Theatre At Stanley Royd Hospital

SE 32 SW 1492-/4/10005

STANLEY ABERFORD ROAD (West side) Theatre at Stanley Royd Hospital

GV II

Hospital dining hall, later recreation hall and theatre. 1859, extended to provide full working stage in 1893, probably to the designs of Bernard Hartley, the County Surveyor. Grey brick with slate roof. Nine-bay hall with one (blind) bay addition for stage, on to whose end gable the datestone of 1859 has been reinserted. To the side were formerly areas for the supervising and kitchen staffs, now small meeting rooms and not of special interest. Rebuilt parapet, windows with central opening casements. The hall is in an Italianate style, the windows set over a high dado in aediculed surrounds with cornice brackets, alternate ones under pediments. Panels and doors at a lower level, flat ceiling whose beams continue as pilasters between the windows, separated by deep cornice. Similar pilasters either side of the moulded plaster proscenium arch over stage. Mahogany doors up narrow flights of stairs with balusters form a symmetrical composition to either side. Stage with trap, dressing rooms under. The chief interest of this building is the survival within of a complete Victorian stage, with timber grid, fly floors and hemps. Most unusual is the grooved system for sliding stage flats in the wings: this was the standard way of hanging wings for some 200 years until this century but is now only the second surviving example discovered in England. The upper grooves are of particular importance, it is not clear whether there would always have been lower grooves and the present set is modern. The particular feature of this example is that of the four pairs of grooves two are canted to give a greater sense of receding perspective for the audience, a device not founded at the Normansfield Hospital, LB Richmond (q.v), which has the only comparable surviving working stage.

Listing NGR: SE3379621726