Elizabethan Theatre

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.