After four years of the Transformation project, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre opened its doors once more in 2010 after substantial redevelopment. Much of the art deco detailing of Elisabeth Scott’s controversial original design survives but the interior has seen dramatic changes, especially the auditorium.
Also included in this project were relatively minor updates to the Swan Theatre, that had opened as a theatre in 1986. This building has led an interesting life, almost as dramatic as the plays it stages. Incorporated by Scott into her design for the main theatre, it served as a conference centre and rehearsal room. This is the life that the building has taken in recent years, after the dramatic events of 1926 when the Shakespeare Memorial theatre caught fire.
The Fire
Many postcards exist of the fire, and the Warwickshire County Record Office is lucky enough to own many of them. The theatre itself opened in 1879, building on renewed enthusiasm for the Bard that came with the Tercentenary Festival that celebrated the birth of Shakespeare in 1864. The scale of the devastation caused by the fire is clear, and these postcards capture well the moment.
Comments
I have always enjoyed telling the story from the top of the new viewing tower to theatre visitors and showing them images. They are fascinated to hear where it happened and speculate as to how it was caused.
Visitors have been known to ask if Shakespeare was in the building when it started.
Shakespeare is everywhere? 😉
My mother remembers the fire in 1925, and was horrified at the new theatre, too modern and too square I supose.
My father, then only 5, lived in Woodcote Road, Warwick and one of his early memories was being shown the glow in the sky of the fire. (How did they know? I can’t believe they had a radio that early!) At an early time he and his older brother were piled into the side-car to go and look at the smouldering ruins. His emotional attatchment to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre seems to have been virtually unbroken from that time.
I have a piece of burnt wood from the old theatre my Grandad kept.
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