Get us in your inbox

Search

Gielgud Theatre

  • Theatre
  • Soho
Gielgud Theatre.jpg
Advertising

Time Out says

You'll find an ever-changing line-up of drama in this well-designed 1907 theatre

The Gielgud is one of legendary and prolific theatre designer WGR Sprague's handful of surviving West End venues. Built in a neo-classical style with just one balcony, it opened in 1907 as the Hicks Theatre, named after actor-manager and playwright Seymour Hicks. Sprague originally designed it to have a 'twin' theatre, Queen's Theatre, which sat just a few doors down, but the twins don't look so alike these days after Queen's Theatre was heavily remodelled after a WWII bomb blast.

American impresario Charles Frohman took over in 1909 and renamed it the Globe, reopening the theatre with a drama by Winston Churchill’s mother, Lady Randolph Churchill. Taken over by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group in the 1980s and refurbished in 1987, it played host to several Ayckbourn premieres and acquired a famous theatre cat, Beerbohm, who on his death in 1995 received a front-page obituary in ‘The Stage’.

To avoid confusion with Sam Wanamaker’s Bankside Shakespeare’s Globe project, the theatre’s name was changed in honour of the great thespian knight in 1992, and in 2006 Cameron Mackintosh’s Delfont Mackintosh Group took ownership and embarked on a further round of refurbishments to both the facade and the interior, which were completed in 2008.

These days, the Gielgud is owned by the Delfont Mackintosh group and seats just under 900 people on three levels. Unusually among West End theatres, it mainly houses straight drama, with an impressive line-up of plays including 'Blithe Spirit' and 'The Ferryman'. But it's breaking with tradition in Summer 2019 by housing a special staging of long-running musical 'Les Miserables', which has long taken up residence in Gielgud's twin Queen's Theatre, during the production's planned revamp. 

Details

Address:
35-37
Shaftesbury Avenue
London
W1D 6AR
Transport:
Rail/Tube: Charing Cross; Tube: Piccadilly Circus
Do you own this business?
Sign in & claim business

What’s on

Opening Night

  • Musicals

In an unusual but undeniably intriguing meeting of minds, British national acting treasure Sheridan Smith stars in a new musical adaptation of John Cassavetes’s classic indie film ‘Opening Night’ created by globally renowned leftfield Belgian director Ivo van Hove and US baroque pop legend Rufus Wainwright. It sounds like an awful lot of balls in the air, and certainly the prolific Van Hove is by no means infallible. Still, if it feels like Smith is the most random element here – given her lack of arthouse credentials – she’s rarely given a bad performance. Moreover, her recent well-documented personal struggles seem perfect fuel for the fire of Cassavetes’s story about Myrtle Gordon, a renowned actress struggling with alcoholism and old age as she prepares to take on the starring role in a new play. 

Advertising
You may also like
You may also like
Bestselling Time Out offers