The Theatre Royal, Portsmouth, is a Victorian Grade II* listed theatre in the heart of Portsmouth, England,Theatre Royal, Guildhall Walk, Historic England website, accessed 25th April 2025. with a capacity of 500. The theatre building was constructed in 1854 as Landport Hall. It was converted to a theatre two years later. It was rebuilt in 1884 by Charles J. Phipps and again in 1900 by Frank Matcham.
The Theatre reopened in October 2015 after a £4.7M refurbishment project.
History Dickens and early theatre in Portsmouth The present site was built to replace a theatre located in the High Street (now designated Old Portsmouth). The theatre features in Charles Dickens' novel Nicholas Nickleby. A popular music hall, it hosted performances by Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt and Mr Kean the leading actor manager of the early nineteenth century. It closed in 1854 and was demolished in 1856 with a number of other buildings to allow for the construction of a military establishment, the Cambridge Barracks. This building now houses Portsmouth Grammar School, a fee paying independent school. The three-arch entrance to the school occupies the location of the theatre. The city archives contain an 1824 poster/playbill of a performance of The Merchant of Venice starring Kean and paintings of the exterior and interior of the theatre. These show the theatre to have been a low building with no windows and a door with a Grecian portico typical of larger houses of the era. The interior was rectangular with two tiers of boxes along each wall and standing in the pit. It would have had a smaller audience capacity than the theatre which replaced it. The illustration of the Portsmouth Theatre by Phiz in Nicholas Nickleby is true to reality though not to scale.
Extract from Nicholas Nickleby Chapter XXIII
"They groped their way through a dark passage, and, descending a step or two, threaded a little maze of canvas screens and paintpots, and emerged upon the stage of the Portsmouth Theatre. 'Here we are,' said Mr Crummles. It was not very light, but Nicholas found himself close to the first entrance on the prompt side, among bare walls, dusty scenes, mildewed clouds, heavily daubed draperies, and dirty floors. He looked about him; ceiling, pit, boxes, gallery, orchestra, fittings, and decorations of every kind,--all looked coarse, cold, gloomy, and wretched. 'Is this a theatre?' whispered Smike, in amazement; 'I thought it was a blaze of light and finery.' 'Why, so it is,' replied Nicholas, hardly less surprised; 'but not by day, Smike—not by day.' "
Nicholas Nickleby Charles Dickens, 1838–39
Did Dickens perform at the Portsmouth Theatre? Dickens was born in Portsmouth and visited the theatre in 1838 to research for Nicholas Nickleby.Charles Dickens and Portsmouth, Portsmouth tourist site, accessed 25 April 2025. He was not only a brilliant writer but a consummate performer and would-be actor. His readings were legendary and made him a 19th-century celebrity. There is a belief that he may have performed at the Portsmouth Theatre but this is unlikely. His descriptions in Nicholas Nickleby show that in addition to the auditorium he visited the stage and back stage but his career as a public performer began some ten years into his literary success and long after its publication. He is known to have performed in Portsmouth later but at St Peter's Hall; he did not perform at the current theatre and there is no evidence of his visiting it though it is possible.
Henry Rutley and the Portsmouth Theatres Company In the same year the old theatre was demolished, Mr Henry Rutley opened a new venue on the present site. Rutley (born Newcastle 1816) was an impresario and circus proprietor who had arrived in Portsmouth in 1854 and purchased the Swan Tavern in Commercial Road and the adjoining Landport Hall, a racquet court. He converted the hall to accommodate equestrian displays and applied to the magistrates for permission to construct a new theatre on the site.Offord, John. The Theatres of Portsmouth. Milestone Publications, Horndean, 1983, p48-52. ISBN 0 903852 47 0. The magistrates, believing theatres places of ill-repute, granted a licence for a limited period with the condition that there was no direct access from the tavern. A door to the hall, bricked in during building, was temporarily uncovered during renovation work in 2004. The Theatre Royal opened on 29 September 1856 with a production entitled A New Way to Pay Old Debts. Rutley managed the venue with J W Boughton as his assistant and was highly successful. In a typical week the theatre would host two plays a night with matinees at the weekend. Rutley died of 'dropsy' in 1874. His grave can be seen in Highland Road Cemetery in Southsea. Boughton became manager of the theatre in 1876 and, after the death of Rutley's successor J C Hughes, took over control of the Portsmouth Theatres Company in 1882. Rutley's widow eventually sold the theatre to him.
Architects C. J. Phipps Boughton decided on a major rebuild demolishing and replacing the theatre with the present building which re-opened on 4 August 1884 with Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida with principals from the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. He engaged the most famous theatre architect of the day, C. J. Phipps, who had earlier built London's Gaiety, Vaudeville and Savoy theatres among others. The new building had a four tier auditorium (stalls or pit, dress circle, upper circle and gods). The theatre reflected the rigid social distinctions of the day. The 6-door frontage led to the dress circle to accommodate the wealthy. Patrons in the other floors entered by single doors to the side of the main foyer. Seating capacity was 2,000 but there was space for standing patrons with refreshment bars on each level. The stage was 40 ft deep with a 30 ft proscenium, fly tower and traps.
Phipps also designed the Empire Theatre (Empire Palace Theatre) in Edinburgh Road, built by Corke of Fratton, which opened in 1891. A two-tiered music hall with a small stage, it was a milestone in design for public safety. Phipps' Exeter Theatre Royal had been destroyed in a fire shortly after opening in 1886. The Empire was a radical improvement in build quality and design. The Empire struggled to compete with the Royal, Princes and Kings. A plan in the early 1900s to build a 'super theatre' on the site today occupied by the Zurich offices was rejected by magistrates and the Empire was extensively redecorated and reopened with Marie Lloyd in 1913. It continued to stage variety shows, even when the other venues converted to screening films, but the quality of these declined to the extent that it ended staging "We never clothe 'em" shows, soft core striptease. The Empire was demolished to make way for a supermarket in 1958.
Frank Matcham
The continued success of the theatre led Boughton to decide to enlarge the stage and he engaged Frank Matcham to renovate the building and build a 65 ft stage in 1900.
Matcham was arguably the greatest theatre architect in UK history. He built over a hundred and fifty theatres across the country including the Tower Ballroom, Sadler's Wells Theatre and the London Palladium.
Matcham perfected increasingly larger floors of seating without supporting pillars, shaped to allow full view of the stage from all seats. He developed 'raked' stages (built at an incline toward the audience) to improve vision from the upper circle and god. Decorative mouldings and shaped frontage to the balcony encouraged better acoustics. Matcham constructed the stage and auditorium area to form a natural bell chamber to project and amplify sound. Comedian Jimmy Tarbuck has said of the Palladium that you can "feel the sound roll around the theatre". Matcham's genius was to create palaces of entertainment which were not only opulent and beautiful but efficient and intimate both for audience and performer.
Matcham enlarged the Theatre Royal stage, rebuilt the dress circle and modified the upper circle and added a cast iron conservatory to the front of the building to allow more patrons into the dress and upper circle bars. The Theatre Royal stage featured a "run-on" or "stage-roller", a large treadmill that allowed horses and vehicles to appear to move on stage. It was a feature of the annual pantomime and it is believed that two racing chariots appeared in a production of Ben Hur shortly after the renovation.
Boughton's success led him to engage Matcham to build two more theatres in Portsmouth, the Prince's Theatre in Lake Road and Kings Theatre in Southsea. The Kings opened in 1907 and is still operating. The Princes Theatre was of a similar structure to the Theatre Royal with a similar cast iron conservatory. It was destroyed in a daylight bombing raid on the city in 1942 during a children's cinema matinee. The three theatres constituted the Portsmouth Theatres Company with a common repertory troupe.
Famous performers
Most of the famous performers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appeared at the Theatre Royal. Sir Henry Irving and his leading lady and mistress, Ellen Terry, appeared many times both individually and together. Sarah Bernhardt performed there on several occasions, including her legendary appearances in later life when in a wheelchair. She left her signature on the wall of the dressing rooms (it was retrieved after the fire in 1972). Marie Lloyd was also a regular. Laurel and Hardy appeared before fame in Hollywood and Oliver Hardy chose the theatre as the venue for his birthday party in 1954. Similarly Morecambe and Wise were among many twentieth-century variety stars who appeared early in their career. Irving died on tour in a Bradford hotel in 1905 but his last complete set of performances was completed two weeks earlier at the Theatre Royal Portsmouth. Ellen Terry was appearing there the week he died. During some of performances his private secretary and theatre manager, Abraham ('Bram') Stoker – author of his biography and of the classic Gothic novel Dracula – worked in the offices backstage.
Theatre programming
At its height from the Victorian to pre-WW2 eras, theatres provided a dynamic programme of entertainment to the communities they served typically, boasting "two shows nightly" with weekend matinees. Like cinemas, the evening programme ran a major and supporting show. As the Victorian wealthy liked to dine late after a trip to the theatre, the main performance started at 7.30 and the support (shorter and usually less demanding such as a light drama or farce) opened afterwards. Audiences could pay to attend either or both performances. With three venues in Portsmouth from the 1900s to the second world war, the city had a stunning level of entertainment choice and provision.
Programming also provides an insight into the talent and workload of the acting profession. In most weeks, the performances would change with as many as three distinct programmes of shows. Posters from the 1860s show an actor taking the lead in Hamlet followed by the lead in a farce at the start of the week, and the lead role in different plays at the weekend, a formidable memory load.
Theatre Royal and New Theatre Royal