The Shaftesbury Theatre is a West End theatre, located in Shaftesbury Avenue, in the London Borough of Camden. It opened in 1911 as the New Prince's Theatre, with a capacity of 2,500. The current capacity is 1,416. The title "Shaftesbury Theatre" belonged to another theatre lower down the avenue between 1888 and 1941. The Prince's adopted the name in 1963.
The theatre, the last to be built in Shaftesbury Avenue, was originally intended to house popular melodramas, but has presented a wide range of productions, including Shakespeare, farce, opera, ballet and revue. Companies based at the theatre for London seasons have included the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, the Ballets Russes, Sadler's Wells Opera, Sadler's Wells Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet and the dance companies of Uday Shankar and Pearl Primus.
The theatre has presented many musicals that premiered on Broadway, from Funny Face in the 1920s to Pal Joey and Wonderful Town in the 1950s, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Hair in the 1960s, and more recently Hairspray, Memphis, Motown and Mrs Doubtfire.
The theatre was at risk of demolition in the early 1970s to make way for new roads or for commercial development, but the Save London's Theatres campaign rescued it, and it was given listed building protection in 1974. The actor, playwright and impresario Ray Cooney led a new organisation, The Theatre of Comedy, backed by a substantial group of actors and writers, which leased and then bought the theatre as a home for British comedy. The Theatre of Comedy remains (2023) the owner of the theatre, but the emphasis of programming has shifted from farces and comedies to musicals.
History
Early years
The theatre was designed for the brothers Walter and Frederick Melville by Bertie Crewe and opened on 26 December 1911, the last new theatre to open in Shaftesbury Avenue. The site, at the junction of Shaftesbury Avenue and High Holborn, had previously been what the theatre historians Mander and Mitchenson call "a maze of derelict property". It was originally named the New Prince's Theatre, becoming the Prince's Theatre in 1914. The original capacity of the auditorium was 2,500. The exterior is faced in terracotta and brick stone with a three-tier façade of vertically aligned windows, topped by a pillared cupola above the entrance. The New Prince's was London's first entirely steel-framed theatre, with no supporting pillars in the auditorium to obstruct the view. The original colour scheme of the auditorium was cream and gold.
The Brothers Melville, who were already running the Lyceum Theatre, London, intended to continue their policy of staging popular melodramas. Early shows at the New Princes included Carlton Wallace's The Apple of Eden (1912), Arthur Shirley and Ben Landeck's Women and Wine (1912) and Walter Howard's romantic drama The Story of the Rosary, (1913), In 1913 the theatre presented a comedy, Brewster's Millions, and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice with Frank Cellier as Shylock, but reverted to melodrama with On His Majesty's Service (1914), When London Sleeps (1915) and For England, Home, and Beauty (1915), which ran for a hundred performances.
In December 1916 Seymour Hicks took over the management, opening with a revival of Bluebell in Fairyland and then reviving The Catch of the Season (February 1917), followed by other popular favourites in his repertory. In 1919 C. B. Cochran succeeded Hicks in the management of the theatre, and in April it had a critical and box-office success with André Messager's romantic opera Monsieur Beaucaire, starring Maggie Teyte; it ran for 221 performances. From September of that year the theatre presented a sell-out eighteen-week season of Gilbert and Sullivan operas by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, returning to the West End for the first time since 1908. During the season the company presented ten Savoy operas including the first revival of the 1884 work Princess Ida.
1920s
From February 1920 Pretty Peggy, a musical, ran for 168 performances. In 1920 the perennial favourite Charley's Aunt played at the Prince's for the Christmas season. In April 1921 Sarah Bernhardt appeared in the title role of Daniel in a play by Louis Verneuil, and Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes presented a season including Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Sylphides, starring Lydia Lopokova.
