Looking back (and forwards) in wonder at three arts powerhouses in our region, Kate Lawson discovers their extraordinary histories, memorable moments and fascinating facts.
Image: Martin Bond
Standing on Park Street in Cambridge, the first stop on this tour of some of the area’s most celebrated stages is the ADC Theatre, which lays claim to being England’s oldest university playhouse.
Founded nearly 200 years ago in the back room of The Hoop Coaching Inn, plays have been performed on site since 1855, and it’s also the former stomping ground of many national treasures.
Historically owned and managed by the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club, it’s a fun venue where the shows are put on by students and Cambridge locals alike; a space in which up-and-coming talent can test out new ideas, making for diverse and exciting seasons of shows.
‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’, as the Shakespeare quote goes. But if you were a woman before 1935, you wouldn’t have performed on the ADC stage, as women’s parts were traditionally played by men. Thankfully, things changed, and Rachel Weisz, Miriam Margolyes, Naomie Harris, Emma Corrin and Olivia Williams have all trodden the boards since.
As the first theatre in the city to have a full fly tower back in the late 1980s, it had a significant facelift in 2018, with refurbished auditorium seating and lighting bridges.
The original wooden front doors remain, but are now inside the theatre having survived a fire in 1933. According to urban legend, someone was trapped inside as the theatre burned down, and so after the doors were relocated to the front-of-house corridor, nobody locked them for fear of being haunted by the ghost.
One manager tried during Covid only to find a slight misalignment in their heights, so they couldn’t be locked. Was this a mistake, or the intervention of a supernatural force? As far as we know, they haven’t been locked since!
The theatre’s original ethos also remains: to broaden access to student and community theatre. Once inside, you might just hear the echoes of laughter from days gone by, when Fry and Laurie, Mitchell and Webb, and Mel and Sue all cut their comedy cloth in the Cambridge Footlights here.
The sound of music
A fanfare from the Master of the Queen’s Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, thrust Saffron Hall’s new concert space onto the international stage in 2013. Since then, it has attracted more than 30,000 prestigious artists to perform there, including the likes of Nicola Benedetti, Jess Gillam, Maxim Vengerov, Clare Teal and Courtney Pine, and has two resident orchestras – the London Philharmonic and Britten Sinfonia.
Here, the 740-seat auditorium’s adjustable acoustics can shift you from the crystal-clear speech of a drama to full orchestral richness in a crescendo – but even more remarkable is that the hall is in the middle of an Essex school.
When not hosting exams or daily assemblies, by night Saffron Walden County High School comes alive to the sounds of classical, jazz, folk, theatre and opera, alongside dance and laughs aplenty from its stand-up comedy shows. Sleek, tiered seating with excellent sightlines helps when spotting the ice cream usher during the interval (a British theatre institution). For the fun fact lovers among you, the venue has sold more than 42,000 pots of the stuff!
Conceived as a concert hall rather than an adapted space, and having garnered architectural acclaim as a dual-purpose venue, Saffron Hall cost just over £9 million to build thanks to the largest-ever private donation to a state school, which came from an anonymous local donor with a passion for music.
“World-class art and outstanding music education should be accessible to everybody and this was the motivation behind Saffron Hall,” says Angela Dixon MBE, chief executive of Saffron Music Trust. “Twelve years on, the effect of having the hall in this location within a school continues to grow and reach into the communities locally and regionally.”
A cultural hub with a strong local foundation, the hall’s social impact projects include Together in Sound, a pioneering music therapy programme in partnership with Anglia Ruskin University, bringing music to those living with dementia and their carers.
Star quality
Nestled on Peas Hill close to King’s College, the Arts Theatre Cambridge is a cultural repository of history and personal memories – a time capsule of past performances and experiences going back generations.
Located on the site of a former fish market and university lodgings, the theatre was opened in 1936 by economist John Maynard Keynes, bursting onto the scene with a gala night that featured ballet icon Margot Fonteyn.
Since then, the playhouse has hosted many premiere performances, including works by Harold Pinter, and launched the careers of such notable thespians as Sir Ian McKellen, who made his debut at the venue in 1959.
The Lord of the Rings actor later voiced the need for a refurbishment of the theatre during a tour of his one-man show, and with a wave of Gandalf’s staff, the Grade II listed building has been undergoing a magical transformation, while respecting its historical character. Funded by a grant from charitable trust the Gatsby Foundation, the overhaul pays homage to its 1930s design roots, with crafted timber panelling, a curved balcony in the auditorium and backstage wings and dressing rooms upgraded using materials and details drawn from the original building.
Once vulnerable to theatre superstitions with its unlucky 666 seats, there are now 664 new red ones! Still to come is a 200-seat rooftop studio theatre for smaller-scale productions, community events and activities, with a Name Your Seat campaign championed by McKellen.
Always in the limelight, the Arts Theatre celebrates its 90th anniversary this year. Its diverse programme continues to bring a stirring mix of comedy, dance, music and drama to the city, including its first in-house professional production in years (aside from its famous panto) – Noël Coward’s Easy Virtue, directed by Sir Trevor Nunn. With support for artists and future voices, the show does indeed go on.