Former Saville Theatre

This converted theatre was built in 1930-1931 to the designs of T P Bennett & Son in collaboration with the theatre architect Bertie Crewe for the theatre impresario A E Fournier. The original sculptural frieze and roundels were created by Gilbert Bayes. ABC adapted the building to serve as a two-screen cinema in 1970, and Odeon later remodelled it in 2001, further subdividing it to give four screens.

Materials

The building has a steel-framed structure with facing brick, embellished with Portland stone dressings. Steel-framed windows are fitted to the secondary side and rear elevations. The frieze to Shaftesbury Avenue is executed in cast concrete, produced from a mould modelled by Bayes.

Plan

The building has an irregular, parallelogram-shaped plan occupying an island site that fronts to Shaftesbury Avenue with the main entrance off-set to the left, at the south-west end. Secondary elevations front to Stacey Street, New Compton Street and St Giles Passage, respectively to the south-west, north-west and north-east sides.

Exterior

The Shaftesbury Avenue façade is asymmetrically composed with a tall, arched window with a wide architrave and keystone off-set to the south-western end of the facade above the main entrance, this featuring stylised Art Deco figurative detailing. The arch originally featured a bronze metal frame with fretwork that was 9 metres high and 5 metres wide. This was either removed or covered in 1970, with the present metal-panelled infill in its place. The rest of this southern elevation is restrained in its composition with a strong horizontal emphasis, reinforced by the channelled rusticated brickwork raised on a black granite plinth and applied ashlar stone at street level. At parapet level there is a continuous stone cornice with dentil detailing.

The secondary elevations to Stacey Street, New Compton Street and St Giles Passage are simply composed, with a blind brick elevation to St Giles Passage (the stage end) and with stripped brick detailing to Stacey Street and New Compton Street. The decorative stone cornice of the Shaftesbury Avenue façade continues around at parapet level to each of the elevations. The building has five storeys at the rear, rising to six at the north-eastern end with the fly tower with a haystack lantern structure to the roof, which is largely screened from view from the street. Window openings to the upper floors of Stacey Street and New Compton Street have subdivided window openings with original steel-framed windows, expressed with channelled brickwork in these elevations. The door openings at ground-floor level are mostly replacements or post-1970 insertions, added following cinema conversion. To St Giles Passage (north-east), an opening for a central taking-in door for scenery and props remains.

The main feature of the façade is the sculptural work by Gilbert Bayes, principally the 40-metre frieze entitled 'Drama through the Ages', which takes the form of a historical pageant of characters taken from celebrated plays. The shallow-relief frieze runs the full length of the Shaftesbury Avenue elevation, folding around the corners to Stacey Street and St Giles Passage. Various performers and theatrical scenes are depicted, including Sybil Thorndike as St Joan from Bernard Shaw's play of 1923, a Greek Chorus, the Chester Players, Bacchanalian dancers, a Harlequinade in Commedia dell'arte costume, Shakespearean characters, and a First World War soldier from Herbert C Sargent and Con West's 1924 play 'Khaki'. The far end of the frieze, at the junction with St Giles Passage, represents the twentieth century with theatre goers of the 1930s and a line of chorus girls.

At high level, five overlapping pairs of roundel plaques modelled in shallow relief by Bayes are set within the rusticated brickwork. These depict art of various periods and cultures. From the left, these are: Egyptian and Assyrian; Roman and Grecian; the Italian Renaissance and Medieval period; Elizabethan and Georgian; Pompadourian and Victorian. A band of render runs beneath the frieze, where the continuous lighting-trough that originally lit Bayes' frieze from below once ran; this was removed together with the original canopy above the entrance. The applied fascia, fixed signage and poster boards all date from the 2001 Odeon conversion.

Interior

The arrangement of the building internally principally consists of four cinema screens divided across the building, with a modern foyer, box office and retail space at ground-floor level, all formed as part of the 2001 remodelling. The walls of the cinema screens are covered with concrete render and draped in full-length curtains, with banks of modern cinema seating (all post-2001) fitted in each of the four screens. There are some surviving elements of the theatre's original fabric and layout internally, though this is principally limited to the back-of-house areas, with no evidence of the original Bennett & Son interior design for the foyer, auditorium or bars, or the later Laurence Irving and John Collins decorative work of 1955. The one area which may have retained some concealed decorative work of the 1930s is beneath the present suspended ceiling, in the narrow portion of the existing foyer that corresponds to the original foyer, though opening-up of one small section has revealed that the ceiling here is covered by a render dating from the 1970 remodelling. There is little cohesive sense of the spatial form of the original entrance foyer, auditorium, salon or stage, owing to the extent of subdivision carried out in 1970 and 2001. The original stage and each of the tiers of the auditorium have been lost, though it is possible that steel trusses associated with the former dress circle and upper circle may be concealed within the roof of screen four and beneath the floor of screen two on the basis of their alignment, though this cannot be confirmed.

The original perimeter staircases and sections of the corridors survive to the north-east corner of the building (to all floors), in the centre of the north-west elevation (from the first floor to the fifth), and additionally to the basement and ground-floor in the south-west and north-west corners. An original central set of stairs connecting each of the levels of the auditorium on the north-west side of the building has been removed and replaced with WCs and other ancillary rooms. The retained 1930s stairs are utilitarian in form, of concrete with steel rails, with some steel staircases to basement level. There are several dressing rooms and ancillary rooms along the north-west side of the building and to the upper levels on the south-west side, some retaining original two-panel doors with fixtures, though nothing of note beyond this. There has been some reorganisation of the configuration of the rooms, with the opening-out of the former dressing rooms at first-floor level, giving two enlarged rooms where there were originally four, for example, and the loss of a corridor that connected smaller rooms on the third-floor to the north-eastern corner.

The original bars that served each level of the auditorium were set at the south-west side of the original plan. These have either been lost to the enlarged cinema screens (as at first-floor level) or reconfigured entirely to be subdivided into multiple spaces (as on the third floor). Only the stalls bar at lower basement level remains legible in its spatial form, though the adjacent salon as shown in original plans has been cut across by one of the inserted banks of cinema seating. This basement bar was remodelled as part of the 1970 conversion though has been boarded off since closure of the ABC. It retains many of its features from this time, including the bar counter, wallpaper, part-glazed veneer doors, 'soldier' tilework, some signage and a section of upholstered bench seating, albeit in a dilapidated state.

To the north-eastern end of the building, the stage house retains some of its structural components and original stage equipment, most notably the fly tower and suspension grid with its counterweight pulleys (marked 'Frank Burkitt'). This is serviced by a loading gallery and a ladder stair between the grid levels. The ventilation plenum plant room survives adjacent to the grid. At lower basement level there is a room that originally served as a props room, stage left, and another that was a scene dock, stage right. Severed suspension trusses for parts of the auditorium ceiling are visible behind the cinema screen at basement level to the north-east end, along with some glazed brick and floorboards associated with a former electrical workshop at this level. Above this is a steel ladder to the former stage level, along with an opening for a scenery taking-in door from St Giles Passage and an inset platform, which marks the position of the 'crossover', used by performers to move between the wings backstage.