Duchess Theatre

Duchess Theatre

Glorious, starring Maureen Lipman at the Duchess Theatre in 2006
Address	3–5 Catherine Street Westminster, London
Coordinates
Owner	Nimax Theatres
Designation	Grade II
Type	West End theatre
Capacity	479 on 2 levels
Production	The Play That Goes Wrong
Construction
Opened	25 November 1929
Architect	Ewen Barr
Website
www.nimaxtheatres.com/nimax/duchess

The Duchess Theatre is a West End theatre in the City of Westminster, London, located in Catherine Street near Aldwych.

The theatre opened on 25 November 1929 and is one of the smallest West End theatres with a proscenium arch. It has 479 seats on two levels. It is a Grade II Listed Building.

History

The Duchess Theatre was designed by Ewen Barr and constructed by F. G. Minter Ltd for Arthur Gibbons. The theatre is built with the stalls below street level, both to overcome the scale of the site and to maintain the rights of neighbours to ancient lights. The theatre opened on 25 November 1929 with a play called Tunnel Trench by Hubert Griffith. The interior decoration scheme was introduced in 1934 under the supervision of Mary Wyndham Lewis, wife of J. B. Priestley.

Notable productions

• Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, which transferred from the Piccadilly Theatre to the St. James's Theatre before moving to the Duchess Theatre where it completed a record run of 1,997 performances in 1942.
• Bill Naughton's play Alfie played at the Duchess in 1962. Famously, Lewis Gilbert saw the play and immediately contacted the writer with a view to a screen transfer.
• Tom Eyen's The Dirtiest Show in Town, which ran for just under 800 performances in the 1970s.
• In December 1974 Oh! Calcutta! transferred to the Duchess Theatre from the Royalty Theatre. Oh! Calcutta! remained at the Duchess until 1980.
• The Players' Theatre Company presented their Late Joys Victorian Music hall programme between 1987 and 1990.
• Marc Camoletti's Don't Dress For Dinner which transferred to the Duchess from the Apollo Theatre in October 1992 and stayed until 1 March 1997.
• The Royal Shakespeare Company's The Herbal Bed by Peter Whelan which ran for six months from April to October 1997.

Production history

• 1929 Opened on 25 November with Tunnel Trench, a play featuring Emlyn Williams in the cast.
• 1930 The Duchess hosted the shortest run in West End history when The Intimate Revue closed without completing its first performance.
• 1932 Frank Vosper starred as King Henry VII in The Rose Without a Thorn and Jessica Tandy and Cathleen Nesbitt appeared in Christa Winsloe's Children in Uniform (opened October 7), directed by Leontine Sagan.
• 1933 J B Priestley’s Laburnum Grove.
• 1934 J B Priestley joined the management of the theatre, producing his own play Eden End with Ralph Richardson.
• 1935 Cornelius, again by Priestley and starring Richardson, and the psychological thriller Night Must Fall with Emlyn Williams as both author and star.
• 1936 Murder in the Cathedral by T S Eliot.
• 1937 Time and the Conways, again by Priestley.
• 1939 Emlyn Williams’s The Corn is Green, starring the author and Sybil Thorndike, was playing at the time of compulsory closure due to the outbreak of war. The Playboy of the Western World.
• 1942 Skylark with John Clements and Constance Cummings. Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, with Margaret Rutherford, transferred from the Piccadilly Theatre to complete a run of 1,997 performances.
• 1947 Priestley’s The Linden Tree with Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike played 400 performances.
• 1948 Angela Baddeley in a revival of Eden End.
• 1949 Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike were re-united in The Foolish Gentlewoman.
• 1950 The Holly and the Ivy featured Bryan Forbes.
• 1951 Thora Hird and Dandy Nichols in Happy Family.
• 1952 Kenneth More and Peggy Ashcroft in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea.
• 1955 The Scandalous Affair of Mr Kettle and Mrs Moon, a comedy in three acts by J. B. Priestley.
• 1958 The Unexpected Guest by Agatha Christie.
• 1960 Harold Pinter’s first West End success The Caretaker with Donald Pleasence and Alan Bates.
• 1961 Impresario Peter Saunders acquired the lease, coinciding with a transfer of Good Night Mrs. Puffin.
• 1962 Rule of Three by Agatha Christie.
• 1963 Bill Naughton’s Alfie and the return of Sybil Thorndike in William Douglas-Home’s The Reluctant Peer.
• 1965 The long-running Boeing Boeing transferred from the Apollo.
• 1967 Wait Until Dark.
• 1969 The musical Dames at Sea and The Old Ladies starring Joyce Carey, Joan Miller and Flora Robson.
• 1970 Diana Dors in Three Months Gone.
• 1971 The Dirtiest Show in Town.
• 1973 Rattigan’s In Praise of Love.
• 1974 Oh! Calcutta! transferred from the Royalty and remained in residence until 1980 with a total of 3,918 performances.
• 1980 Maria Aitken and Michael Jayston in a revival of Coward’s Private Lives.
• 1984 Snoopy!!! The Musical with Teddy Kempner and Susie Blake.
• 1985 Dorothy Tutin and Colin Blakeley in a trio of Pinter plays called collectively Other Places.
• 1986 The freehold of the theatre was acquired by Stoll Moss Theatres Ltd, presenting George Cole in A Month of Sundays, followed by a transfer from the Garrick of the long-running comedy No Sex Please, We're British.
• 1987 The Players Theatre took up residence for two and a half years while their new theatre in Villiers Street was under construction.
• 1990 Ray Cooney’s long-running farce Run for Your Wife transferred to the Duchess to complete its nine-year West End run.
• 1991 An Evening with Gary Lineker.
• 1992 Don’t Dress for Dinner by Marc Camoletti transferred from the Apollo and kept audiences happy for a further four and a half years.
• 1997 Maureen Lipman’s one-woman show Live and Kidding was followed by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Peter Whelan’s The Herbal Bed and the comedy whodunnit Scissor Happy.
• 1998 Michael Williams starred as John Aubrey in the one-man play Brief Lives, Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon played for ten weeks in the RSC’s The Unexpected Man and Michael Codron and Lee Dean transferred their production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Things We Do for Love from the Gielgud.
• 1999 The National Theatre’s production of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn opened with its original cast of Sara Kestelman, David Burke and Matthew Marsh.
• 2000 In January the Duchess became a Really Useful Theatre when Lord Lloyd-Webber’s Really Useful Group and Bridgepoint Capital purchased Stoll Moss Theatres Ltd.
• 2001 The auditorium was transformed to recreate the Cottesloe in the round layout for Blue/Orange by Joe Penhall, with Bill Nighy and the original National Theatre cast. This was followed by the Irish comedy Alone it Stands.
• 2002 Life After George with Stephen Dillane. The Glee Club and David Hare returned to the West End with Via Dolorosa prior to the opening of Alan Ayckbourn’s Damsels in Distress.
• 2003 The year started with Gyles Brandreth’s Zipp! Through the Leaves and Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.
• 2004 Hershey Felder as George Gershwin Alone. Coyote on a Fence and Novel Theatre Company’s adaptation of Little Women.
• 2005 David Suchet in Man and Boy by Terence Rattigan, The Birthday Party revived with Eileen Atkins and Henry Goodman, and Maureen Lipman in Glorious by Peter Quilter.
• 2006 Stones in his Pockets by Marie Jones, starring Conrad Kemp and John Cronin.
• 2007 The musical Buddy - The Buddy Holly Story.
• 2009 Plague Over England with Michael Feast and Celia Imrie, Collaboration and Taking Sides, with Michael Pennington and David Horowitz, and Endgame with Mark Rylance, Simon McBurney, Miriam Margolyes and Tom Hickey.
• 2010 Morecambe starring Bob Golding, Ghosts starring Lesley Sharp, The Fantasticks, and Krapp's Last Tape starring Michael Gambon.
• 2011 Simon Gray's Butley starring Dominic West and Paul McGann, Ruby Wax: Losing It, and The Pitmen Painters.
• 2012 The RSC's Written on the Heart, The Hurly Burly Show, Our Boys starring Laurence Fox and Arthur Darvill.
• 2013 Alan Bennett's Untold Stories starring Alex Jennings, August Wilson's Fences starring Lenny Henry and Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui starring Henry Goodman.
• 2014 Bakersfield Mist starring Kathleen Turner, then The Play That Goes Wrong (Winner of the 2015 Olivier Award for Best New Comedy and Best New Comedy at the WhatsOnStage.com Awards in 2014. Written by the Mischief Theatre Company)

See also

• List of London theatres
• List of West End musicals
• List of notable musical theatre productions
• Musical theatre

References

• Guide to British Theatres 1750-1950, John Earl and Michael Sell pp. 108 (Theatres Trust, 2000) ISBN 0-7136-5688-3

External links

• Official Duchess Theatre Web Site