Resource |
Text: Article
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Title |
Belvoir Street Theatre |
Creator Contributors |
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Related Venues |
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Belvoir Street Downstairs Theatre, Surry Hills, NSW
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Belvoir Street Theatre, Surry Hills, NSW
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Nimrod, Surry Hills, NSW
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Nimrod Downstairs, Surry Hills, NSW
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Nimrod Upstairs, Surry Hills, NSW
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Source |
Philip Parsons, Victoria Chance, Companion To Theatre In Australia, Currency Press with Cambridge University Press, Sydney, NSW, 1995
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Page |
85
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Date Issued |
1995
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Language |
English
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Citation |
Ross Thorne, Belvoir Street Theatre, Companion To Theatre In Australia, 1995, 85
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Resource Identifier |
64697
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Provide feedback on Belvoir Street Theatre
Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney. Converted from factory by Nimrod Theatre Company. Main theatre, seating 320 persons, opened 1 June 1974 as Nimrod Theatre. Downstairs theatre, seating 110, opened 7 February 1976. Building bought on 19 June 1984 by syndicate now called Belvoir Street Theatre Ltd and renamed Belvoir Street Theatre.
When the Nimrod Theatre Company needed a theatre larger than the Nimrod Street Theatre - now the Stables Theatre - a developer offered it rent-free leasehold of a two-storey factory on a site for which low-rise office buildings were planned. The architect Vivian Fraser designed a theatre occupying the whole top floor, using the diagonal of the plan as the axis for a corner thrust stage and wide fan of seating around it. The lower floor contained a rehearsal room, dressing rooms, offices and a foyer and bar in which poster-covered walls and brick paving hinted at the informality of Nimrod Street. The rehearsal room was opened in 1976 as Downstairs, an open-space theatre which has been used in several formats. Robyn Archer used it as a cabaret for her Kold Komfort Kaffee and Gordon Chater performed Steve J. Spears's The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin on an end stage. For a decade the theatre stood alone on a large cleared site. In 1982 the Nimrod company converted its 15-year lease to ownership of the building and one metre of land around it for $1. In 1984, the company, facing insolvency, decided to sell its theatre and move to the Seymour Theatre Centre.