Royalty Theatre - Later Years

Later Years

After further rebuilding work and redecoration in French Regency style, which increased the capacity of the theatre to 657 seats, the Royalty reopened on 4 January 1906 with a season of Theatre Français directed by Gaston Mayer. In 1911, J. E. Vedrenne and Dennis Eadie acquired the theatre, and in 1912, they staged Milestones, by Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblauch (later Knoblock), which had over 600 performances. The Man who Stayed at Home was also a hit in 1914, playing for 584 performances. Henry Daniell starred as Bobby Gilmour in The Man from Toronto at the theatre in May 1918.

A post-war success was the concert-party entertainment, The Co-Optimists, first staged in 1921. The year 1924 saw the first West End production at the theatre of Noël Coward's The Vortex. Ibsen's Pillars of Society played in 1926. The last big success for the Royalty was in 1932 with While Parents Sleep. By 1936 the danger of fire from celluloid stores and other adjacent properties was thought to override the consideration, strongly pressed on the Lord Chamberlain by the licensee, that the theatre had been on the site before the development of inflammatory trades nearby. The last performance was given at a matinee on 25 November 1938, by the Southern Cross Players.

Although several schemes were considered for its rebuilding, the theatre soon became derelict and was damaged in the World War II Blitz. The Royalty was demolished in 1953 and a block of offices, Royalty House, was erected on the site.

A modern Royalty Theatre was opened in the basement of an office block at Portugal Street near Aldwych in 1960. This was bought by the London School of Economics and renamed the Peacock Theatre in 1996. It is a lecture hall by day and a venue for the Sadler's Wells Theatre company by night.