Curtain rises on new theatres

More than £120m later, three English theatre companies are ready to move into their new homes. The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), which has been staging work from the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon for the past three years, has announced that its refurbished Royal Shakespeare Theatre will reopen to the public for tours and one-off events on 24 November. The four-year development project has cost £112.8m, £34.7m of which was raised by donations from 13,000 people in 55 countries, but is coming in on time and budget according to the RSC. The company celebrates its fiftieth birthday next year, and the first plays will be staged in the new theatre in February 2011, with a formal opening and a full-scale season of plays in April.
Elsewhere, the Pegasus Youth Theatre in Oxford reopened on 4 September, following a £7.4m revamp. The project received a £3.35m cash injection from Arts Council England, with remaining funds successfully raised from private donors, a Lottery grant and the money from the Department of Children, Schools and Families (now the Department for Education). Pegasus also raised £650,000 from the local community through a number of activities, including seat naming, a friends’ scheme and sponsored events. A generous £100,000 was also gifted by Oxford-based author Philip Pullman, in whose honour Pegasus has since named its stage.
Over in Derbyshire, the Pavilion Arts Centre (PAC) will become the first new theatre in the area for more than a century when it opens at the end of September. Formerly the Paxton Suite in Buxton’s Pavilion Gardens complex, the PAC is a second venue for Buxton Opera House, to be managed and programmed by High Peak Theatre Trust. Restoration of the building, which initially opened in 1889, has cost around £2.5m. PAC is set to become a permanent home to the Opera House’s junior, youth and student theatre companies, as well as touring events and shows. Also in Derbyshire, the Duchess Theatre, which was gutted by fire in 2003, has reopened following £250,000 of rebuilding work.