New Theatre Royal

The present site was built to replace a theatre located in the High Street (now designated "old Portsmouth". The theatre features in Charles Dickens' novel Nicholas Nickleby. A popular music hall, it hosted performances by Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt and Mr Keane the leading actor manager of the early nineteenth century. It closed in 1854 and was demolished in 1856 with a number of other buildings to allow for the construction of a military establishment, the Cambridge Barracks. This building now houses Portsmouth Grammar School, a fee paying independent school. The three-arch entrance to the school occupies the location of the theatre. The city archives contain an 1824 poster/playbill of a performance of The Merchant of Venice starring Mr Keane and paintings of the exterior and interior of the theatre. These show the theatre to have been a low building with no windows and a door with a Grecian portico typical of larger houses of the era.The interior was rectangular with two tiers of boxes along each wall and standing in the pit. It would have had a smaller audience capacity than the theatre which replaced it. The illustration of the Portsmouth Theatre by Phiz in Nicholas Nickleby is true to reality though not to scale.

Extract from 'Nicholas Nickleby'

"They groped their way through a dark passage, and, descending a step or two, threaded a little maze of canvas screens and paintpots, and emerged upon the stage of the Portsmouth Theatre. 'Here we are,' said Mr Crummles. It was not very light, but Nicholas found himself close to the first entrance on the prompt side, among bare walls, dusty scenes, mildewed clouds, heavily daubed draperies, and dirty floors. He looked about him; ceiling, pit, boxes, gallery, orchestra, fittings, and decorations of every kind,--all looked coarse, cold, gloomy, and wretched. 'Is this a theatre?' whispered Smike, in amazement; 'I thought it was a blaze of light and finery.' 'Why, so it is,' replied Nicholas, hardly less surprised; 'but not by day, Smike—not by day.' "

Newly painted

Nicholas Nickleby Charles Dickens 1838–39

Dickens was born in Portsmouth and visited the theatre in 1838 to research Nicholas Nickleby. He was not only a brilliant writer but a consummate performer and would-be actor. His readings were legendary and made him a 19th-century celebrity. There is a belief that he may have performed at the Portsmouth Theatre but this is unlikely. His descriptions in Nicholas Nickleby show that in addition to the auditorium he visited the stage and back stage but his career as a public performer began some ten years into his literary success and long after its publication. He is known to have performed in Portsmouth later but at St Peter's Hall. Sadly, he did not perform at the current theatre and there is no evidence of his visiting it though it is possible.

In the same year the old theatre was demolished, Mr Henry Rutley opened a new venue on the present site. Rutley (born Newcastle 1816) was an impresario and circus proprietor who had arrived in Portsmouth in 1854 and purchased the Swan Tavern in Commercial Road and the adjoining Landport Hall, a racquet court. He converted the hall to accommodate equestrian displays and applied to the magistrates for permission to construct a new theatre on the site. The magistrates, believing theatres places of ill-repute, granted a licence for a limited period with the condition that there was no direct access from the tavern. A door to the hall, bricked in during building, was temporarily uncovered during renovation work in 2004. The Theatre Royal opened on 29 September 1856 with a production entitled 'A New Way to Pay Old Debts'. Rutley managed the venue with J W Boughton as his assistant and was highly successful. In a typical week the theatre would host two plays a night with matinees at the weekend. Rutley died of 'dropsy' in 1874. His grave can be seen in Highland Road Cemetery in Southsea. Boughton became manager of the theatre in 1876 and, after the death of Rutley's successor J C Hughes, took over control of the Portsmouth Theatres Company in 1882. Rutley's widow eventually sold the theatre to him.

Boughton decided on a major rebuild demolishing and replacing the theatre with the present building which re-opened on 4 August 1884 with Gilbert and Sullivan's "Princess Ida". He engaged the most famous theatre architect of the day, C J Phipps, who had earlier built London's Gaiety, Theatre Royal and Haymarket theatres among others. The new building had a four tier auditorium (stalls or pit, dress circle, upper circle and gods). The theatre reflected the rigid social distinctions of the day. The 6-door frontage led to the dress circle to accommodate the wealthy. Patrons in the other floors entered by single doors to the side of the main foyer. Seating capacity was under 1000 but there was space for standing patrons with refreshment bars on each level. The stage was 40 ft deep with a 30 ft proscenium, fly tower and traps.

Phipps also designed the Empire Theatre (aka Empire Palace Theatre) in Edinburgh Road, built by Corke of Fratton, which opened in 1891. A two-tiered music hall with a small stage, it was a milestone in design for public safety. Phipps' Exeter Theatre Royal had been destroyed in a fire shortly after opening in 1886. The Empire was a radical improvement in build quality and design. The Empire struggled to compete with the Royal, Princes and Kings. A plan in the early 1900s to build a 'super theatre' on the site today occupied by the "Zurich" offices was rejected by magistrates and the Empire was extensively redecorated and reopened with Marie Lloyd in 1913. It continued to stage variety shows, even when the other venues converted to screening films, but the quality of these declined to the extent that it ended staging "We never clothe 'em" shows, soft core striptease. The Empire was demolished to make way for a supermarket in 1958. It is said that the Empire Company applied unsuccessfully to lease the Theatre Royal.

The continued success of the theatre led Boughton to decide to enlarge the stage and he engaged Frank Matcham to renovate the building and build a 65 ft stage in 1900.

Matcham was arguably the greatest theatre architect in UK history. His buildings are loved by a variety of artistes as the ideal place to perform. He built over a hundred and fifty theatres across the country including the Tower Ballroom Blackpool, Sadlers Wells and the London Palladium, his greatest success. (The exact number is not known as much of the Matcham archive was destroyed in the WW2 bombing of London.) A brilliant and innovative architect, Matcham perfected increasingly larger floors of seating without supporting pillars, shaped to allow full view of the stage from all seats. He developed 'raked' stages (built at an incline toward the audience) to improve vision from the upper circle and gods, and decorative mouldings and shaped frontage to the balcony fronts that encouraged better acoustics. Matcham constructed the stage and auditorium area to form a natural bell chamber to project and amplify. Comedian Jimmy Tarbuck has said of the Palladium that you can "feel the sound roll around the theatre". Matcham's genius was to create palaces of entertainment which were not only opulent and beautiful but efficient and intimate both for audience and performer.

Matcham enlarged the Theatre Royal stage, rebuilt the dress circle and modified the upper circle and added a cast iron conservatory to the front of the building to allow more patrons into the dress and upper circle bars. The Theatre Royal stage featured a "run-on" or "stage-roller", a large treadmill that allowed horses and vehicles to appear to move on stage. It was a feature of the annual pantomime and it is believed that two racing chariots appeared in a production of Ben Hur shortly after the renovation.

Boughton's success led him to engage Matcham to build two more theatres in Portsmouth, the Prince's Theatre in Lake Road and Kings Theatre in Southsea. The Kings opened in 1907 and is still operating. The Princes Theatre was of a similar structure to the Theatre Royal with a similar cast iron conservatory. It was destroyed in a daylight bombing raid on the city in 1942 during a children's cinema matinee. The three theatres constituted the Portsmouth Theatres Company with a common repertory troupe.

Other surviving Phipps-Matcham theatres include the Tivoli Aberdeen.

In 2003, faced with on-going financial stringency, the Board of Trustees commissioned the Boyden Report which advised a short closure and re-launch and the appointment of an experienced professional director. Shortly after this appointment, the Project Director of a local social enterprise (The Portsmouth and SE Hampshire Partnership) which had been entrusted with finding suitable projects for £1m from the Onyx environmental trust, added the NTR as a last minute addition to the shortlist. The theatre was awarded £440,000, the largest single grant given by the Onyx Trust. With additional funding, the Matcham cast iron portico was renovated, central heating and a new pit bar installed, and original vintage seating in the stalls which had previously been used on the set of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. A larger stage was built in front of the proscenium. To accommodate this, the frontage of the lower boxes had to be removed. Investigation revealed that these were prefabricated and fitted using large bolts. They were stored beneath the stage until eventually reinstatement when the new stage house was built. An external lighting rig was erected over the open stage.

The renovation led to a dynamic programme development endorsed by the trust board. Drama, stand up comedy, music and dance became features of each season whilst work with local schools and community groups was expanded. The trust developed links with the university of Portsmouth, a funder with the city council. The New Theatre Royal gained prominence on the cultural scene of the city. However, performances were still restricted by the lack of a proper stage and get-in and limited seating capacity. Inevitably, lack of operating finance became problematic again necessitating a period known as "NTR Lite" with less risky but less exciting programing.

Shortly after the recruitment of a new executive (artistic) director, the trust embarked upon the most challenging an exciting period since the remodelling by Matcham.

The board of trustees appointed a sub-committee to investigate and advise on the options for capitalising on its vacant "back lot". The outcome was a plan to rebuild the stage and back stage accommodation in addition to teaching facilities for the university. In 2009, London-based architects Peynore and Prasad were contracted to design the building and a professional fundraiser was appointed to raise the estimated £4m cost to the trust. A fund raising programme "Let's Make It Great" began at the opening of 2010 with a weekend finishing with a gala performance MC'd by comedian and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig and headlined by the actor Sheila Hancock, chancellor of the university. Broadcaster and musician Paul Jones and actor Christopher Timothy were among the cast list which included popular and classical music, comedy, opera and dance. At the end of the evening, Sheila Hancock accepted the invitation to become the patron of the theatre.

In May 2010, the theatre hosted the first screening in nearly three decades of "The Boy Friend", an honour it shared in the same week with the Verona Film Festival. The screening was preceded by an interview with the director Ken Russell and cast members Twiggy, Brian Murphy, Georgina Hale and Murray Melvin and the score composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davis, former Master of the Queens Music. The interview was hosted by local television personality Sally Taylor. Following this event, Twiggy, Sir Peter and Brian Murphy agreed to join Sheila Hancock as patrons.