1920s–1950s

1920s – Theatre, transportation, and commercial entertainment
In the 1920s, Sydney’s most lively theatres were at the hub of the city’s transportation routes. The major theatres were distributed along the tramlines that ran from Circular Quay to Central Station. J.C. Williamson presented musicals, comedies and operetta at the Theatre Royal and Her Majesty’s, and Harry Rickards at the Tivoli specialised in vaudeville and revue. The smaller Criterion, Playhouse, and Palace theatres presented spoken-word drama and comedy.

Productions at newer theatres appealed to the audience of commuters, traveling into the city centre by train on an expanding suburban network. The Grand Opera House, on Castlereagh Street, near Central Station opened in 1911 by the Fullers brothers, Benjamin and John. The Fullers also built the Majestic Theatre near the train station in Newtown, and the St James Theatre near St James station in the city.

1930s – Amateur dramatics after work
The Great Depression in the 1930s and competition from movies changed the production of live theatre in Sydney. Some commercial theatres closed. But audiences in Sydney always had something to watch. J.C. Williamson continued to present musical comedy, operetta, and drama at the Theatre Royal, while the Grand Opera House in Haymarket became the new Tivoli Theatre in 1932, offering variety, pantomime and revue.

Amateur theatre thrived in the 1930s. Theatre enthusiasts made use of smaller, vacant venues, with capacities for seating no more than several hundred spectators. They found these venues on side streets in older areas of downtown Sydney and on the city fringes east in Darlinghurst. The amateur theatres were led by women. Producers Carrie Tennant, Beryl Bryant and Doris Fitton promoted the production of Australian plays and developed an extensive network of theatre artists between them.

1940s – International drama in professional production
Sydney theatre in the 1940s was shaped by the political divisions that emerged after the Second World War. Two venues represent radically opposed models of production. The Minerva Theatre in King’s Cross ventured a capitalist model of production, inherited from London, New York and Hollywood. Across town, the New Theatre embodied a counter model of collective production, committed to socialised ideals, with plays by Bertolt Brecht, Clifford Odets, and Edward Chodorov.

Sydney theatres in the 1940s cultivated a three-strand pattern of repertoire that persists to this day. The pattern combines recent ‘hits’ from London and New York, premieres of new ‘Australian’ plays, and director-led revivals of European ‘classics’. The pattern was formulated by Doris Fitton, who moved the Independent Theatre into a permanent venue in North Sydney in 1939, and by May Hollinworth, who established the Metropolitan Theatre in 1943. They also introduced a subscription approach to audience development still practised by theatre companies today.

1950s – Arts from entertainment: the commercial and the governmental
Artistic theatre split from commercial entertainment with government intervention in the 1950s. The Theatre Royal offered much the same repertoire as it always had: international plays, Broadway musicals and light opera. The Tivoli continued to present variety-revue, alongside ballet, opera, pantomime and comedy. And the Empire, which had converted to movie screenings in 1929, returned to presenting live performance in the 1950s. Producer William Orr leased St James Hall in the city, previously a venue for amateur drama, and it the Phillip Street Theatre for a series of intimate revues, small-scale song-and-dance shows with commentary on topical themes.

The government-led Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust was established in 1954 as a subscription initiative to establish national drama, opera and ballet companies. The Trust leased the Majestic in Newtown, and renamed it the Elizabethan Theatre. It promoted touring productions of Australian plays – Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), Ned Kelly (1596), The Shifting Heart (1957), Lola Montez (1958), The Slaughter of St Teresa’s Day, and Bastard Country (1959). The Trust also presented British and American drama, along with seasons of opera and operetta, consolidating an artistic repertoire for audiences in Sydney.

Streamgraph 1920s – 1960s

The streamgraph is a timeline of activity at Sydney theatres over one hundred years. Each colour is a venue. The more activity at the venue, the thicker the line becomes. The streamgraph focuses on theatres in each decade that offered something new to audiences – new because the venue did not previously exist, or new because programming at the venue changed the repertoire on offer to audiences.

The streamgraph provides a backbone for the exhibition of theatre programs. The theatre programs the genres of performance that appealed to audiences in Sydney. Programs also indicate the national origin of artists, companies and playwrights, providing evidence of efforts to support local artists and present Australian works.

1960s – 1990s

1960s – Distributed reach: little theatres, serious pursuits
During the 1960s theatres in Sydney adopted a subsidy-sponsorship model for production in partnerships with business, government and universities. The Old Tote was created in a tin shed at the University of New South Wales. The Q Theatre presented lunchtime theatre at the AMP Theatrette in Circular Quay. And PACT launched as an artists’ cooperative in a building provided by the Sydney City Council in 1964. They operated on a ‘professional’ basis, neither amateur, nor strictly commercial.

Alongside the Ensemble housed in a harbour-side boat shed in Kirribilli, the church-based Genesian Theatre in the city, and the community-based Pocket Playhouse to the south in Sydenham, the theatres operating on subsidy-sponsorship in the 1960s secured access to venues for rehearsal and production. In stabilising operations through institutional alignments, these theatres also engaged governmental ideas about artistic appeal for an educated audience and provided employment for a growing workforce of artists.

 1970s – Into the house: Sydney Opera House and alternative theatres
Theatre expanded across Sydney in the 1970s. The number theatres in Sydney doubled in the decade: from 75 venues in the 1960s to 146 in the 1970s. The momentous opening of the Sydney Opera House added a whole complex of venues: Concert Hall, Opera Theatre, and Drama Theatre, along with a Music Room and a Recording Hall. The Old Tote became a resident company. At the same time, smaller alternative theatres proliferated across the inner suburbs.

Small-scale and marginal, the alternative theatres embodied a commitment to staging Australian plays and an oppositional stance. In 1970 Nimrod converted an old stables near King’s Cross into a theatre (now home to Griffin). From 1974 to 1977 the Black Theatre Arts and Culture Centre in Redfern presented theatre by Aboriginal artists and the National Black Theatre Company. Audiences across the inner suburbs attended UNSW’s Jane Street Theatre in Randwick, the Mews Playhouse in Centennial Park, the Australian Theatre in Newtown, and the Actors’ Company Theatre in Ultimo.

 1980s – Company positions, genre distinctions, audience relations
Sydney’s ‘mainstage’ theatre companies moved into their own venues in the 1980s and are still in residence today. Sydney Theatre Company, formed after the demise the Old Tote, presented its first production in 1979, and moved into the Wharf at Walsh Bay in 1984. Griffin moved into the Stables in 1980, after it had been used as a city-side venue by the Ensemble Theatre. The company that became Belvoir St Theatre moved into Nimrod’s former theatre in Surry Hills in 1985, while the Seymour Centre at the University of Sydney, provided three theatres for touring companies and festival shows, and base for Nimrod until 1987.

Performance diversified in the 1980s when The Performance Space, in Redfern (from 1980), and the Off Broadway Theatre (later Bay Street Theatre), in Glebe (from 1984), provided opportunities for artists to experiment with form. Previously, a small range of genres defined theatre: drama, comedy, mystery, tragedy, ballet, pantomime, variety, revue. In the 1980s the range of genres expanded to include performance art, dance theatre, contemporary performance, corporeal theatre, avant-garde, experimental, visual theatre, physical theatre, post-dramatic, group-devised, monodrama, movement-based, improvised, multimedia, video art, exhibition, installation and more.

 1990s – Re-enchantment of entertainment: renovated theatres, pub shows and artists studios
The subsidy-sponsorship model and subscriber-audiences that established the ‘mainstage’ companies disrupted the commercial production of theatre. While musicals were presented at the new Theatre Royal and Her Majesty’s during the 1970s and 1980s, three renovated cinemas expanded Sydney’s capacity for commercial theatre in the 1990s: the State Theatre in Market Street, the Capitol Theatre in Haymarket, and the Enmore Theatre near Newtown. Sydney Harbour Casino (later known as Star City Casino and the Star Sydney) added the Sydney Lyric Theatre as a fourth large-scale venue for commercial production in 1997. Elsewhere, smaller, artist-generated spaces in pubs, unused halls and studios, for production on a co-operative basis in the margins of the subsidised sector: the Crossroads Theatre in Darlinghurst (reviving the venue that had been used as Bryant’s Playhouse in the 1930s), the Tilbury Hotel in Woolloomooloo, the Lookout Theatre in Woollahra, and the The Edge Theatre in Newtown.

2000s – 2010s & Beyond

2000s – Stratification: genre diversity, audience segments, festival curation
The map of Sydney theatres in the 2000s thickens as new venues add layers to the existing strata. The new layers laminate performance genres into alignment with audience segments, while relations between companies, artists and venues become flexible and festivalised. The Sydney Theatre (now Roslyn Packer Theatre) was designed as venue-home for productions from the Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Dance Company, and as a touring venue for international companies. Pinchgut Opera at the City Recital Hall presented chamber-scale operas from the 17th and 18th repertoire, which Opera Australia at the Sydney Opera House rarely produces.

Other venues became curators of performance in many genres. The Studio at the Sydney Opera House presented music, dance, drama, comedy, drag, circus and burlesque in shows of short duration that fit into the social schedule of an evening out. Carriageworks embodied genre-diversity in its design as a multi-arts urban precinct for performance, dance, installations and events that encompass the innovative, the hybrid and the experimental. Meanwhile, artist-collectives continued to produce theatre in found spaces, including the Darlinghurst Theatre Company in Potts Point, the Tamarama Rock Surfers at the Old Fitzroy Hotel in Woolloomooloo, and Short and Sweet seasons at the Newtown Theatre.

2010s – New venues for old forms: renovations, replacements and redevelopments
In the 2010s, Sydney city-council investment in artist-led creative spaces proceeded alongside major state-level public-private investments in redeveloping, upgrading and replacing venues. The Eternity Playhouse in Darlinghurst and the Hayes Theatre in Potts Point represent city council investments in production capacity, drawing on the independent theatre scene that develops around actor training and plays across makeshift venues, like the Old 505 Theatre.

State-government re-investment proceeded on a massive scale with multi-million dollar upgrades to the Sydney Opera House, the Wharf at Walsh Bay, and the Theatre Royal, while newly-built venues take the place of old venues as more-or-less like-for-like replacements. The Darling Quarter Theatre in a Darling Harbour redevelopment became home for Monkey Baa Productions, providing children’s entertainment in place of Sega World. The ICC Sydney Theatre (later, the First State Super Theatre, and the Aware Super Theatre) replaced the Sydney Entertainment Centre and, likewise, the Esme Timbery Creative Practice Lab incorporated replacements for Io Myers and Studio One.

Theatres across suburban Sydney – Performing beyond the city
The Sydney map of theatres is a cluster-centric form, focused on the city centre and the inner suburbs. But the story of performance across Sydney is more expansive than the metro-centric cluster of venues.

Theatres in the northern suburbs – Marian Street Theatre in Killara, Glen Street Theatre in Frenchs Forest, and the Zenith Theatre in Chatswood – sustained audiences through the 1960s–80s. Since the 1970s, the larger city councils in greater Sydney have built venues for performing arts, or converted civic centres into entertainment centres in Sutherland, Castle Hill, Hurstville, Penrith, Casula, Blacktown, Chatswood and Bankstown. Director Doreen Warburton moved the Q Theatre from Circular Quay to Penrith in 1977, and opened the Riverside Theatres in Parramatta with a production of The Sentimental Bloke in 1988. Sidetrack Performance Group performed across greater Sydney in the 1980s–90s, and Death Defying Theatre moved to Bankstown to become Urban Theatre Projects in 1997.

Licensed clubs across suburbs and regional towns provided touring venues for variety entertainment since the 1960s. The latest venue is the Sydney Coliseum Theatre at WestHQ in Rooty Hill, a 2,000-seat lyric theatre, rivalling the largest in the city centre. Although the first year was disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, programming adopts an ‘arts-as-entertainment’ repertoire popular since the 1950s, ranging from the Australian Ballet to Bangarra, Wolfgang’s Magical Musical Circus by Circa to Birds of Tokyo with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and, for the children, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Bonnie Lythgoe’s OzPanto productions.

SOURCES

AusStage, http://ausstage.edu.au

Katharine Brisbane, ed. Entertaining Australia: An Illustrated History (Sydney: Currency Press, 1991)

Dictionary of Sydney, https://home.dictionaryofsydney.org

Philip Parsons with Victoria Chance, ed., Companion to Theatre in Australia (Sydney : Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Ross Thorne, http://rossthorne.com

Trove, http://trove.nla.gov.au

Visualising productions at Sydney theatres, 2000s – 2010s

City council investment in artist-oriented creative spaces in the 2000s and 2010s proceeded alongside major state-level investments in redeveloping, upgrading and replacing Sydney’s theatres. Four smaller-scale venues defined genre distinctions for audience segments. These distinctions are evident in visualisations of data from AusStage.

The Darlinghurst Theatre Company moved production of local drama into the renovated Eternity Playhouse in 2013. The Hayes Theatre specialised in cabaret and musicals on a small scale moved into Potts Point in 2014. Pinchgut Opera at the City Recital Hall since 2003 created an audience for baroque opera in Sydney. In 2012 the Darling Quarter Theatre became the home theatre for Monkey Baa’s Productions for children.

Map of theatres in Greater Sydney 1920 – 2020