Belvoir Street Theatre

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.