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Duchess Theatre

This intimate West End space is the place to go for straight drama
  • Theatre | West End
  • Covent Garden
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Time Out says

With its reliably good sight lines, comfy seats and smallish size, the Duchess Theatre can be counted on for one of the West End’s more pleasant theatre experiences. Today, it's making packed houses giggle with slapstick comedy 'The Play That Goes Wrong'. But this 500-seater playhouse has staged plenty of weighty dramas over the years – a possible hangover from its early years in the '30s, when author and playwright JB Priestley formed part of the Duchess management. Some of its most famous premieres include Priestley's own 'Laburnum Grove', celebrated poet T S Eliot's 'Murder in the Cathedral', Harold Pinter's 'The Caretaker', and Peter Whelan's 'The Herbal Bed'. 

But things haven't always been quite as classy. In the '70s, audiences got their jollies at 'The Dirtiest Show in Town' – the things people got up to before the internet, eh. This saucy revue was followed up by the comparatively classy but nonetheless thoroughly filthy 'Oh! Calcutta!', a nude show about sex that ran for six years. The Duchess Theatre also has the dubious distinction of hosting the West End's most disastrous ever show; after mass walk-outs, the 1930 entertainment 'The Intimate Revue' closed after just one night, citing technical problems.

Today, Duchess Theatre cuts a fine figure on out-of-the-way Catherine Street, with its 1929 modern gothic style facade highlighted with bright gold friezes. Inside, the carefully planned auditorium is split over two levels, with simple cream and gold decor. And its original features are preserved right down to the original '20s lift, which, thankfully, has been updated with 21st century machinery. 

Details

Address
3-5
Catherine Street
London
WC2B 5LA
Transport:
Tube: Covent Garden
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What’s on

The Play That Goes Wrong

3 out of 5 stars
This comedy has, of course, actually done everything right. Produced by LAMDA graduates Mischief Theatre, the show has had successful runs at the Old Red Lion in Islington, Trafalgar Studios, and in Edinburgh; now it's made it all the way to the West End. Amid all the chatter about the overbearing West End dominance of jukebox musicals and film spin-offs, it’s cheering to see a dynamic young company land slap-bang in the middle of Theatreland.The show is a farcical play-within-a-play. Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society are mounting a production of a hoary old sub-‘Mousetrap’ mystery called ‘The Murder at Haversham Manor’. From the first moment, in which a hapless stage manager attempts to secure a collapsing mantelpiece, we suspect that things are not going to go to plan. And that, indeed, is the case, as the production shudders painfully into chaos, taking in everything from dropped lines to disintegrating sets, intra-cast fighting, technical malfunctions of the highest order, and an unexpectedly resuscitated corpse.The show sits in a fine tradition of British slapstick, and of plays about theatrical blunders: its debt to Michael Frayn’s hilarious ‘Noises Off’, about the gradual disintegration of a touring rep production, is considerable. This is, to be fair, acknowledged by the play’s marketing, which calls it — correctly — ‘“Fawlty Towers” meets “Noises Off”’. But the trouble is that anyone who has seen, and loved, ‘Noises Off’, is likely to find the comparison...
  • Comedy
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