Mermaid Theatre

Mermaid Theatre, London, originally a small private theatre in the garden of Bernard Miles's house in St John's Wood. Designed on Elizabethan lines, it opened in 1951 with a performance of Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, followed a week later by The Tempest. In 1953, to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II, the Mermaid was re-erected in the City of London for performances of As You Like It, Macbeth, and Jonson, Marston, and Chapman's Eastward Ho! The success of his venture encouraged Miles to build a permanent professional theatre, which opened in 1959 with his own musical adaptation of Fielding's Rape upon Rape as Lock up Your Daughters, a huge success which, like several later productions, transferred to the West End. The new Mermaid, financed by public subscription and erected within the walls of an old bombed warehouse at Puddle Dock, near Blackfriars Bridge, seated nearly 500 in one steeply raked tier, and had an open Elizabethan-style stage. Miles himself directed many of the productions and gave some notable performances there. Among the plays seen were several revivals of Shaw (1961–2), a series of plays by O'Casey (also 1962), and Peter Luke's Hadrian VII (1968). Ian McKellen gave much-acclaimed performances in the title-roles of Richard II and Marlowe's Edward II (1969), and two interesting revivals were Joyce's Exiles (1970) and Sherriff's Journey's End (1972). A musical biography of Noël Coward entitled Cowardy Custard opened in 1972 and ran for a year, being followed by similar treatments of Cole Porter (Cole, 1974) and Stephen Sondheim (Side by Side by Sondheim, 1976). In 1978, at the end of the run of Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, the theatre closed for reconstruction. It reopened in 1981 seating 610 and with a much larger stage. The opening productions, however, were failures, and the consequent financial problems caused the curtailment of future plans, in spite of the successful transfer of Mark Medoff's Children of a Lesser God to the Albery Theatre. Miles's involvement ended in 1982 and the theatre has since had a varied history. The RSC's production of Stephen Poliakoff's Breaking the Silence moved there in 1985 and the National Theatre's of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross in 1986. The RSC occupied the theatre as an extra London base in 1987, but withdrew after a year. Brecht's Mother Courage was staged in 1990, with Glenda Jackson.