Westminster Theatre

Westminster Theatre, West End theatre situated on Buckingham Palace Road, London. It opened in 1924 as a cinema, the St James’s Picture House, on the site of an old chapel, and was transformed into a theatre in 1931 with Anmer Hall designing the stage and dressing rooms. In 1966 a refurbishment took place in which part of the building was transformed into an arts centre and in 1986 it was refurbished again, thereby acquiring a capacity of 1,527 seats.

Traditionally the Westminster Theatre presented established classics together with new plays, and the opening production starred Henry Ainley in James Bridie’s The Anatomist. This was followed by a wide variety of English and foreign plays including revivals of Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello and Waste by Harley Granville-Barker in 1936. Throughout the 1930s the Dublin Gate Theatre (under the management and direction of Michéal MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards) presented several plays there, and in 1938 The London Mask Company took up temporary residence under the direction of J. B. Priestley. Priestley’s own play, Music at Night, was the first play to be produced in London after the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

Successful productions included An Ideal Husband (1943 and 1989) by Oscar Wilde, Lesley Storm’s Black Chiffon (1949), Frederick Knott’s Dial M for Murder (1952), and Give a Dog a Bone, a popular children’s show that ran every Christmas during the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s the theatre was often unused, before it came under ecumenical management towards the end of the decade. In later years the theatre was used by amateur dramatic societies and for variety and music hall one-night shows until Westminster Council granted planning permission for its demolition in 2001 to make way for a residential development.