The Festival Theatre
A Georgian theatre of 1816 on Newmarket Road that became the experimental Cambridge Festival Theatre of 1926-35.
The Festival Theatre on Newmarket Road in Barnwell began as the Theatre Royal, opened in 1816, and had a second life from 1926, when it became known for avant-garde productions. It stopped being a theatre in 1935. Part of its Georgian interior survives, and the building is Grade II* listed.
Why it stood outside the town
A law of 1736 banned plays within five miles of the university, so Cambridge had no permanent theatre. Touring companies played at the Stourbridge Fair, and three successive theatres were built at Barnwell, beyond the town boundary. William Wilkins, a builder who ran a chain of East Anglian theatres, put one up in Sun Street in 1807. His son, also William Wilkins, who went on to design Downing College and the National Gallery, drew up the replacement on Newmarket Road, completed in 1816. In 1878 it shut and was converted into a nonconformist chapel.
The Festival Theatre years
In 1926 Terence Gray took a lease and relaunched the building as the Cambridge Festival Theatre. He roofed over the passage beside it to make a foyer and installed an early revolving stage, a brick-built cyclorama and electric light. It is said to have been the country's first permanent indoor performing space modelled on a Greek open-air theatre. The first production, on 22 November 1926, was The Oresteia. It earned a name for avant-garde work and for little-known plays by major dramatists, and its company was among the first in Britain to put on Chekhov's The Seagull. Money troubles brought the theatre to an end in June 1935.
Afterwards
From 1962 the Cambridge Arts Theatre used the building as a workshop and store. In 1995 the student Marlowe Society renovated the Festival Theatre and staged a single run of James Shirley's The Lady of Pleasure, a play not performed for 350 years. The building has been a Buddhist centre since 1998. Historic England describes the interior as "a virtually complete example of a Georgian theatre with a three-tiered horseshoe auditorium".
Nearby
Within a few minutes' walk
