Resource | Text: Article | |
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Title | St George's Hall | |
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Source | Philip Parsons, Victoria Chance, Companion To Theatre In Australia, Currency Press with Cambridge University Press, Sydney, NSW, 1995 | |
Page | 540 | |
Date Issued | 1995 | |
Language | English | |
Citation | Bill Dunstone, St George's Hall, Companion To Theatre In Australia, 1995, 540 | |
Resource Identifier | 65224 |
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Theatre in Hay Street, Perth, opened 4 December 1879.
Establishment amateur performers, writers and designers who had produced operettas and short comedies in the ballroom at Government House under the patronage of the Governor of Western Australia, Sir William Robinson, found a new multipurpose venue in St George's Hall. It opened under viceregal patronage with a local production of Dion Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn. Henry Prinsep, an English painter, amateur performer and writer of polite comedies, painted the sets and the hall's drop-curtain. His title for the latter 'Come unto these yellow sands', recalls Richard Dadd' s painting of the same title from The Tempest, and may have been a reference to the Perth terrain. Prinsep also designed six iron Corinthian columns for the Howick Street - as Hay Street was then called - gallery of St George's Hall, after the facade of the Lyceum Theatre in London. They were probably the first cast in Western Australia. Touring companies also appeared at St George’s Hall, which was built for Messrs Burt and Stone on Iand they owned. Its facade, including Prinsep's columns, is retained in the present building on the site.