The Theatre

Theatre in Sydney, in premises of Robert Sidaway, managed by John Sparrow. Opened 16 January 1796.

The evidence is scanty, but it is known that the first theatre building in Australia, known simply as the Theatre, existed somewhere in little Sydney Town at the end of the 18th century. The prices show that it had four divisions in its auditorium - pit, front boxes and gallery. Other descriptions published since the mid-19th century have been based on circumstantial evidence or conjecture. The facts revealed by research so far come from a description by David Collins, Judge-Advocate of NSW, at the time of the first performance in the Theatre; reports printed in a couple of contemporary British journals; and a few playbills in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. 

For a century writers have argued whether Sidaway's theatre was near the bakery where he made the colony's bread - somewhere east of Bell Row, now Bligh Street – or near his home off High Street (now George Street), near present-day Jamison Street. Some have assumed that he built the theatre for the cost of £100 cited in one report, yet Collins's words were: ' ... some of the more decent class of prisoners ... obtained permission to prepare a play-house... [and] they had fitted up the house with more theatrical propriety than could have been expected'. Given the costs of the time, £100 would not have been enough to build a theatre from scratch. Furthermore, 'prepare' does not generally indicate 'erect' or 'construct' a whole building. It is likely that the theatre was in existing premises.

Collins wrote of a benefit for widow Eades and her family: 'The house was full, and it was said that she got upwards of twelve pounds by the night'. Paul McGuire, in his book The Australian Theatre, assumed that this meant the takings for the night were £12 and, calculating loosely from the seat prices, he deduced that the theatre held 120 persons. A beneficiary, however, generally gained the takings less expenses, so £12 would have been yielded by a performance before many more than 120 persons. The design of the interior, with its four divisions, is also uncertain. It may have been laid out in typical Georgian style on two levels, rough-hewn like the theatre shown in J. Wright's 1788 engraving of W. R. Pyne's painting Macbeth in a Barn rather than a typical English provincial theatre. Or it may have been on one raked level, like the fit-ups in barns in which English touring companies played where there was no dedicated theatre; George Coppin describes these temporary theatres in his autobiography. If Sidaway's theatre was of the latter type, this would account for its having been 'dismantled' in 1798, on the orders of Governor John Hunter, and its having existed again in 1799 and 1800.

The Theatre's existence was chequered largely because there was a shortage of money in the colony and goods-in-kind were accepted in place of the one to five shillings charged for admission. A contemporary report claims that while the people of Sydney - mostly convicts and emancipists - were at the theatre, other convicts ransacked their houses.