The Donmar Warehouse is a small not-for-profit theatre in the Covent Garden area of the London Borough of Camden, with seating for 250 playgoers.
Theatrical producer Donald Albery formed the Donmar company in 1953, the name reputedly formed from the first three letters of the names Donald Albery and Margot Fonteyn, the ballerina and a friend. In 1961, Albery bought the site, a space that was once the vat room and hops warehouse of a brewery, as a private drama studio and rehearsal room for Fonteyn's London Festival Ballet.
It was acquired as a theatre by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1977, renamed the Warehouse, then converted. The Warehouse was an RSC workshop as much as a showcase and the seasons were remarkably innovative, including Trevor Nunn's acclaimed Stratford 1976 Macbeth, starring Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, which opened at the Covent Garden venue in September 1977 before transferring to the Young Vic. |
Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, is a reconstruction of The Globe Theatre, an Elizabethan playhouse in the London Borough of Southwark, on the south bank of the River Thames. It is approximately 230 metres (750 ft) from the site of the original theatre and was completed in 1997. Jack Shepherd's 'Prologue Production' of The Two Gentlemen of Verona starring Mark Rylance as Proteus, opened the Globe to the theatregoing public in August 1996, a year before the formal opening Gala.
The original Globe was owned by actors who were also shareholders in the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Two of the six Globe shareholders, Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert Burbage, owned double shares of the whole, or 25% each; the other four men, Shakespeare, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, and Thomas Pope, owned a single share, or 12.5%.
The Globe was destroyed by fire on June 29, 1613. The fire was caused by a accident with a cannon during a production of Henry VIII. The theatre was rebuilt by June 1614, but was officially closed by pressure of Puritan opinion in 1642 and demolished in 1644 . The Old Vic is located just south-east of Waterloo Station in London on the corner of The Cut and Waterloo Road. It became a Grade II listed building in 1951. It also shares the name of a repertory company that was based at the theatre. The company formed the core of the National Theatre of Great Britain when formed in 1963, under Laurence Olivier. The National Theatre remained at the Old Vic until new premises were built on the South Bank complex, which opened in 1976.  The theatre was founded in 1818 by James King, Daniel Dunn and Thomas Serres, then Marine painter to the King who managed to secure the formal patronage of Princess Charlotte (the only child of George IV) and her husband Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, naming the theatre the Royal Coburg Theatre. The theatre was a "minor" theatre (as opposed to one of the two patent theatres) and was thus technically forbidden to show serious drama. Nevertheless, when the theatre passed to William Bolwell Davidge in 1824 he succeeded in bringing legendary actor Edmund Kean south of the river to play six Shakespeare plays in six nights. The theatre's role in bringing high art to the masses was confirmed when Kean addressed the audience during his curtain call saying "I have never acted to such a set of ignorant, unmitigated brutes as I see before me." | St Martin's Theatre is located in West Street, near the Charing Cross Road. It was designed as one of a pair of theatres with the Ambassadors Theatre by W.G.R. Sprague, in memoriam for the 9th Baron Willoughby de Broke. The theatre was Grade II listed by English Heritage in March 1973.
Nurtured at an early age through amateur theatricals at Compton Verney, the family seat in Warwickshire, and later developed during the time he spent in London, both as an MP for Rugby, and as a member of the House of Lords. It was his intention to devote a chapter of his autobiography "The Passing Years" to drama, but he died before the theatre's completion. 
The St Martin's début was delayed by the outbreak of World War I in 1914: with the first performance of Houpla taking place on 23 November 1916.
Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" transferred to the theatre in March 1974 (after running continuously for 22 years at the New Ambassadors Theatre). When she wrote the play, Christie gave the rights to her grandson Mathew Prichard as a birthday present. Outside the West End, only one version of the play can be performed annually and under the contract terms of the play, no film adaptation can be produced until the West End production has been closed for at least six months. The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane is located near Covent Garden, in the City of Westminster. The building standing today is the most recent in a line of four theatres at the same location dating back to 1663, making it the oldest of London's theatres. For its first two centuries, Drury Lane could claim to be London's leading theatre and therefore one of the most important theatres in the English-speaking world.  During most of this period, it was one of a small handful of patent theatres that were granted monopoly rights to the production of "legitimate" drama in London. "Legitimate" meant spoken plays, rather than opera, dance, concerts, or any play containing music, which tended to be the norm, stretching right back from the earliest forms of Greek theatre.
Drury Lane has a reputation for being one of the world's most haunted theatres. The appearance of almost any one of the handful of ghosts that are said to frequent the theatre, signals good luck for an actor or production. The most famous ghost is the "Man in Grey," who appears dressed as a nobleman of the late 18th century: powdered hair beneath a tricorne hat, a dress jacket and cloak or cape, riding boots and a sword. Legend says that the Man in Grey is the ghost of a man whose skeletal remains were found within a walled-up side passage in 1848. He had apparently died from a knife wound. |
|
London Theatre & Cinema 
