Welcome to our London theatre guide where we have created profiles for approximately 50 of London's theatres - covering everything from their audience capacity to their history and background (as well as a list of recent productions where possible). We hope this guide is useful to you!

Introduction

A historical perspective of history and drama.

During the late Tudor period to the early Stuarts, the theatre was the dominant drama of the era. Public life was impregnated with theatricality; the monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and status were defined in a rigid code of dress. These tensions and contradictions, which would eventually lead to the development of a modern Britain, were embodied and played out on the stage every afternoon.

Drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society; the theatre was one of the cheapest and therefore most popular forms of entertainment. What the apprentices, fishwives, labourers, and hoi poloi witnessed in the afternoon was re-enacted at court that same evening. Drama was sensitive to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience and therefore it presented unique complex, multiple perspectives on a single event.

London's old Theatre land lay in the shadow of Drury Lane and it was almost completely destroyed in the reconstruction of Wellington Street, the Strand and the beginning of Fleet Street. The whole area was a maze of slums, flanked by Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn; the new streets became the Aldwych and Kingsway, constructed. Although this reconstruction was begun in the last years of the nineteenth century, it was not completed until after the First World War. Drury Lane once covered a larger area but the Aldwych development scheme of 1910 demolished a lot of it. The change brought into existence the Aldwych Theatre and the Strand Theatre, but four theatres were demolished, including the Opera Comique, the Gaiety Theatre in the Strand, the Olympic Theatre in Wych Street, and the Globe Theatre vanished from Newcastle Street.

London offers every shade of dramatic experience from open-air Shakespearean performances in the newly constructed Globe Theatre to the bizarre performances in the London International Festival of Theatre. The West End has over forty commercial theatres, playing to audiences composed in almost equal parts of Londoners, out-of-town theatregoers many of whom come by coach, and overseas tourists.