Olympic 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.