Wyndham's Theatre

Wyndham's Theatre, London, in Charing Cross Road. Built for Charles Wyndham, it seats 770 and has the last complete picture-frame surround in London. It opened in 1899 with a revival of T. W. Robertson's David Garrick, in which Wyndham and his wife Mary Moore had already appeared. The first new play was a translation of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac in 1900. The early years were notable for productions of Henry Arthur Jones's Mrs Dane's Defence (1900); Charles Marlowe's When Knights Were Bold (1907); and the controversial war play An Englishman's Home (1909), written by Guy Du Maurier. Frank Curzon became manager in 1903, and in 1910 Gerald Du Maurier became joint manager, appearing in 1913 in a revival of Sardou's Diplomacy. He then played Dearth in Barrie's Dear Brutus (1917), and in 1921 scored an outstanding success as Bulldog Drummond in the play of that name by ‘Sapper’ ( H. C. McNeile). In 1926 the first of six plays by Edgar Wallace was staged. The stepbrothers Howard Wyndham and Bronson Albery took over in 1931, their productions including Savory's George and Margaret (1937), Esther McCracken's Quiet Wedding (1938), and its sequel Quiet Week-End (1941), the last being the first play at this theatre to have more than 1,000 performances. The first post-war success was Bridie's Daphne Laureola (1948), with Edith Evans; Peter Ustinov had a personal triumph in his own play The Love of Four Colonels (1951), as did Dorothy Tutin in Graham Greene's The Living Room (1953). Sandy Wilson's musical The Boy Friend began a long run in 1954. It closed in 1959 and was succeeded by Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, the first of four transfers of productions by Theatre Workshop, which was followed by Brendan Behan's The Hostage, Stephen Lewis's Sparrers Can't Sing in 1961, and Oh, What a Lovely War! in 1963. Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane was seen in 1964; John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence and an adaptation of Muriel Spark's novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with Vanessa Redgrave, both followed in 1965. Ronald Millar's Abelard and Heloïse (1970) had a long run, as did Godspell (1972), a musical based on the life of Christ. In 1975 Pinter's No Man's Land transferred from the Old Vic, and the musical compilation Side by Side by Sondheim (1976) and Mary O'Malley's Once a Catholic (1977) both did well. The next decade brought Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1980), Peter Nichols's Passion Play (1984), and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money (1987).