Theatre Royal Adelaide

Theatre in Hindley Street, opened 13 April 1868, seating 894. Architect: Thomas English. Enlarged to seat 3000 and reopened 2 March 1878. Architect: George Johnson. Remodelled, reopened 11 April 1914. Architect: William Pitt jnr. Closed 1959. Demolished 1962.

From the 1880s until its closure in 1959 the first Theatre Royal was the Adelaide showplace of J.C. Williamson’s and its forerunners. When it opened in 1868 Samuel Lazar, J. T. Sagar and J. M. Wendt owned it and George Coppin leased and directed it. The new theatre was an improvement on others in Adelaide, although its auditorium was quite small – 15.3 metres long by 13.8 metres wide by 10.8 metres high. Into this were squeezed the pit and stalls, holding 614 persons, a dress circle seating 200, and a gallery seating 480. The stage was 13.8 metres wide by 16.2 metres deep and fully equipped with traps. The scenery was the traditional system of sliding wings and shutters, with borders that could be raised out of sight, all worked by pulleys and drums. One bar served pit and stalls patrons, and dress-circle patrons had exclusive use of a second bar and a billiards room, adjoining a large saloon. At the foot of the gallery stairs there was a third bar, reached by passing through a restaurant from a separate entrance. 

When the theatre was rebuilt in 1878 some of the original facade may have been retained but two-thirds of it was a new and far more imposing neoclassical section. This was symmetrical in itself, with a tripartite first-floor facade of pilasters, pedimented windows, entablature, and a deep cornice, over which was a large central pediment in front of a balustraded parapet wall. The interior was among the earliest in Australia to conform to the new Victorian style. The auditorium, enlarged to 21.9 metres wide by 21 metres deep, housed 3000 people on three levels. The stage was increased in size and the proscenium, widened from 7.5 to 9 metres, was designed like a picture frame. Gas lighting was installed, with the new pilot-light system which permitted lights to be turned off during performances. Separate entries to the various parts of the house still enforced the separation of social classes, to the gratification of a reviewer in South Australian Register who referred to pit and gallery patrons as the 'great unwashed' with 'playful eccentricities'. The 1878 auditorium, as in the original building, had three boxes, one above the other in a narrow band directly in front of the proscenium. When William Pitt jnr altered the auditorium in 1914 he designed a very deep proscenium with a splayed-arch sounding board and four private boxes on each side in two banks of two, all decorated in heavily modelled French rococo. Unfortunately the elderly Pitt had not kept his engineering skills up to date, so the tiers were still supported by six posts. By the mid-20th century, audiences resented these as unnecessary obstructions. In 1959 J.C. Williamson's found it a better proposition to buy and remodel the Tivoli Theatre, now Her Majesty’s Theatre, than to modernise the Theatre Royal.