Dorset Garden Theatre - The Building

The Building

The theatre was built in the former grounds of Dorset House, London seat of the Sackville Earls of Dorset, which was destroyed in the Great Fire of London and was soon densely built over with speculative tenements. Part of the site had been used as a theatre in the time of Charles I: in 1629 the Earl of Dorset leased the "stables and out howses towards the water side" behind Dorset House... to make a playhouse for the children of the revels." The site for the new theatre, by Dorset Stairs in Whitefriars on the Thames, was slightly upstream from the outlet of the New Canal, part of the Fleet River. Its position on the Thames permitted the patrons to travel to the theatre by boat, avoiding the nearby crime-ridden neighbourhood of Alsatia.

It opened on 9 November 1671 and was almost twice the size of the Duke's Company's former theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It became the principal playhouse in London when the Theatre Royal burned down in January 1672, soon to be rivalled however by the new Theatre Royal, which opened in March 1674. After the Duke's Company merged with the King's Company in 1682 to form the United Company, the theatre in Dorset Garden was used mainly for opera, music, and spectaculars, and from the 1690s it was also used for other entertainments, such as weight lifting, until it was demolished in 1709.

Apart from the illustrations in the libretto of The Empress of Morocco, no contemporary pictures of the interior are known. The rivalry between the two companies led to descriptions of the Dorset Garden theatre in prologues and other verse of the period, thus providing us with some evidence as to what the theatre was actually like.

Thomas Betterton lived in an apartment on an upper floor on the south side. A number of eminent people lived nearby: Aphra Behn in Dorset Street; John Dryden in Salisbury Square from 1673 to 1682; John Locke in Dorset Court in 1690.

It is not known who designed the new theatre building, though tradition ascribes it to Sir Christopher Wren. This however seems unlikely on both practical and stylistic grounds. Perhaps Robert Hooke, an associate of Wren’s had something to do with the design. The outside measurements were 147–148’ by 57’, including a 10’ deep porch. A foreign visitor reported in 1676 that it contained a central "pit", in the form of an amphitheatre, two tiers of seven boxes each holding twenty people, and an upper gallery. It could accommodate approximately 850 patrons. The theatre represented a great investment to the Duke's Company. The interior was richly decorated: the proscenium arch had carvings by Grinling Gibbons.