Liverpool's Royal Court Theatre Runs Backstage Heriitage Tours
Liverpool's Royal Court Theatre Runs Backstage Heriitage Tours
THE architect has been chosen, his designs are completed and the finishing touches are being put to the application for Heritage Lottery funding.
If all goes to plan, work will soon begin on regenerating Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre in a £10.6m scheme.
In the meantime however, the public is being given the chance to explore its nooks and crannies in their current state before the face-lift.
“We’ll be showing people the whole of the theatre including places they don’t usually see when they come here for a performance,” says Gillian Miller, chief executive of the Royal Court Trust.
“There are many original features from 1938 when the theatre was completely rebuilt after a fire that we will be showing them.”
These include the old lighting board, a giant contraption of slides and knobs still attached to a wall in the wings of the stage, and doors where the limelights would have glowed when a flame was directed at a cylinder of quicklime in the days before electric lighting.
Visitors will be taken up several flights of stairs to the fly floor, where backstage hands operate the scenery, and may be given a glimpse of the original 1930s heating system and the void space between the outside of the curved auditorium and the square building that contains it.
Beneath the ground floor foyer is the Queen Mary Lounge, so-called because it was modelled on a room on board the Cunard ocean liner which sailed the north Atlantic until the late-1960s.
The tours are part of the national Heritage Open Days scheme and aim to raise the profile of the theatre’s regeneration plans as it continues to raise funds.
The building’s operators made a surprising discovery while carrying out survey work ahead of the project – a sandstone void beneath the theatre filled with stagnant water.
“We’ve pumped it out and think it could be the location of the well that we know the theatre was built on,” says Miller.
BACKSTAGE tours of the Royal Court are taking place at 12pm and 2pm on September 12, 14 and 16. Further details at www.royalcourtliverpool.com. Information on Heritage Open Days at www.heritageopendays.org.uk
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