Traverse Theatre - History

History

The Traverse Theatre began as a theatre club in 15 James Court, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh, a former doss-house and brothel also known as Kelly's Paradise and Hell's Kitchen. It was "a long, low-ceilinged first-floor room barely 15ft wide by 8ft high" with 60 seats salvaged from the Palace Cinema placed in two blocks on either side of the stage. The theatre is named because Terry Lane mistakenly believed that the staging arrangement is called 'traverse'; he later realised that it is 'transverse' but it was already too well known to change it. In its first year of operation, a Theatre Conference was organised by director Jim Haynes, John Calder and Kenneth Tynan and including a Happening involving Allan Kaprow among others. The first performance was on 2 January 1963.

By the end of the 1960s, following a surveyor's report in March 1969 which stated where the internal floors of James Court were unsafe, the Traverse moved to a former sailmakers's loft at 112 West Bow, Grassmarket, in the east end of the Grassmarket. This larger space had a 100-seat theatre with flexible seating configurations. The first performance in this venue was on 24 August 1969. In its early days the theatre included exhibition space for the visual arts, until 1966 when the administrators for that space – including Richard Demarco – moved away to establish what became the Richard Demarco Gallery.