![]() Hampstead Theatre in April 2016 | |
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Address | Eton Avenue London, England |
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Coordinates | 51°32′36″N0°10′27″W / 51.543333°N 0.174167°W |
Public transit | ![]() ![]() |
Owner | Hampstead Theatre Company |
Designation | RIBA Award 2003 |
Type | Flexible stage and seating |
Capacity | Main House Configuration: End On 374 Thrust 370 Traverse 383 Hampstead Downstairs: 90 |
Construction | |
Opened | 2003 |
Years active | Since 1959 | (various locations)
Architect | Bennetts Associates |
Website | |
www |
Hampstead Theatre is a theatre in South Hampstead, in the London Borough of Camden. It specialises in commissioning and producing new writing, supporting and developing the work of new writers.
The original Hampstead Theatre Club was created in 1959, in Moreland Hall, a parish church school hall in Holly Bush Vale, Hampstead Village. [1] James Roose-Evans was the founder and first Artistic Director, and the 1959–1960 season included The Dumb Waiter and The Room by Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco's Jacques and The Sport of My Mad Mother by Ann Jellicoe.
In 1962, the company moved to a portable cabin in Swiss Cottage where it remained for nearly 40 years, before, in 2003, the new purpose-built Hampstead Theatre opened in Swiss Cottage. The main auditorium seats 373 people. The studio theatre, Hampstead Downstairs, seats up to 100 people and was turned into a laboratory for new writing in 2010. [2]
In 2022, Arts Council England removed the theatre's public funding. [3]
Playwrights who have had their early work produced at the theatre include:
Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.
Hampstead is an area in London, England, which lies 4 miles (6 km) northwest of Charing Cross, forming the northwest part of the London Borough of Camden, a borough in Inner London. It borders Highgate and Golders Green to the north, Belsize Park to the south and is surrounded from the northeast by Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland.
The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs over 1,000 staff and opens around 20 productions a year. The RSC plays regularly in London, Stratford-upon-Avon, and on tour across the UK and internationally.
The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play by Harold Pinter written in 1957.
Sir Peter Reginald Frederick Hall CBE was an English theatre, opera and film director. His obituary in The Times declared him "the most important figure in British theatre for half a century" and on his death, a Royal National Theatre statement declared that Hall's "influence on the artistic life of Britain in the 20th century was unparalleled". In 2018, the Laurence Olivier Awards, recognising achievements in London theatre, changed the award for Best Director to the Sir Peter Hall Award for Best Director.
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, commonly shortened to Central, is a drama school founded by Elsie Fogerty in 1906, as the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, to offer a new form of training in speech and drama for young actors and other students. It became a constituent college of the University of London in 2005 and is a member of Conservatoires UK and the Federation of Drama Schools.
No Man's Land is a play by Harold Pinter written in 1974 and first produced and published in 1975. Its original production was at the Old Vic theatre in London by the National Theatre on 23 April 1975, and it later transferred to Wyndham's Theatre, July 1975 – January 1976, the Lyttelton Theatre April–May 1976, and New York's Longacre Theatre from October–December 1976. It returned to the Lyttelton from January – February 1977. It is a two-act play.
Thomas Patrick McKenna was an Irish actor. He had an extensive stage and screen career.
The Evening Standard Theatre Awards, established in 1955, are the oldest theatrical awards ceremony in the United Kingdom. They are presented annually for outstanding achievements in London Theatre, and are organised by the Evening Standard newspaper. They are the West End's equivalent to Broadway's Drama Desk Awards.
Michael Vivian Fyfe Pennington is an English actor, director and writer. Together with director Michael Bogdanov, he founded the English Shakespeare Company in 1986 and was its Joint Artistic Director until 1992. He has written ten books, directed in the UK, US, Romania and Japan, and is an Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is best known for his role as Moff Jerjerrod in the original Star Wars trilogy film Return of the Jedi.
Higham Ronald Hayman was a British critic, dramatist, and writer who was best known as a biographer.
Betrayal is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1978. Critically regarded as one of the English playwright's major dramatic works, it features his characteristically economical dialogue, characters' hidden emotions and veiled motivations, and their self-absorbed competitive one-upmanship, face-saving, dishonesty, and (self-)deceptions.
Marilyn J. "Lynn" Farleigh is an English actress of stage and screen.
Alan Schneider was an American theatre director responsible for more than 100 theatre productions. In 1984 he was honored with a Drama Desk Special Award for serving a wide range of playwrights. He directed the 1956 American premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tiny Alice; the American première of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane, Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, as well as Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, The Collection, and a trilogy of Pinter's plays under the title Other Places ; Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle; You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running; and Michael Weller's Moonchildren and Loose Ends.
Michael Keith Billington is a British author and arts critic. He writes for The Guardian, and was the paper's chief drama critic from 1971 to 2019. Billington is "Britain's longest-serving theatre critic" and the author of biographical and critical studies relating to British theatre and the arts. He is the authorised biographer of the playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008).
The Hothouse (1958/1980) is a full-length tragicomedy written by Harold Pinter in the winter of 1958 between The Birthday Party (1957) and The Caretaker (1959). After writing The Hothouse in the winter of 1958 and following the initial commercial failure of The Birthday Party, Pinter put the play aside; in 1979 he re-read it and directed its first production, at Hampstead Theatre, where it opened on 24 April 1980, transferring to the Ambassadors Theatre on 25 June 1980, and it was first published, also in 1980, by Eyre Methuen. The play received its American premiere at the Trinity Repertory Company in 1982. Pinter himself played Roote in a subsequent production staged at the Minerva Theatre, in Chichester, in 1995, later transferring to the Comedy Theatre, in London.
David Hugh Jones was an English stage, television and film director.
James Roose-Evans was a British theatre director, priest, and writer on experimental theatre, ritual and meditation. In 1959 he founded the Hampstead Theatre Club, in London; in 1974 the Bleddfa Centre for the Creative Spirit, in mid-Wales; and in 2015 Frontier Theatre Productions. He was best known for directing the West End play 84 Charing Cross Road.
Michael Rudman was an American theatre director.
Sir Michael Victor Codron is a British theatre producer, known for his productions of the early work of Harold Pinter, Christopher Hampton, David Hare, Simon Gray and Tom Stoppard. He has been honoured with a Laurence Olivier Award for Lifetime Achievement, and is a stakeholder and director of the Aldwych Theatre in the West End, London.