Playhouse

Playhouse, London, in Northumberland Avenue. As the Royal Avenue Theatre, holding about 1,500 in four tiers, this opened in 1882 with Offenbach's Madame Favart, the first of a series of light operas presented by various managements. In 1890 George Alexander began his career as an actor-manager with Hamilton Aidé's Dr Bill, and a year later Henry Arthur Jones's The Crusaders was a success. The most important event of these early years was the production of Shaw's Arms and the Man (1894). Mrs Patrick Campbell and Forbes-Robertson were at the Avenue in 1899, and in 1904 came Somerset Maugham's first play A Man of Honour. At the beginning of 1905 Cyril Maude took over the theatre and started to rebuild it, but when the work was almost completed part of Charing Cross station collapsed on it. Maude received £20,000 compensation and started building again. The new theatre, named the Playhouse, its three-tier auditorium having a seating capacity of 679, opened in 1907 with Clyde Fitch's Toddles. With his wife Winifred Emery as his leading lady, Maude remained until 1915, producing and playing in a number of successful plays. In 1916 Gladys Cooper began her long association with the Playhouse. As joint manager until 1928, and then by herself, she produced and acted in many plays, her final production being Keith Winter's The Rats of Norway in 1933, in which Laurence Olivier also appeared. After her departure the theatre had no settled policy until in 1938–9 Nancy Price took it over, as the Playhouse Theatre, as a base for her People's National Theatre. It then closed for a time, to reopen in 1942 under its former name with a revival of Maugham's Home and Beauty. In 1943 it staged a season by the Old Vic company, bombed out of their own theatre, which included a new Soviet play, The Russians by K. Simonov. The last successful production was a dramatization of Agatha Christie's Murder at the Vicarage in 1949. In 1951 it became a BBC studio, housing a number of popular radio programmes until it was relinquished in 1975. After becoming derelict the theatre was handsomely restored, reopening as an 800-seat theatre in 1987. The new theatre's policy is to initiate its own productions, the first of which was the musical Girlfriends. The Peter Hall Company occupied the theatre in 1991.