would remedy that.

The new Princess Theatre was behind deep shops, and long corridors reached to the various parts of the house. The axis of the auditorium and stage ran parallel to the street. The auditorium was 24 metres wide by 18 metres deep and the stage, contrary to published dimensions, was only about 18 metres wide by less than 15 metres deep, with a nine-metre-wide proscenium opening flanked by banks of three private boxes. The floor of the pit and stalls appears to have been flat, with 11 posts supporting the dress circle and the gallery above it. Six posts at the edge of the circles continued to support the domed ceiling. During its first 50 years the theatre saw touring companies of entrepreneurs such as William Anderson, Wybert Reeve and J. C. Williamson as well as local performers and oddities like the Egyptian War Diorama in January 1885. In 1936 major alterations to produce an Art Deco cinema and theatre reduced the auditorium to two levels but extended the theatre into a former warehouse behind.

Theatre in Gilles Arcade, Adelaide, opened 11 January 1841, seating c.1000. Closed 28 November 1842. Restored, enlarged and reopened as Royal Victoria Theatre 23 December 1850. Closed 10 November 1851. Reopened 1859. Closed 1868. Proclaimed heritage site 15 April 1994.

The remnants of the Queen’s Theatre, the first building to house continuous theatre in Adelaide, have yielded more architectural elements and artefacts than any other mid-19th century theatre-tavern site in Australia. The theatre held a pit for 700 persons, a dress circle of boxes and an upper circle. Its layout was advanced for the time, with the pit penetrating beneath the dress circle, in a similar way to the then recent Royal Victoria Theatre in Sydney. The brothers Vaiben and Emanuel Solomon spent £10 000 in 1841 to build the Queen’s Theatre, the Shakespeare Tavern – which opened into the auditorium – and five large houses. The theatre was run in a respectable manner by John Lazar but he was forced to close it in November 1842, during an economic depression in South Australia. In 1843 the theatre was converted to a courthouse.

When George Coppin arrived in Adelaide in 1846 he found no theatre available, so he arranged with Emanuel Solomon to convert a billiards saloon adjacent to the Shakespeare Tavern into a temporary two-level theatre to house some 900 persons. This New Queen’s Theatre operated until the end of 1850. Edward Snell visited it on 21 November 1850 and noted in his diary that it was ‘a wretched place, only pit and boxes in it and the stage illuminated by 5 foot lights and 2 side lights only. The actors were a set of dull dogs, the scenery was damnable, and the audience a mixture of prostitutes and pickpockets.’

While performing at the New Queen’s Theatre, Coppin and Lazar restored, enlarged and improved the old theatre, after the Supreme Court moved out. It reopened on 23 December 1850 as the Royal Victoria Theatre. It had a new, more imposing front, with applied columns, entablature and pediment, constructed almost 4.2 metres in front of the central portion of the older Georgian-style façade. Architectural fragments of the original Queen’s Theatre still exist – window openings of the first façade and structural timber members cut off at the wall surface, which indicate the dress-circle and gallery levels. Exits from the dress circle to the saloon and tavern bar respectively are discernible. In addition, excavations in 1989-90 revealed walls of the Queen’s Theatre stage and dressing room, the adjoining tavern and the stage and auditorium of the New Queen’s Theatre. Also found were two bases for posts that supported the dress circle and the gallery of the Queen’s, and some 200 artefacts related to the theatre and the tavern. Excavation of the dressing room, stage and orchestra pit revealed grease paint, sequins, military buttons, a Tudor jester’s shoe, candlestick holders, clay pipes, glass bottles and stoneware bottles and shards of crockery.

A plan of the Queen’s Theatre before it was converted to a courthouse shows the auditorium as 16.2 metres long, possibly including the orchestra pit, the stage as 9.1 metres deep, and the whole as 9.8 metres wide. It shows the pit and gallery entrances from Weymouth Street to the front of the auditorium, with rooms behind and along one side of the stage and the Shakespeare tavern along the other side. The press reported that up to 400 persons could pack into the gallery, making the total capacity about 1200.

The gold rush in Victoria in 1851 denuded Adelaide of men and whole families. Deprived of an audience, Coppin became bankrupt and the Royal Victoria Theatre closed in November. It was occasionally used by touring companies until Alex Henderson reopened it permanently in 1859 after minor alterations. It was closed in 1868, just before the new Theatre Royal opened in Hindley Street. The old theatre became successively an extension to the tavern, premises for the City Mission and a horse bazaar. Buyers sat in the dress circle and gallery to study horses paraded in the pit which was paved in bricks. In 1900 the circle and gallery and above-ground stage walls were removed, leaving the building as it is today. The South Australian government has undertaken to preserve it as a state and national heritage item.

Performing-arts centre in Brisbane, opened 20 April 1985 as part of Queensland Cultural Centre. Concert Hall seats 2000. Cremorne Theatre seats up to 315. Lyric Theatre seats 1000, 1500 or 2000 people on three levels. Architect Robin Gibson. Managed by Queensland Performing Arts Trust.

The last mainland state capital to complete a performing arts complex, Brisbane benefited from the others' experience and obtained good value for the $66 million spent between 1979 and early 1985. The origins of the Queensland Performing Arts Complex date back to 1969, when the state government set up a committee to assess the needs of a new art gallery. In 1973 the architect Robin Gibson won a two-stage limited competition for that building. On 8 November 1974 the government announced that it would establish a cultural centre with a performing-arts complex as its major element. On 16 June 1975 Gibson was appointed to produce a conceptual design for an integrated complex, including the Performing Arts Complex, Queensland Art Gallery, Queensland Museum and State Library. Gibson, the theatre consultant Tom Brown and others produced the planning brief for the Performing Arts Complex in January 1978, and a building contract was let in 1979. 

The Art Gallery, which opened first, set the pattern by winning an award from the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. Its interior spaces were not lavish, but provided the public with a great feeling of comfort. The foyers, the Concert Hall and the Lyric Theatre continue in this vein, providing a quiet richness more appropriate to a theatrical occasion, yet without architectural gimmicks or postmodern references to past styles.

The Lyric Theatre was designed for current styles of performing opera, ballet and musicals, with a proscenium width of 14.7 metres and depth from house curtain to last flying line of 15.5 metres. The total width of the stage behind the proscenium is 40.5 metres. The almost rectangular auditorium has two balconies of almost equal size, each seating about 500 persons. The rake of each balcony extends in a leg down each side of the auditorium as a modem equivalent of the horseshoe balcony. The colours of Queensland walnut wall panelling and deep rose carpet and upholstery are graded from back to front of the theatre to direct the eye towards the proscenium arch. Opera and dance companies and musical-theatre companies toured by commercial entrepreneurs perform in this theatre.

The Queensland Theatre Company has used the Cremorne Theatre since it opened. It is a studio theatre which can be arranged into any of five modes---cabaret, in-the­round, thrust stage, flat-floor concert and single-rake cinema. Its name commemorates an old vaudeville theatre that stood on part of the site from 1911 to 1954.

The two-level Concert Hall is used for events ranging from symphony-orchestra concerts to rock concerts and solo shows by popular entertainers. The whole complex also caters for convivial social occasions through the bar service, a cafe and two restaurants.

Theatre in Castlereagh Street, Sydney, opened 29 April 1886 as Royal Foresters' Hall, seating 906. Architects: Ellis and Slatyer. Renamed Royal Standard Theatre 8 May 1886. Renamed Empire Theatre 16 March 1901; Standard Theatre 24 November 1906; Little Theatre 22 March 1913; Playhouse 1917. Demolished c.1923.

After nearly 30 years of melodrama, vaudeville, boxing, seances and two-up games, this modest hall-cum-theatre became significant in 1913, when Hugh Buckler and his wife Violet Paget made it the home of their Little Theatre. This company was the first in Sydney to specialise in literary drama, following the lead of the Royal Court Theatre in London and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.  

The theatre began as a hall in a building on the western side of Castlereagh Street, south of Bathurst Street. It was erected by the Ancient Order of Foresters, a lodge and friendly society. There was a lodge room behind the dress circle and there were more rooms above the auditorium. According to the NSW Government Architect, the hall was 29.2 metres long by 11 metres wide. The stage was the same width but only 7.6 metres feet deep with a 6.1 metre-wide proscenium opening. The original lessee, Frank Smith, had a slight slope built into the floor. He also had 308 iron tip-up chairs, upholstered in crimson velvet, put into the front stalls and 220 into the dress circle. The rear stalls, occupying less than half of the floor, were 442 hard tip-up seats.

Nine days after the hall opened it was renamed the Royal Standard Theatre for the first stage performance - Alfred Dampier's production of The Phantom Ship, based on the legend of Vanderdecken, the Flying Dutchman. The premiere of For the Term of His Natural Life by Dampier and Thomas Somers followed on 5 June 1886.

In 1901 Fullers' from New Zealand leased the theatre, renovated it and reopened it as the Empire Theatre. Their Empire Minstrel and Variety Company played there for nearly a year. From November 1906 it was called the Standard Theatre and occupied by Harry Clay's Vaudeville Company. In 1913 the theatre, renovated, redecorated and re-seated, reopened as the Little Theatre, 'the Home of High-Class Comedy'. Gone was the 'mouldy, mediocre unloveliness' of the auditorium, said the management, which had installed a tea and coffee lounge beneath the stage so that patrons could exchange ideas after matinee performances. A photograph of the Little Theatre in 1913 corresponds to a description published in 1886 - a three-storey building surmounted by the largest carved stone pediment in Sydney. This displayed rich foliage and the arms of the Foresters' lodge.

During the First World War the lease passed from Hugh Buckler to Sid James, who again renovated the theatre and reopened it as the Playhouse on 29 September 1917, with The New Sin, a play by Basil Macdonald Hastings. Later J. and N. Tait Ltd. took over the Playhouse. It seems to have ended its days with the final performance of the Aussie Smart Set Diggers on 15 January 1921.

Theatre in Bourke Street, opened 12 April 1841 as Royal Pavilion Saloon. Called Theatre Royal in 1842. Closed and reopened August 1842 as Royal Victoria Theatre. Closed 24 April 1845. Reopened as Canterbury Hall but soon demolished.

Only four years after Melbourne was officially named and planned, Thomas Hodge, or Hodges, built the first theatre. Hodge, whose interest in theatre had arisen from some menial contact with the English actor-manager Charles Kean, was apparently a barman. His employer at the Eagle Inn, J. Jamieson, put up adjoining land and most of the finance for construction of a shed-like timber building measuring 22.5 by 10.5 metres. The Colonial Secretary in Sydney refused Hodge a licence for theatrical performances but the local police magistrate gave permission for musical concerts and the Royal Pavilion Saloon, generally known as the Pavilion, opened on 12 April 1841. The musical performance was 'spiced with low buffoonery, ribaldry and interludes of riot and confusion' and Hodge was imprisoned for infringing a law introduced in the 1820s. 

George Buckingham offered to organise and direct a company of local players but this was initially unacceptable to the authorities. In December 1841 six leaders of the community formed themselves into a board of stewards to set up an Amateur Theatrical Association to obtain a temporary licence for performances for the benefit of a projected hospital. The Colonial Secretary issued a licence for one month from 24 January 1842. Buckingham prepared the theatre and stage decorations and doubtless rehearsed the casts for amateur performances of Rob Roy and The Widow’s Victim in aid of the hospital fund on 21 February. The theatre was then called the Theatre Royal. It was given a continuous 12-month licence on 8 July and in August it reopened as the Royal Victoria Theatre, sometimes called the Victoria Theatre.

According to vague descriptions, the dress boxes were so low that occupants could bend and touch people in the pit, so the floor of the dress circle must have been at stage level, in Georgian style. An unstable ladder-like stair led to an upper circle of small pens graced with the name of boxes. The partitions between them were soon removed to form a more conventional gallery. The theatre leaked and it was so unstable that it swayed in a wind. Inebriated 'swells' once attempted to capsize it by applying brute force beneath the floor. Successive managers, Buckingham, Conrad Knowles and Samson Cameron were all criticised for poorly prepared actors and riotous behaviour in the audience. Three days after the opening of the more substantial Queen’s Theatre Royal the Royal Victoria was closed.

Theatre in Pitt Street, 26 March 1838, seating 1900 in four tiers. Architect: Henry Robertson. Auditorium rebuilt in three tiers for reopening on 2 December 1865. Destroyed by fire 22 July 1880.

For most of its existence the Royal Victoria Theatre was Sydney’s largest and most important theatre. Joseph Wyatt decided to build it in mid-1836, shortly after he became sole lessee of Barnett Levey’s Theatre Royal and on 7 September the foundation stone was laid, on the western side of Pitt Street, between King and Market Streets. The architect, Henry Robertson designed a building in the Regency colonial style – a restrained, three-storey façade with pilasters above the ground floor topped by an entablature and modest cornice. His early sketches of the elevation, published prior to construction, have been misinterpreted as representing the Theatre Royal.

The front section of the Royal Victoria housed a hotel and a shop. Entry to the more expensive seats was between the hotel bar and the shop, while patrons reached the cheaper seats down a side alleyway. The interior broke with Georgian tradition and heralded the Regency style of theatre design. The Royal Victoria was the first theatre in Australia to have the ground-floor pit extend beneath a dress circle raised above stage level. Above the dress circle were a family circle and a gallery – four tiers in all. There was a splayed-arch proscenium but Georgian proscenium doors for actors’ entry to the stage were retained until 1854, when they gave way to proscenium boxes. The Georgian scene-changing system of wing flats and shutters in sliding grooves was also installed.

Drawings in the Mitchell Library (Sydney) show the auditorium to have been 16.75 metres long by 15 metres wide buy 11.38 metres high. The stage apron was 3.05 metres deep and the depth from the curtain line to the rear stage was 12.42 metres. In 1840, for Edward Fitzball’s play The Flying Dutchman, an opening 4.72 metres wide was made in the rear stage wall to allow scenic vistas for a further 15.24 metres in depth. At first the theatre was lit by Argand oil lamps but in 1841 gas lighting, fed by a private gas generator on site, was installed in the auditorium.

The Royal Victoria opened on 26 March 1838 with Othello followed by the farce The Middy Ashore. Complaints that Wyatt had a monopoly subsided when George Coppin took over the theatre for a season in 1843. Wyatt and his wife Rachael sold the land on which the theatre stood on 5 November 1847 and then leased back the building on 4 January 1849. On 31 December 1851 they sub-leased the hotel part to Andrew Torning. In 1854 Wyatt was unable to renew the lease on favourable terms and Torning became the lessee at the start of September. Wyatt decided to build the Prince of Wales Theatre, which gave the Royal Victoria its first real opposition. Later lessees of the Royal Victoria included Samuel Colville from 1 October 1859, R. Tolano from 2 December 1865 and Coppin for six months in 1867. In 1865 the auditorium was gutted and rebuilt with only three tiers, which reduced the capacity from the original 1900 or more persons and improved comfort and safety. Until its destruction in 1880 the Royal Victoria continued to be upgraded and redecorated – 20 times in all – and to house leading performers. In the 1850’s Clarance Holt and his wife, Richard Stewart and the Australian tragedian H.N. Warner performed there. The 1860s included two seasons by Charles and Ellen Kean, and the 1870s saw William Creswick, Alfred Dampier, George Darrell in his own Transported for Life and other works, Bland Holt and Adelaide Ristori at the Royal Victoria.

Theatre in Russell Street, Melbourne. Converted from church and opened as theatre seating 374, 1944. First used by Union Theatre Repertory Company 20 July 1960. Altered to seat 416 - later reduced to 394 - and reopened by Melbourne Theatre Company 12 February 1968. Architect: Robin Boyd.

Australia's oldest existing professional theatre company, the Melbourne Theatre Company made the Russell Street Theatre its home during a period of consolidation and development in the 1960s and has remained there ever since. The building in downtown Russell Street was a church until the Victorian Council for Adult Education took it over in 1944 and converted it for amateur theatrical performances. In the late 1950s audiences for amateurs were falling away and the Union Theatre Repertory Company was seeking premises off the University of Melbourne campus. It presented a revue at Russell Street for a month in 1960 and next year it began a six-month season there. The company left the university at the end of 1965 and moved to Russell Street full time in 1966. Between the 1967 and 1968 seasons the architect Robin Boyd remodelled the converted church into a delightfully intimate theatre. The capacity was increased by the addition of two boxes each seating 15 persons, at the rear of the raked stalls and a small central balcony - virtually another box – seating about 12 and filling one-third of the auditorium width. The proscenium stage, lacking a fly tower, was cleverly designed to minimise separation of the audience from the action. A wall-covering pattern reproducing the company's new symbol in a variety of sizes enriched the red-toned auditorium. The company reopened the theatre with The Crucible by Arthur Miller - its first performance as the Melbourne Theatre Company. The company intended to use the theatre only until the larger Playhouse at the Victorian Arts Centre was available in the mid-1970s, but it had to wait until 1984 for that theatre. Since then it has retained the Russell Street Theatre as its second venue. The theatre was redecorated in greys in 1989. 

Performing-arts centre on Darlington campus of University of Sydney, opened September 1975. Architects: Allen, Jack and Cottier. Contains thrust-stage York Theatre, seating 788; end-stage Everest Theatre for music and dance, seating 600; Downstairs studio theatre, seating up to 200.

Metropolitan theatres derive their image from the type of shows performed in them, their district or the sense of occasion they engender but none such distinction serves the Seymour Theatre Centre. It houses a wide range of shows and it is a kilometre from the central business district. In many ways it is like a performing-arts centre in a large country town, but without the local status.

The centre commemorates Everest York Seymour, who developed a chain of shops, bred cattle and took an interest in the arts. When he died in 1966, aged 60, he left the Sydney City Council $4 million for the 'purchase or construction of a building as a centre for the cultivation, education and performance of the musical and dramatic arts befitting the City of Sydney'. No money was provided for maintenance or performances. Building costs virtually meant that the recipient of the bequest would have to provide the land for a new building. The University of Sydney, apparently the only organisation within the city able and willing to provide the land and infrastructure, obtained the funds.

The Seymour Centre was designed to supplement the city's theatres with a fully-equipped thrust-stage theatre, a medium-capacity concert hall-theatre with good acoustics, and an adaptable studio theatre. Its success has varied, in the case of the York Theatre partly because of the dull brick and concrete architectural style and the black interior, so loved by directors, and partly because of the lack of a permanent vibrant company. From 1984 to 1987 the Nimrod Theatre Company was resident in the York. The seating capacity made viable such productions as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman with Warren Mitchell and Mel Gibson, but the style of acting contrasted unfavourably with the informal style which the company had been identified in the smaller Nimrod Theatre. Some actors have found the actor-audience relationship demanding and alienating, but on occasion it could not be bettered, as with the commercial productions of Nell Dunn's Steaming and Claire Luckham's Trafford Tanzi. The York is mostly used for touring productions of drama, comedy, musicals and dance. The Everest Theatre has been modified for dance and musical theatre as well as concerts.

Theatre in Sydney, in premises of Robert Sidaway, managed by John Sparrow. Opened 16 January 1796.

The evidence is scanty, but it is known that the first theatre building in Australia, known simply as the Theatre, existed somewhere in little Sydney Town at the end of the 18th century. The prices show that it had four divisions in its auditorium - pit, front boxes and gallery. Other descriptions published since the mid-19th century have been based on circumstantial evidence or conjecture. The facts revealed by research so far come from a description by David Collins, Judge-Advocate of NSW, at the time of the first performance in the Theatre; reports printed in a couple of contemporary British journals; and a few playbills in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. 

For a century writers have argued whether Sidaway's theatre was near the bakery where he made the colony's bread - somewhere east of Bell Row, now Bligh Street – or near his home off High Street (now George Street), near present-day Jamison Street. Some have assumed that he built the theatre for the cost of £100 cited in one report, yet Collins's words were: ' ... some of the more decent class of prisoners ... obtained permission to prepare a play-house... [and] they had fitted up the house with more theatrical propriety than could have been expected'. Given the costs of the time, £100 would not have been enough to build a theatre from scratch. Furthermore, 'prepare' does not generally indicate 'erect' or 'construct' a whole building. It is likely that the theatre was in existing premises.

Collins wrote of a benefit for widow Eades and her family: 'The house was full, and it was said that she got upwards of twelve pounds by the night'. Paul McGuire, in his book The Australian Theatre, assumed that this meant the takings for the night were £12 and, calculating loosely from the seat prices, he deduced that the theatre held 120 persons. A beneficiary, however, generally gained the takings less expenses, so £12 would have been yielded by a performance before many more than 120 persons. The design of the interior, with its four divisions, is also uncertain. It may have been laid out in typical Georgian style on two levels, rough-hewn like the theatre shown in J. Wright's 1788 engraving of W. R. Pyne's painting Macbeth in a Barn rather than a typical English provincial theatre. Or it may have been on one raked level, like the fit-ups in barns in which English touring companies played where there was no dedicated theatre; George Coppin describes these temporary theatres in his autobiography. If Sidaway's theatre was of the latter type, this would account for its having been 'dismantled' in 1798, on the orders of Governor John Hunter, and its having existed again in 1799 and 1800.

The Theatre's existence was chequered largely because there was a shortage of money in the colony and goods-in-kind were accepted in place of the one to five shillings charged for admission. A contemporary report claims that while the people of Sydney - mostly convicts and emancipists - were at the theatre, other convicts ransacked their houses.

Theatre in Nimrod Street, Darlinghurst, Sydney. Opened 2 December 1970 as Nimrod Street Theatre, sealing 140, Renamed The Loft 1974, Stables Theatre 1975.

Since 1970 this little theatre has seen the most innovative and exciting productions in Sydney, especially of Australian plays. It was founded by the actor John Bell and Ken Horler and his wife Lilian, who became business manager. Ken Horler, a lawyer, had been passionately interested in theatre since he and Bell were both in the Sydney University Players. The small, austere building, more than 100 years old, had been a stables for delivery and cab horses, a garage for taxis and a gymnasium. With some money from Horler, members of the proposed company worked unpaid to convert the building into a small, primitive theatre. Double coach-house doors opened into a brick-paved, barn-like foyer. A stair led to a triangular loft, two sides of which contained raked hard wooden benches. The remaining side, which formed the acting area, had a post dead-centre, supporting the low roof. Despite, or even because of these restrictions, the Nimrod mounted extraordinary productions in the theatre. It opened with Biggles, a satire on Returned Services League clubs by Ron Blair, Michael Boddy and Marcus Cooney, and it developed works by Blair, Alex Buzo and others in rough, larrikin style. Two high points were David Williamson's The Removalists, which left members of the audience as emotionally wrung out as if they had experienced police arrogance and brutality at first hand, and the memorable premiere of Peter Kenna's A Hard God. 

After only three years the company decided it needed double the audience capacity of 140, and in May 1974 moved to a new theatre, now called the Belvoir Street Theatre, in Surry Hills. The old theatre was renamed the Loft for a short period during which it was rented to alternative-theatre groups. The dramatist Bob Ellis bought the theatre in late 1975 and renamed it the Stables Theatre. The Griffin Theatre Company took up permanent residence in 1980. It was still there when Ellis put the theatre up for sale in 1985. The theatre was threatened with destruction. In 1987, however, a theatrical philanthropist, Dr Rodney Seaborn, established a family foundation, the Seaborn, Broughton and Walford Foundation, to buy and improve the building. In 1988 the roof was raised-enabling patrons in the back seats to stand up straight when the performance ended - and supported with trusses to eliminate the centre-stage post. Air-conditioning was installed and the seating was made more comfortable. The early works of Grant Fraser, Michael Gow, Gordon Graham and Hannie Rayson were performed at the Stables.

Performing-arts centre on Bennelong Point, opened 28 September 1973. Architects: Joern Utzon, stages 1 and 2, 1957-66; Peter Hall, Lionel Todd and David Littlemore in association with NSW Government Architect, E. H. Farmer, stage 3, 1966-73: Originally comprised Concert Hall seating 2690, Opera Theatre seating 1550, Drama Theatre seating 544, Music Room seating 419 and Recording Hall seating 300. Recording Hall became Broadwalk Studio April 1986. Music Room became Playhouse November 1983.

Whatever the problems of design, cost and function before and after its completion, the Sydney Opera House is a major architectural achievement. Its unique site and exterior design have made it the sight tourists most wish to see in Australia. It has become a symbol and a centre for civic events in Sydney. It gave patrons of the performing arts facilities that remain far superior to any others in Sydney, and this has helped to generate a considerable increase in audiences, especially for drama and opera. It has been the principal venue for the Sydney Theatre Company and its predecessor, the Old Tote Theatre Company.

The Sydney Opera House was the most complex structure proposed for Sydney, perhaps anywhere in Australia, since the Harbour Bridge was built in 1927-32. In 1954, after several years' discussion about a venue for concerts and opera, the NSW government resolved to build a music centre on Bennelong Point. It was to comprise a large concert hall, seating about 3000 persons, that could be converted for performances of opera, and a small multipurpose theatre for chamber opera and drama, to seat 1200.

Sir Eugene Goossens has been credited with promoting the idea when he was director of the NSW State Conservatorium of Music and conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, but students at the University of Sydney School of Architecture had a project to design an opera house on Bennelong Point in 1947 and another in 1951, which was exhibited in a department store.

An international architectural competition was held in 1956, judged by Professor H. Ingham Ashworth of Sydney, Professor Leslie Martin of Cambridge (England), the American architect Eero Saarinen and the NSW Government Architect, Cobden Parkes. From 222 entries they chose a design by a 38-year-old Dane, Joern Utzon. It was so sketchy that a perspective drawing had to be made by a local architect before it could be exhibited and a local quantity surveyor had to make a rough estimate of cost. As with many competitions, imagination mattered more than strict conformation to specifications. It is usually argued that because competition designs are hardly more than architectural ideas, it is less important to select a design than to select a designer who will produce a superior building.

In the event there was probably more controversy during the construction of the Sydney Opera House than any other building in Australia. A change of government from Labor to Liberal, changes in the design brief, the lack of a theatre consultant, rising costs, the forced resignation of the architect in 1966, and the appointment of a consortium of architects to complete the design, mostly the interior, all contributed to a first-rate public scandal. The architect, the government and the committee set up to act on its behalf all have been criticised for their actions and their organisation of the job. The government produced a poor design brief for the building and insisted on the work beginning before the design had been satisfactorily developed or proper costing done. The Public Works Department's procedures of calling for public tender were incompatible with Utzon's need to work with manufacturers on the mass production of revolutionary components. A new government in 1966 reviewed and changed the design brief, causing considerable redesign of the interiors to produce the present spaces.

The space originally intended to house the auditorium and fly-tower stage of the main theatre was converted to a concert hall. The space beneath the stage, originally to be occupied by machinery for moving scenery, was converted to the Recording Hall. The original space for chamber opera and drama had to be 'stretched' to become the Opera Theatre - in which 98 seats have poor views of the stage. A space allocated for an 'experimental' theatre became the Drama Theatre. For years designers and directors had difficulty in filling its wide low-proscenium stage with setting and action. The Music Room quickly became a cinema for art films, and when the Ensemble Theatre Company found a home there during rebuilding of its premises, it became the Playhouse, now used by entrepreneurs. Apart from these five auditoria there is the Reception Hall, which accommodates 200 persons.

The Sydney Opera House was Sydney's first theatre in the 20th century to provide bars serving alcoholic drinks in the foyer. The management has fostered catering as well as performance. Soon after the opening of a restaurant and a harbour-side cafeteria, it converted part of the box-office lobby into a cafe. Alterations to the forecourt in 1986-88 added a third restaurant as well as shops and a new pedestrian concourse. The management also hires out the harbour-side foyers of the concert hall and the opera theatre for luncheons and other functions. All this and the bar trade provide more income than the box office.

Theatre in Hindley Street, opened 13 April 1868, seating 894. Architect: Thomas English. Enlarged to seat 3000 and reopened 2 March 1878. Architect: George Johnson. Remodelled, reopened 11 April 1914. Architect: William Pitt jnr. Closed 1959. Demolished 1962.

From the 1880s until its closure in 1959 the first Theatre Royal was the Adelaide showplace of J.C. Williamson’s and its forerunners. When it opened in 1868 Samuel Lazar, J. T. Sagar and J. M. Wendt owned it and George Coppin leased and directed it. The new theatre was an improvement on others in Adelaide, although its auditorium was quite small – 15.3 metres long by 13.8 metres wide by 10.8 metres high. Into this were squeezed the pit and stalls, holding 614 persons, a dress circle seating 200, and a gallery seating 480. The stage was 13.8 metres wide by 16.2 metres deep and fully equipped with traps. The scenery was the traditional system of sliding wings and shutters, with borders that could be raised out of sight, all worked by pulleys and drums. One bar served pit and stalls patrons, and dress-circle patrons had exclusive use of a second bar and a billiards room, adjoining a large saloon. At the foot of the gallery stairs there was a third bar, reached by passing through a restaurant from a separate entrance. 

When the theatre was rebuilt in 1878 some of the original facade may have been retained but two-thirds of it was a new and far more imposing neoclassical section. This was symmetrical in itself, with a tripartite first-floor facade of pilasters, pedimented windows, entablature, and a deep cornice, over which was a large central pediment in front of a balustraded parapet wall. The interior was among the earliest in Australia to conform to the new Victorian style. The auditorium, enlarged to 21.9 metres wide by 21 metres deep, housed 3000 people on three levels. The stage was increased in size and the proscenium, widened from 7.5 to 9 metres, was designed like a picture frame. Gas lighting was installed, with the new pilot-light system which permitted lights to be turned off during performances. Separate entries to the various parts of the house still enforced the separation of social classes, to the gratification of a reviewer in South Australian Register who referred to pit and gallery patrons as the 'great unwashed' with 'playful eccentricities'. The 1878 auditorium, as in the original building, had three boxes, one above the other in a narrow band directly in front of the proscenium. When William Pitt jnr altered the auditorium in 1914 he designed a very deep proscenium with a splayed-arch sounding board and four private boxes on each side in two banks of two, all decorated in heavily modelled French rococo. Unfortunately the elderly Pitt had not kept his engineering skills up to date, so the tiers were still supported by six posts. By the mid-20th century, audiences resented these as unnecessary obstructions. In 1959 J.C. Williamson's found it a better proposition to buy and remodel the Tivoli Theatre, now Her Majesty’s Theatre, than to modernise the Theatre Royal.

Theatre in Elizabeth Street, opened January 1865 as Mason's Concert Hall. Architect: W. Coote. Name later alternated between Victoria Concert Hall and Victoria Theatre. Renovated, reopened on 21 April 1874 as Queensland Theatre. Rebuilt and reopened on 18 April 1881 as Theatre Royal, seating 1350. Improved with electric lighting and redecoration 1911. Closed 19 December 1959 and converted to cabaret and orchestral rehearsal room.

The first true theatre in Brisbane began as a one-level hall behind the Victoria Hotel. A photograph of the old hotel shows 'Theatre Royal Est'd 1863' in plasterwork above the cornice, but the publican George B. Mason did not open the simple concert hall that became the theatre until early 1865. There were dress seats, stalls and pit on the flat floor, but there was neither gallery nor boxes. The stage appeared 'to be well adapted for theatrical representation', said a correspondent in the Brisbane Courier. The theatre was first advertised as the Victoria Theatre on 30 September 1865, but patronage seems to have been mediocre. 

After the theatre reopened as the Queensland Theatre on 21 April 1874, the Brisbane Courier said the formerly 'dingy and cellar-like' house had been considerably improved. It had a raked floor, a new proscenium, a new gas sunlight, lighter colours and generally increased comfort. The newspapers still did not consider it a good theatre, however. The whole building appears to have been rebuilt from the street backwards in 1881, parts of the hotel becoming integral with the theatre as refreshment and smoking rooms. Both hotel and theatre were named Royal. The theatre housed 350 in the dress circle, 250 in the stalls and 750 in the pit. The newspapers rated it suitable for a city of nearly 30,000 inhabitants. It was rather austere, with numerous closely spaced posts supporting the circle. From 1900 until the Second World War its uses fluctuated between vaudeville and popular light drama. It was in the Brennan Vaudeville Circuit for a period after the 1911 refurbishment. During the Second World War it was a theatre for the American armed forces. It returned to vaudeville in 1948 under the direction of George Wallace jnr, but his weekly-change shows lost popularity after television began in Brisbane and it soon closed.

Theatre opened c.1852. Front portion rebuilt as hotel 1856. Destroyed by fire and immediately rebuilt 1857. Gutted by fire and rebuilt as two-level theatre in 1887 Remodelled as cinema in 1930s.

For more than 130 years there has almost continuously been a place of entertainment on the site of the Theatre Royal in the old gold town of Castlemaine. The first building was made of timber and canvas, but some fragments of masonry walls of the 1857 and 1887 rebuildings remain in the present theatre. A photograph of the interior after the 1887 rebuilding shows a deep horseshoe balcony with a Regency-style deep proscenium, in which there are traditional stage doors and small boxes above. This interior disappeared when the theatre was redecorated in Art Deco style inside and outside in the 1930s. It is used for cinema, live theatre and disco.  

Theatre in St John Street, opened 1857, seating 800. Architect: W. H. Clayton. Partly rebuilt in 1878 and thereafter known variously as Gaiety Theatre, Empire Theatre and Lyceum Theatre. Now Lyceum Hall, used as craft shop.

Possibly the oldest little-altered theatrical structure in Australia is the two-storey Lyceum Hall in Launceston (Tas.). It was built in 1856 by the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Odd Fellows as members' rooms and offices, with a hall in the upper storey. Like many such halls, it would have been fitted up with a temporary or semipermanent stage and dressing rooms in front of the rear windows. The ground floor has been gutted for modem shops but the second-storey front and rear facades retain the windows that originally illuminated the simple, high-ceilinged rectangular hall. A straight stair from a rear lane enters one side of the hall. The original stair came from the main entrance on the ground floor and turned. 

As the Theatre Royal from 1857 to 1878 the hall saw major touring performers such as G. V. Brooke, Sir William and Lady Don, Charles Poole's dramatic company and W. S. Lyster's Royal Italian and English Opera Company. The building became the property of the Bank of Tasmania in 1872 and was partly rebuilt in 1878. After this it seems to have housed mainly variety. From about 1892 to 1910 the hall was one of four in Launceston that were fitted up for theatrical performances. The others were the Academy of Music, the Albert Hall and the Mechanics' Institute. The Theatre Royal was the home of Todd's (Lyceum) Pictures from early in the 20th century until 1921, when it became the Lyceum Billiard Saloon.

Theatre in Bourke Street, opened 16 July 1855. Architect: J. R. Burns.  Seated 3300 persons in four levels.  Destroyed by fire March 20 1872.  Rebuilt and reopened 6 November 1872.  Architect George Browne.  Seated nearly 4000.  Redesigned by William Pitt Jnr. as three-level auditorium 1904. Closed 17 November 1933 and demolished to make way for department store.

Built in 1854-55, only two decades after the first settlement of Melbourne, this large, substantial theatre rivalled the Theatres Royal at Covent Garden and Drury Lane in London in the sizes of its auditorium and stage. The auditorium was 19.2 metres wide by 22.8 metres from the rear to the stage curtain line. The stage was 26.4 metres from the same curtain line to its rear wall, with a 3.6 metre apron projecting into the auditorium. The stalls-pit floor extended to the boundary walls of the auditorium, with posts supporting three balconies, all rather cramped in height. In front of the theatre was a lofty two-storey hotel in a heavy early-Victorian neoclassical style. The theatre, owned by John Black, was largely an optimistic extravagance for the young town, even with the influx of residents and itinerants brought by the Victorian gold rushes. A year after Black opened the Theatre Royal with R. B. Sheridan's The School for Scandal, he went bankrupt and was forced to sell it for £21 000, about one-quarter of the cost of building it. The actor G. V. Brooke and the actor-manager George Coppin bought the theatre, but it was rarely profitable to them or various lessees. In 1861 the theatre came under the control of Ambrose Kyte and then returned to Coppin.

After fire destroyed the building in 1872 Coppin rebuilt the theatre with a high three-storey hotel in front, designed in rococo Victorian style and surmounted by a huge royal coat of arms. The architect George Browne increased the depth and height of the auditorium to 25.5 metres and 18 metres respectively and increased the capacity to nearly 4000 people. The stage was deepened to 36 metres. There was a huge gas chandelier in a 12.6 metre diameter dome, painted with scenes of Melbourne and London. In 1880 the proscenium was brought forward to eliminate the stage apron. Yet even with these improvements Dion Boucicault in 1885 found the theatre to be large, dusty and primitive, with poor audience accommodation and wretched backstage arrangements for the actors.

Coppin operated the theatre in partnership with Henry Harwood, John Hennings and Richard Stewart until it was taken over by Williamson, Garner and Musgrove. This firm and its successors ran until the Great Depression, when it was sold as a redevelopment site. In 1904 J. C. Williamson had the auditorium gutted and redesigned by William Pitt Jnr with only three levels, but still with a forest of posts. As the Williamson company's premier theatre in Melbourne, the Theatre Royal mainly housed major overseas companies and opera and operetta productions.

Theatre in George Street, opened 5 October 1833. Seated about 900.Closed September 1838. Destroyed by fire 17-18 March 1840.

The first continuously licensed permanent theatre Australia, the Theatre Royal was the brainchild of Barnet Levey, an amateur singer of comic songs. In April 1826 he began a building spree on the eastern side of George Street between King and Market Streets. The first structure was to be the Colchester Warehouse, which would include a two-tier theatre, with one floor of grain storage beneath it and two above. During 1827 Levey was preoccupied with building a windmill atop the warehouse and commencing a new building between the warehouse and George Street. This building, which was attached to the warehouse, was at first noted as being a dwelling, purportedly designed by the architect Francis Greenway. By mid-1828 the 'dwelling house' was being roofed and the theatre was being prepared. It then emerged that Levey did not possess title to the land on which the warehouse was built.  

Part of the 'dwelling house' was opened as the Royal Hotel in March 1829 and Levey obtained a licence to hold balls, dances and concerts at the hotel, but he appears to have transferred the concerts to the theatre in the warehouse, which was first used on 24 August 1829. Then he went further and performed dramatic sketches at an 'at-home'. This riled Governor Ralph Darling and he further restricted Levey's licence for balls and concerts when it was renewed on 1 January 1830. Unable to use the theatre for theatrical performances, Levey advertised the concerts that he held there as being in the Royal Assembly Rooms.

On 18 December 1830 the hotel and warehouse, including the theatre, were sold by order of the mortgagee. The purchaser transferred the title to the former mortgagee, Daniel Cooper. He employed John Verge, architect and builder, to refit the theatre and enlarge it by adding a third tier in place of a storage floor above. The hotel in front was to be completed and include an 'orchestra surmounted by the royal arms' in the saloon, for concerts. George Sippe, the new licensee, reopened the hotel in September 1831.

Levey leased the theatre and the saloon of the hotel and obtained a licence under a new governor to hold at-homes, including theatrical sketches, in the saloon until work on the theatre was completed. Newspaper reports of the time are confusing as to whether Levey held his at-homes in the saloon or the theatre, but it is clear that the saloon was fitted up with a 'tasty stage' and 'a tier of boxes' for a performance of Douglas Jerrold's Black-Eyed Susan on 26 December 1832. Regular performances were given in this temporary abode until the beginning of June 1833. Finally the new three-tier theatre within the warehouse was completed. It opened on 5 October 1833 with a melodrama, The Miller and His Men, followed by a farce, The Irishman in London. With the exception of an additional tier of audience accommodation, in dimensions and style the theatre was similar to the Georgian Theatre at Richmond in Yorkshire - two tiers of narrow boxes, the lower at the level of the stage, and one tier of gallery, including side slips over the boxes. These, together with the stage, were arranged in a rectangle enclosing a raked pit. The pit and the three tiers above it were contained within a height of 8.8 metres. The theatre was 26 metres long, including the stage, and about 9.7 metres wide. The space for each person at that time was about half today's allowance, so the capacity would have been about 900 persons.

Management fluctuated between Levey and Joseph Simmons until June 1836, when Conrad Knowles took control as actor-manager until early February 1837. There were consistent complaints of imperfect preparation of plays even after Levey reopened in April 1837. Thomas Simes became manager in May. Levey died on 2 October 1837. His wife Sarah took over the management, with the stage under John Lazar's control, but closed the theatre without notice just before Joseph Wyatt opened the Royal Victoria Theatre on 26 March 1838. She continued to occupy the building, and its owner, Daniel Cooper, sued her in September 1838. He won an action for ejection, leaving him free to lease or sell the building to someone else. Wyatt bought all the buildings on 2 January 1839.

Theatre in Castlereagh Street, opened 11 December 1875. Architect: J. F. Hilly. Auditorium damaged by fire 17 June 1892. Reopened 2 January 1893. Closed 29 April 1972 and demolished. Replaced by new Theatre Royal in King Street, opened 23 January 1976. Architect: Harry Seidler.

After fire destroyed the second Prince of Wales Theatre in January 1872 its architect, J. F. Hilly, was commissioned to design the third theatre on the site, the Theatre Royal. He reused the Castlereagh Street front of the Prince of Wales Theatre. The stage was reduced to 20.1 metres in depth and the auditorium was slightly increased to 21.3 metres by 18.3 metres. It seated only about 1500 people in comfort, in three levels instead of four. The groove system of scene-changing remained. The outer walls were brick and the posts and basic framing were cast-iron but the interior was still lined in timber with canvas affixed as the base for painted and modelled decoration. The theatre opened under the lesseeship of Samuel Lazar, who offered fairly eclectic fare, ranging from classical drama with Mary Scott-Siddons and later George Rignold, through Alfred Dampier's dramas to the London Comedy Company and the Emily Soldene Opera-Bouffe Company. 

The theatre was refurbished in 1882, when Williamson, Garner and Musgrove took it over. In 1883 electricity was installed. This allowed the auditorium to be plunged into darkness, producing a 'peepshow stage', which quickly became the new tradition for proscenium-stage theatres. Fire damaged the auditorium on 17 June 1892, leaving the canvas hanging in shreds. The theatre reopened on 2 January 1893 with the stage-house raised to provide full height flying facilities. About 1897 the freehold came into the hands of Gustave Ramaciotti. Stars who appeared at the Theatre Royal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries included Sarah Bernhardt, Dion Boucicault and Nellie Stewart. The theatre housed vaudeville in the 1920s. In 1921 the architect Henry E. White redesigned the facade in an Edwardian style, foyers in classical style and an auditorium, again on three levels, in classical Adam style. There was now only one post in the stalls instead of 13. Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike acted there in 1932 but the Theatre Royal was largely given over to musicals during the Great Depression. By the end of 1935 it and the Tivoli Theatre were the only live theatres in Sydney.

The Ramaciotti family sold the theatre to developers in 1969 and closure became imminent in 1972. John Tasker tried to save the theatre by organising a small committee of interested citizens, including Jack Mundey, president of the Builders' Labourers Federation. After public meetings, protests and a building workers' ban on demolition, the developer signed an undertaking on behalf of the owners of the site that the MLC Centre would incorporate a new fully professional theatre, seating no fewer than 1000 persons - the old theatre then held 1292 persons. It was agreed to retain items from the old theatre for 'possible inclusion in the new theatre'. These items are not in the new Theatre Royal and no-one knows where they are. The last performance before the old theatre was demolished ended a Shakespeare season by the Prospect Theatre Company from England. The new Theatre Royal, turned 90 degrees to face King Street, seats its audience on two levels, facing an unadorned proscenium. The musicals Cats and Les Miserables had long runs at the theatre.

Two theatres in Albert Square, Brisbane, opened 15 May 1915. Comprised three-level proscenium theatre seating 1800 and Roof Garden Theatre seating 1200. Architect: Henry E. White. Reconstructed as two-level cinema 1927. Architects: Kaberry and Chard. Closed 17 June 1965 and demolished.

In 1914 Henry E. White was reported to be designing 'more theatres than all the other architects in Australasia'. One was the Tivoli Theatre in Brisbane for Hugh D. McIntosh's Rickards Tivoli Theatres Ltd. The exterior was in a style variously referred to as Art Nouveau and Spanish. The interior was in White's 'Louis Seize' style, very similar to Her Majesty's Theatre in Wellington (New Zealand), which he had designed in 1911. The main auditorium, 19.2 metres square, was on three levels, each containing two private boxes within a deep proscenium. The stage was 19.2 metres wide by 11.4 metres deep, with a skimpy fly tower. There was a minuscule vestibule - no foyer - to the street. Above this was the one-level Roof Garden Theatre with a shallow stage – 4.5 metres deep - with no fly tower. The auditorium had a latticed ceiling and wide side-wall shutters that could be raised to expose potted plants and creepers and the subtropical night. 

The Roof Garden Theatre remained largely unaltered when Union Theatres had the main vaudeville theatre reconstructed as a two-level cinema. The stage depth was halved to 4.8 metres, the old proscenium firewall was removed and the two tiers above the stalls were removed and replaced by a circle extending back to the front wall of the building over the circle foyer. Every wall and ceiling surface was decorated in a semi-classical picture-palace style with false window-backed balconies along the side walls, and dropped-dome and chandelier on the ceiling. The exterior remained unchanged until the theatre, bought by the City of Brisbane in 1963, was closed in 1965 and demolished to make way for a city square.

Theatre in Bourke Street, opened as Prince of Wales Theatre 24 August 1872. Architect: George Johnson. Became known as Prince of Wales Opera House. Renamed Her Majesty's Opera House September 1884. Renamed Alhambra Theatre 1893. Lost licence 1899. Rebuilt as Opera House, opened 18 May 1901, seating 1539. Architect: William Pitt jnr. Renamed Tivoli Theatre 1912. Auditorium rebuilt 1956. Architect: Dudley Ward. Closed 2 April 1966. Interior destroyed by fire April 1967. Theatre sold as redevelopment site in 1969.

The laissez-faire attitude to safety in theatre design adopted by entrepreneurs and licensing authorities alike in the late 19th century was strikingly exemplified in the Prince of Wales Theatre in Melbourne. It stood on a site that was initially occupied by the Australia Hall, built above a stable in 1866. By the end of the year it was referred to as the Varieties. Singers, instrumentalists and comedians performed on a rough platform at one end of an 'unprepossessing chamber' furnished with tables and chairs and served by two bars in the style of an English music hall. The hall, renamed the Opera Comique in 1869, was destroyed in a fire on 5 July 1870.

On 27 December 1871 the architect George Johnson submitted plans for a theatre on the site to the Victorian Board of Health, the licensing authority. Johnson estimated a capacity of 3000 persons. Each would have had little more than a quarter of a square metre, and the board's inspector believed that 2200 would be more appropriate. In building the Prince of Wales Theatre, it seems, the old rubble stone outer walls of previous buildings on the site were reused to a height of three metres, then brick was added to the height of gallery, which was protected from elements by a timber wall to the roof. The architect chose wooden posts to support the three balconies above the pit and stalls, although cast-iron posts were readily available. Patrons of the top gallery had to negotiate gangway exits that were 560 mm wide with only 1.4 metres' headroom. The entrance to the theatre, reached through the ground floor of the hotel, stood 7.6 metres from the rear of the hotel and it was suspected that contaminated air from the hotel's stable and kitchen yards entered the ventilation intake. Another official observation was that a fire in the hotel would cut off most egress from the theatre.

The new theatre opened on 24 August 1872 with Dion Boucicault's comedy London Assurance, starring Mary Gladstane, whose husband, L. M. Bayless, was lessee of the theatre. W. S. Lyster took over the theatre for his opera companies in March 1873 and it became known as the Prince of Wales Opera House. After Lyster's death in 1880, the theatre housed productions by his nephew George Musgrove. It was lit by electricity in 1882. From September 1884, the theatre was under new management as Her Majesty's Opera House, and from 1886 it was the Melbourne base of the Brough-Boucicault Comedy Company. About that time, only 14 years after the opening, inspectors referred to the theatre as 'this dilapidated makeshift sort of building', though illustrations show a handsome interior and descriptions praise its white-and-gold decoration.

By 1893 the theatre had become a vaudeville house. Despite some slight modifications it limped well behind the ever-rising standards of safety and construction of theatres. The Board of Health's files indicate the social irresponsibility of theatre owners and entrepreneurs and of officials who continued to license the theatre in disregard of inspectors' advice that it breached the board's recommendation. It was finally refused a licence in 1899.

Harry Rickards, lessee since 1895, oversaw the building of a new theatre designed by William Pitt Jnr. A newspaper article described it as French Renaissance but it more closely approached an 'Alhambra style' that was popular for variety theatres at the time. The new Opera House had three levels, including the stalls, and seated only 1539 persons. Although English engineering developments over the previous decade had eliminated most of the need for balcony-supporting posts, Pitt supported the dress circle and the gallery with 14 posts in the stalls. These remained until Dudley Ward redesigned the auditorium in 1956. The stage was commodious, measuring 18.3 by 19.5 metres and it had a fly tower. Rickard's successor, Hugh D. McIntosh changed the name to Tivoli Theatre in 1912 and this remained until the theatre closed in 1966.

Theatre in Castlereagh Street, opened 5 April 1911 as Adelphi Theatre, seating 2400. Architects: Eaton and Bates. Major alterations reduced seating to 2100 in 1915. Architect: Henry E. White. Renamed Grand Opera House 28 August 1916. Renamed New Tivoli Theatre 1932. Closed March 1966. Demolished 1969.

In 1910 the Sydney City Council split its Old Belmore Markets site - bounded by Campbell, Castlereagh, Hay and Pitt Streets - into two lots of about 0.2 hectares each and auctioned off 50-year leases. Both successful bidders claimed they would build theatres, but only Thomas Rofe did. His Adelphi Theatre, designed for the entrepreneur George Marlow, had a 18.3 metre square stage behind a 9.1 metre-wide proscenium. Marlow began with Frederick Melville's The Bad Girl of the Family, starring Nellie Ferguson and Robert Inman. George Willoughby managed the theatre from 1912 until 1915, when Marlow resumed management. He reopened a renovated Adelphi on 26 June 1915 with his wife Ethel Buckley heading a 'new and brilliant dramatic company' in Mary Latimer - Nun. 

On 23 October 1915 the theatre closed for major alterations. Henry E. White redesigned the auditorium, lowering the lofty circle and gallery to improve sight lines and reducing capacity to 2100. The Adelphi reopened on 21 December 1915 with Dick Whittington and His Cat, starring Carrie Moore as principal boy. In 1916 Marlow's partner Benjamin Fuller took over the stage direction, for vaudeville at first. Then he renamed the theatre the Grand Opera House for a season by the Gonsalez Grand Opera Company from Italy. In the early 1920s Fuller combined with Hugh J. Ward to present musical comedy and drama at the Grand Opera House, but at the end of the decade Fullers' gave up live theatre.

The theatre had a chequered existence until 1932, when Mike Connors and Queenie Paul took it for revue and renamed it the New Tivoli Theatre. In 1934 it became part of the second Tivoli Circuit. From 1948 until the theatre's closure in 1966 revue was interspersed with drama, musicals and opera, performed by local and touring companies. The Old Vic Theatre Company and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company from England performed there. During renovation in 1954 White's rich decoration was removed or painted in a single colour, leaving a bland interior. But the Tivoli remained an asset to Sydney. Its capacious auditorium - 1933 seats at the time of closure ­ and large stage and scenery store made it particularly suitable for touring shows. For a quarter of a century since its demolition in 1969 until the Capitol Theatre was rehabilitated these characteristics were combined in no Sydney theatre. The new developers promised to build a 1300-seat theatre but the part of the site dedicated for this purpose has remained vacant ever since the demise of the Tivoli.

Theatre in Castlereagh Street, opened 22 December 1890 as Garrick Theatre, seating about 1000. Architect: E. Weltzel. Renamed Tivoli Theatre 18 February 1893. Destroyed by fire 1899. Rebuilt and opened 12 April 1899, seating 1181. Architect: Backhouse and Backhouse. Closed 28 September 1929. Rebuilt as Embassy cinema. Closed 1977. Demolished in mid-1980s.

The first Tivoli Theatre in Sydney stood on land where there was entertainment for most of 126 years. In September 1851 an American named J. S. Noble established the Olympic Circus behind the Painters' Arms Hotel on the western side of Castlereagh Street, midway between King and Market Streets. For about 40 years thereafter a large yard behind the street-facing buildings was called Circus Court. The circus was converted to a theatre in May 1852. In July 1854 the theatre and the hotel in front were both called the Royal Albert. Both had gone by 1860. 

In 1866 the Scandinavian Hotel was built with the Scandinavian Hall, which was used in the style of a British Music Hall, with tables and chairs and free admission. In December 1869 it saw an Australian burlesque, Formosa by W. Read. In 1870 the hall was renamed the St James Hall, with fixed seating and an entrance charge, and the hotel in front was eliminated. By 1872 it was called the Scandinavian Music Hall, with a Columbia Hotel next door. It was an athletic hall by 1875, and a billiards saloon from 1877 to 1880. About 1881 both hall and hotel were renamed Victoria. In December 1881 an Australian extravaganza, Aladdin and Company Limited, was performed on the hall's small stage-about 8.5 metres feet wide and 9.4 metres deep with a 6.4 metre-wide proscenium. Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun was also played there. After renovation, the hall was renamed the Academy of Music on 23 September 1882. Its small auditorium - 8.5 metres wide by 24 metres long - officially seated 750 on two levels.

The Colonial Architect criticised the hall as old and dilapidated only a few years later and at the end of the 1880s it and an adjacent boarding house facing into Circus Court were demolished to provide a wider frontage for the new Garrick Theatre, again behind a hotel. The Garrick had a three-level auditorium, 13.7 by 16.8 metres. The stage was 13.8 by 15.2 metres. After a short period of drama, Harry Rickards renamed the theatre Tivoli and devoted it to vaudeville. He redecorated it in gold and crimson plush in 1897, but in 1899 fire destroyed the auditorium and stage. Rickards built a slightly larger theatre behind the original facade. He died in 1911 and Hugh D. Mclntosh acquired control of the Tivoli circuit, but the Rickards estate retained the Sydney Tivoli. It sold the site in September 1928 and the Tivoli closed a year later.

Performing-arts centre in St Kilda Road, Melbourne. Architect: Roy Grounds. Melbourne Concert Hall, opened 6 November 1982. Theatres complex includes State Theatre opened 12 May 1984, seating 2000; Playhouse opened 8 May 1984, seating 809; and George Fairfax Studio opened 4 May 1984, seating 250-400.

The largest and most comprehensive arts centre in Australia, the Victorian Arts Centre stands on a site that has been a centre of entertainment since circuses began to perform there in tents in 1870. From 1901 to 1953 circuses performed in permanent buildings, including the Olympia, which was leased as Melbourne's largest cinema in 1911. A dance hall, an ice rink and the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Playhouse Theatre were also on this 4.5 hectare site and its surroundings, across the Yarra River from the Flinders Street railway station. In 1943 a committee of architects appointed by the Victorian government proposed that the site be reserved for a new art gallery, including an auditorium to hold 1000 persons, to be built after the Second World War. In 1945 the government passed an act to reserve the site but political turbulence in Victoria delayed its proclamation until 1955. 

The two-stage building project began in 1959 with the appointment of Roy Grounds, a notable Victorian architect. He was then much admired in architectural circles for designing houses within simple plan forms such as a triangle or a circle, within which he skilfully manipulated all the functional requirements. His preoccupation with wrapping simple external form around complex internal function also manifested itself in his overall design for the arts centre. His scheme was for two buildings - a strong rectangular form for the National Gallery of Victoria and an elongated teepee-shaped copper-sheathed spire above the theatres and concert hall, which would be underground.

The gallery, built on a foundation of basalt rock, opened in 1968. After it was built it was discovered that the foundation material on the adjacent site was not basalt as expected but silt from Port Phillip Bay and fill dumped there during the 19th century. On such a site, so close to the bay and the Yarra, it would have been enormously difficult and prohibitively expensive to construct a building more below the water table than above it. It was decided to raise the theatre complex partially out of the ground and build the concert hall on a different site. The Melbourne City Council assigned the small triangular Snowden Gardens to the government for the concert hall. It was separated from the remainder of the complex by a busy road but the foundation was basalt, which allowed two-fifths of the building's height to be below ground.

The concert hall was finished two years before the theatres building, which had to be completely redesigned. This fills every corner of its awkwardly shaped site with accommodation below ground, but above two hemicylinders linked by parallel straight sides are to be seen, surmounted by a mast of lacy steelwork. The concert hall appears above ground as a simple cylindrical form but below ground it is a pear shape. Thus, Roy Grounds in his final major work repeated his strong predilection for simple external forms irrespective of the internal function. This approach is more successful visually in the Sydney Opera House.

When the interior finishes and furnishings of the concert hall and theatre buildings were being decided, the current architectural style was off-form, pre-cast or bush-hammered concrete and natural timbers of various types with fabrics and carpets of muted colours. There were already bush-hammered columns in the foyers and prismatic concrete diffusers all over the interior of the concert hall as part of the architect's concept for the interior. Late in the project, the Victorian Arts Centre building committee decided to employ the designer John Truscott to obtain a more traditional quality in a contemporary manner. He was forced to decorate rather than influence the architectural form. He covered walls and ceilings and foyers with leather, mirrors, brass and glossy surfaces to reflect sparkle from carefully placed electric lighting and make subterranean spaces with rather low ceilings seem spacious. The major revision of the interiors in the theatres building occurred in the principal public spaces as timber panelling had been determined for the State Theatre auditorium at the acoustic design stage.

The State Theatre is in traditional opera-house form, with a large proscenium stage and a three-level auditorium with side boxes. The acoustics are good and a mellow orchestral sound emanates from the pit. The stage is the best in Australia, with 1067 square metres of space, a fly tower incorporating 111 lines and facilities for trucking in complete settings from each side and the rear. It opened with the Australian Opera's production of Fiddler on the Roof. The Playhouse is the major performing space for the Melbourne Theatre Company, which opened it with a production of Euripides's Medea. It has a modified thrust in front of a proscenium stage of 321 square metres, with fly tower. The seating, on two levels, fans out close to the stage, giving an impression of intimacy, but behind this the auditorium is more narrowly rectilinear.

The George Fairfax Studio opened with the Playbox Theatre Company's production of Jack Hibberd's A Stretch of the Imagination. It is fairly typical of the flat-floored, box-type spaces that have become popular as experimental theatres, or studio theatres for professionals, amateurs and students. Comfortable pull-out 'bleachers' seat 250-400, depending on which of the six staging modes is chosen - theatre-in-the-round, corner stage, thrust stage, centre stage, end stage or proscenium stage. There is an access walkway halfway up and all round the walls. The theatres building also houses restaurants and gallery space, and the concert hall building houses the temporary exhibitions of the Performing Arts Museum.

Theatre in Hickson Road, Walsh Bay, Sydney, opened 13 December 1984, seating 319. Architect: Vivian Fraser.

When maritime freight went to containers many wharves became redundant, including Pier 4/5 at Walsh Bay, a double-decked finger wharf projecting 222 metres into Sydney Harbour. The NSW government gave the upper deck of this fine timber warehouse, built in 1920-22, to the Sydney Theatre Company with $3.7 million to convert it into a home. The resulting complex contains the thrust-stage Wharf Theatre; a versatile studio space, renamed Wharf Theatre 2 in 1994; rehearsal rooms; scenery and costume workshops; administrative offices and a restaurant. 

The company schedules the Wharf Theatre year round for smaller-scale productions in its subscription seasons and conducts experimental work in Wharf Theatre 2 and occasionally in its rehearsal rooms. Since 1991 it has also sometimes converted warehouse space on the lower deck into a rough open-stage auditorium, named the Blackfriars Theatre because of Shakespeare performances given there. At the Wharf the company also assembles and rehearses productions for performance in the Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House. On the lower deck, Arts Council of NSW has its offices, the Australian Youth Theatre has premises and the Sydney Dance Company has rehearsal and administrative space.

Vivian Fraser’s conversion retained the material and structural qualities of the wharf. It is built of ironbark, a hard timber which is so fire-resistant that fire regulations required only sprinklers and an internal emergency exit tunnel to the street from the restaurant at the farthest end. The Wharf won the Sir John Sulman Award for architecture in 1985 and the Royal Australian Institute of Architects' President's Medal for the best recycled building in Australia in 1984-85.