Prince of Wales Theatre

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.