Court Theatre comes of age

The Court Theatre will take its long-awaited permanent place in Christchurch’s arts landscape after entertaining the public in a temporary space for 14 years. Metropol writer Cheryl Colley dives into the development.

After years of planning and building, the lights in the Court Theatre’s auditorium will be dimmed. The actors for the first show will take over. To say the anticipation at the new theatre is palpable would be an understatement.

On the corner of Gloucester and Colombo Streets, the new state-of-the art Court Theatre opens to the public on 3 May with a production of Bruce Mason’s seminal work, The End of the Golden Weather. It will become the anchor point of the city council’s performing arts precinct together with the Isaac Theatre Royal and The Piano.

Architects began the process with a vision: the theatre would stand out from the many steel and glass structures built city-wide post earthquakes. Deliberately, they chose to incorporate timber. Certainly, the structural elements needed to be steel-reinforced concrete, yet a timber structure supports the foyer and the hospitality spaces on the Gloucester St side, with exposed timber dubbed ‘Kiwi Scandi chic’. Timber was sourced from the North Island; some of the flooring is from the West Coast, and part of the outdoor decking is recycled Australian hardwood.

It makes for an extremely striking and eye-catching finished product. Artistic lead for the new theatre, Ross Gumbley says “The first thing patrons are going to encounter when they walk into the foyer of the building is, I hope, a sense of welcome. The foyer, the front of house space, is a welcome mat. It’s an invitation to the work that goes on in the building.” Patrons will move from the huge bar, food, and box office area through to one of two theatres. The 379-seat Stewart Family theatre, a modern interpretation of a Georgian horseshoe theatre, will be central to the building’s new life, while a smaller 120-150-seat theatre, The Front Room, will house a separate and complementary programme of work. It will be a permanent home for the late night comedy show Scared Scriptless. The building also provides spaces for the theatre’s flourishing education programme, plus function areas, rehearsal rooms, offices for staff, and a large workshop space.

“Apparently a theatre is one of the most difficult types of buildings to construct because of the massive cavities within the heart of the building which really do engineers’ heads in,” says Ross. “There are only two other types of building that are more complicated – a hospital and a nuclear power plant.”

COURT THEATRE TIMELINE

• 1971: Court Theatre founded by Yvette Bromley and Mervyn Thompson. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the first play performed in the Provincial Chambers.
• 1976: The theatre finds a permanent home in The Arts Centre. By then, productions had been staged in four different locations around town.
• 2011: Christchurch’s February earthquake tragically destroys The Arts Centre theatre. Come November, the theatre has a new temporary home in Addington, called The Shed.
• 2025: Finally, the new theatre opens in Christchurch city.