Resource | Text: Article | |
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Title | Theatre Royal Melbourne | |
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Source | Philip Parsons, Victoria Chance, Companion To Theatre In Australia, Currency Press with Cambridge University Press, Sydney, NSW, 1995 | |
Page | 584 | |
Date Issued | 1995 | |
Language | English | |
Citation | Ross Thorne, Theatre Royal Melbourne, Companion To Theatre In Australia, 1995, 584 | |
Resource Identifier | 65205 |
Provide feedback on Theatre Royal Melbourne
Theatre in Bourke Street, opened 16 July 1855. Architect: J. R. Burns. Seated 3300 persons in four levels. Destroyed by fire March 20 1872. Rebuilt and reopened 6 November 1872. Architect George Browne. Seated nearly 4000. Redesigned by William Pitt Jnr. as three-level auditorium 1904. Closed 17 November 1933 and demolished to make way for department store.
Built in 1854-55, only two decades after the first settlement of Melbourne, this large, substantial theatre rivalled the Theatres Royal at Covent Garden and Drury Lane in London in the sizes of its auditorium and stage. The auditorium was 19.2 metres wide by 22.8 metres from the rear to the stage curtain line. The stage was 26.4 metres from the same curtain line to its rear wall, with a 3.6 metre apron projecting into the auditorium. The stalls-pit floor extended to the boundary walls of the auditorium, with posts supporting three balconies, all rather cramped in height. In front of the theatre was a lofty two-storey hotel in a heavy early-Victorian neoclassical style. The theatre, owned by John Black, was largely an optimistic extravagance for the young town, even with the influx of residents and itinerants brought by the Victorian gold rushes. A year after Black opened the Theatre Royal with R. B. Sheridan's The School for Scandal, he went bankrupt and was forced to sell it for £21 000, about one-quarter of the cost of building it. The actor G. V. Brooke and the actor-manager George Coppin bought the theatre, but it was rarely profitable to them or various lessees. In 1861 the theatre came under the control of Ambrose Kyte and then returned to Coppin.
After fire destroyed the building in 1872 Coppin rebuilt the theatre with a high three-storey hotel in front, designed in rococo Victorian style and surmounted by a huge royal coat of arms. The architect George Browne increased the depth and height of the auditorium to 25.5 metres and 18 metres respectively and increased the capacity to nearly 4000 people. The stage was deepened to 36 metres. There was a huge gas chandelier in a 12.6 metre diameter dome, painted with scenes of Melbourne and London. In 1880 the proscenium was brought forward to eliminate the stage apron. Yet even with these improvements Dion Boucicault in 1885 found the theatre to be large, dusty and primitive, with poor audience accommodation and wretched backstage arrangements for the actors.
Coppin operated the theatre in partnership with Henry Harwood, John Hennings and Richard Stewart until it was taken over by Williamson, Garner and Musgrove. This firm and its successors ran until the Great Depression, when it was sold as a redevelopment site. In 1904 J. C. Williamson had the auditorium gutted and redesigned by William Pitt Jnr with only three levels, but still with a forest of posts. As the Williamson company's premier theatre in Melbourne, the Theatre Royal mainly housed major overseas companies and opera and operetta productions.