Last Thursday the Queen (and I don’t mean Helen Mirren) paid a Royal visit to the Theatre Royal, Brighton, as part of its 200th anniversary celebrations, so I went down a day later to pay my own respects (and even if I don’t qualify as visiting Royalty, there are some that would say that I make a good effort sometimes at acting queenly. Though, this being Brighton, one is hardly out of place…).
Actually, Brighton is on a convenient circuit of touring theatres near London – led by Richmond, Wimbledon and Bromley, of course, for me but also embracing Guildford and Cambridge – that I visit on a fairly regular basis throughout the year. Though touring, either pre or post-West End, or sometimes with no immediate West End ambitions in its sights but as an end in itself – is relatively unacknowledged by most of the national media, a production that travels on an extensive tour can reach many more of my readers in the Sunday Express than, say, a production that originates and only plays at Manchester’s Royal Exchange or the Birmingham Rep. So I like to cover as many of them as I can.
And theatres like Brighton that reek of the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd are the essence of a particular kind of touring: there’s a kind of faded, tatty glamour to the building that brings with it a powerful blend of associations on both sides of the footlights, with a dedicated and loyal local audience that support it all the time. But though I do once remember interviewing Richard Briers in the Number One dressing room backstage (opposite dressing room 1A, which in one of the subtler moves of the management there means there is no No 2 room), I have previously confined my visits to the auditorium, and that’s only the public part of this theatre’s story.
As a special souvenir supplement of the local Brighton Argus to commemorate the anniversary puts it, “Although it’s the architecture of Theatre Royal Brighton’s exterior and auditorium that is most obvious, the backstage areas are in some ways more interesting and certainly more complex.” Last Friday, after lunching with the theatre’s current Chief Executive Julien Boast and his deputy and Head of Marketing Tracey Shaw, I was taken on a guided tour of the backstage area, and discovered a building – literally falling apart in places, and leaking all over the place (buckets are everywhere) – that has been stitched together from different periods to make the fantastic relic it is today of some 200 years of resourceful (lack of) planning. For instance, the dressing rooms are reclaimed out of former fishermen’s cottages; while areas of the front-of-house are carved out of the former home of the Nye Charts, the theatre’s 19th-century manager Henry Nye Chart and, after his death, his wife Ellen Nye Chart who took over; it was the latter who introduced “flying matinees”, in which an entire London production would travel by train to Brighton, put on their show there, and then go straight back to perform it again in London in the evening!
So, where you see a domestic fireplace, for instance, in the dress circle bar, this is in what was formerly the Nye Chart’s drawing room. All of this affords what the Argus supplement refers to as “tremendous visual evidence of the theatre’s organic growth, giving it almost unparalleled character.” As Boast himself says, “It’s remarkable for any theatre to reach 200 years old, given their tendency to burn down, thanks to the combination of timber and gas lighting. But what’s particularly amazing about Theatre Royal Brighton is her growth has been pretty much uninterrupted throughout the reigns of nine monarchs and architecturally she’s pretty much untouched. Several theatres of her age or older have had a lot of money put in and the infastructure changed.”
No wonder he tells me he is reluctant to make those kind of interventions here: as custodian of the building for what is, in the scheme of its 200 years, only a brief tenure (he has been here five years so far), he doesn’t want to have to make decisions that will cover (up) its history. Instead, the building is gently held together, in some places by scaffolding, as in what used to be his office where the windows were warping dramatically – and when the frames were taken off, it was discovered that the building it was housed in was entirely timber.
But the glorious thing about theatre, of course, is its endless pursuit of the new and the innovative; and even if the building may be 200 years old, the production I saw on Friday night was bang up-to-the-minute: a new touring version of The Hound of the Baskervilles cleverly combined a new version of a classic Sherlock Holmes story with a new technology to tell it that summonsed set changes by video projection.
Brighton, too, is similarly a wonderfully eclectic mixture of the classical and venerable and the hip and new. Even the guest houses are being made over. While the seaside B&Bs, with the cosy familiarity of a similarly tarnished air to them that the theatre has, are still there, I stayed at a fabulously reclaimed one: The Amherst, in Lower Rock Gardens in Kemptown, looks like one of a number of guest houses in the street from the outside, but you enter a smart, fashionable world inside, with DVD players in every room and fluffy white duvets to collapse into – and cooked breakfasts that are brought to your room. It doesn’t get better than this.
