Duchess Theatre

Duchess Theatre, London, in Catherine Street, off the Aldwych. This small theatre, seating 491 in two tiers, with a proscenium opening of 25 ft., opened in 1929 and housed some early productions by the People's National Theatre company under Nancy Price. In 1934 J. B. Priestley, whose Laburnum Grove had had a successful run at the theatre the previous year, took it over and produced his plays Eden End (1934) and Cornelius (1935). Emlyn Williams then appeared in his own thriller Night Must Fall (also 1935), which ran for a year and was followed by the first West End staging of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. Another long-running Priestley play was Time and the Conways (1937). In 1938 Emlyn Williams returned in his play The Corn is Green, which was still running when the theatre closed on the outbreak of war in Sept. 1939. It reopened shortly afterwards, but closed again until 1942, when Coward's Blithe Spirit began a long run. Later productions included Priestley's The Linden Tree (1947), Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea (1952), William Douglas Home's The Manor of Northstead (1954), and Ronald Millar's The Bride and the Bachelor (1956). Two plays by Agatha Christie, The Unexpected Guest (1958) and Go Back for Murder (1960), were seen there, as was The Reluctant Peer by William Douglas Home (1964). The nude revue Oh! Calcutta! ran from 1974 to 1980 and Richard Harris's The Business of Murder (1981) began its long run here. From 1987 to 1990 the building was occupied by the Players' Theatre while its new theatre was built, the Duchess then reopening with a transfer of Ray Cooney's comedy Run for Your Wife.