Resource | Text: Article | |
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Title | Royal Victoria Theatre Sydney | |
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Source | Philip Parsons, Victoria Chance, Companion To Theatre In Australia, Currency Press with Cambridge University Press, Sydney, NSW, 1995 | |
Page | 512 | |
Date Issued | 1995 | |
Language | English | |
Citation | Ross Thorne, Royal Victoria Theatre Sydney, Companion To Theatre In Australia, 1995, 512 | |
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Resource Identifier | 64409 |
Provide feedback on Royal Victoria Theatre Sydney
Theatre in Pitt Street, 26 March 1838, seating 1900 in four tiers. Architect: Henry Robertson. Auditorium rebuilt in three tiers for reopening on 2 December 1865. Destroyed by fire 22 July 1880.
For most of its existence the Royal Victoria Theatre was Sydney’s largest and most important theatre. Joseph Wyatt decided to build it in mid-1836, shortly after he became sole lessee of Barnett Levey’s Theatre Royal and on 7 September the foundation stone was laid, on the western side of Pitt Street, between King and Market Streets. The architect, Henry Robertson designed a building in the Regency colonial style – a restrained, three-storey façade with pilasters above the ground floor topped by an entablature and modest cornice. His early sketches of the elevation, published prior to construction, have been misinterpreted as representing the Theatre Royal.
The front section of the Royal Victoria housed a hotel and a shop. Entry to the more expensive seats was between the hotel bar and the shop, while patrons reached the cheaper seats down a side alleyway. The interior broke with Georgian tradition and heralded the Regency style of theatre design. The Royal Victoria was the first theatre in Australia to have the ground-floor pit extend beneath a dress circle raised above stage level. Above the dress circle were a family circle and a gallery – four tiers in all. There was a splayed-arch proscenium but Georgian proscenium doors for actors’ entry to the stage were retained until 1854, when they gave way to proscenium boxes. The Georgian scene-changing system of wing flats and shutters in sliding grooves was also installed.
Drawings in the Mitchell Library (Sydney) show the auditorium to have been 16.75 metres long by 15 metres wide buy 11.38 metres high. The stage apron was 3.05 metres deep and the depth from the curtain line to the rear stage was 12.42 metres. In 1840, for Edward Fitzball’s play The Flying Dutchman, an opening 4.72 metres wide was made in the rear stage wall to allow scenic vistas for a further 15.24 metres in depth. At first the theatre was lit by Argand oil lamps but in 1841 gas lighting, fed by a private gas generator on site, was installed in the auditorium.
The Royal Victoria opened on 26 March 1838 with Othello followed by the farce The Middy Ashore. Complaints that Wyatt had a monopoly subsided when George Coppin took over the theatre for a season in 1843. Wyatt and his wife Rachael sold the land on which the theatre stood on 5 November 1847 and then leased back the building on 4 January 1849. On 31 December 1851 they sub-leased the hotel part to Andrew Torning. In 1854 Wyatt was unable to renew the lease on favourable terms and Torning became the lessee at the start of September. Wyatt decided to build the Prince of Wales Theatre, which gave the Royal Victoria its first real opposition. Later lessees of the Royal Victoria included Samuel Colville from 1 October 1859, R. Tolano from 2 December 1865 and Coppin for six months in 1867. In 1865 the auditorium was gutted and rebuilt with only three tiers, which reduced the capacity from the original 1900 or more persons and improved comfort and safety. Until its destruction in 1880 the Royal Victoria continued to be upgraded and redecorated – 20 times in all – and to house leading performers. In the 1850’s Clarance Holt and his wife, Richard Stewart and the Australian tragedian H.N. Warner performed there. The 1860s included two seasons by Charles and Ellen Kean, and the 1870s saw William Creswick, Alfred Dampier, George Darrell in his own Transported for Life and other works, Bland Holt and Adelaide Ristori at the Royal Victoria.