Making waves

Between the towering majesty of Greene King’s brewery and its bottling plant in Bury St Edmunds nestles the Georgian gem of the Theatre Royal. Built in 1819 by William Wilkins (architect of the National Gallery) and now reopening after a £5 million restoration, its survival is something of a miracle. From 1925 it was effectively swallowed by the brewery when it was used as a barrel store. Reclaimed in 1965, it remains the sole surviving working theatre from the Regency period. The new and brilliantly executed refurbishment strikes an ideal balance between fidelity to Wilkins’s exquisitely proportioned semi-circular auditorium and the modernising provision of 360 comfortable seats (the original theatre would have crammed in up to 800 on backless benches), a welcoming foyer (with bar and restaurant) and decent loos (instead of ‘three earth closets’).

Most Georgian playhouses fell victim either to fire or to the Victorian taste for entertainment on a more grandiose scale. No less sad has been the loss of the repertory written for these theatres. After Congreve and Vanbrugh there’s a 100-year gap occupied in general esteem only by Goldsmith and Sheridan. Colin Blumenau, artistic director of the Theatre Royal, has made it his mission to reanimate not just the theatre but also the authors, once hugely popular, of its period. He begins with Black Eyed Susan (1829), a nautical melodrama by Douglas Jerrold, admired friend of Thackeray and Dickens, whose satirical gifts enlivened the early pages of Punch.

Part of Blumenau’s case is that Georgian plays need the kind of theatre for which they were written, with a proscenium stage designed for quick-change painted scenery on moveable wings and ‘drops’. In such theatres the scenery shamelessly craves applause, and richly deserves it in Kit Surrey’s designs for Susan.