Queen's Theatre

Queen's Theatre, West End theatre, situated on Shaftesbury Avenue, London, next to the Gielgud Theatre. The two theatres were designed as a pair by W. G. R. Sprague and are separated only by a common wall. The Queen’s opened in 1907, and for a time was used as a dance hall at the height of the tango craze, before the success of the comedy Potash and Perlmutter in 1914. Later, Edith Evans starred in The Apple Cart (1929) by George Bernard Shaw and John Gielgud made his West End debut in 1930 as Hamlet, and in 1938 also played Richard II and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

In 1940, the Queen’s became one of the first casualties of the Blitz, when its façade was badly damaged. Although the auditorium survived, the theatre remained closed until 1959, when it finally reopened with a restored frontage. Subsequently, the Queen’s hosted the successful Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley musical Stop The World, I Want To Get Off (1962); the final stage performance of Noel Coward in Suite in Three Keys (1966); Another Country (1982) by Julian Mitchell, launching the careers of Kenneth Branagh and Rupert Everett; William Nicholson’s Shadowlands (1988) starring Nigel Hawthorne and Jane Lapotaire, which later transferred to Broadway after a long run; Street of Crocodiles (1999) by acclaimed physical theatre company Theatre de Complicité; and several Alan Bennett plays: Getting On (1971), The Old Country (1977) with Alec Guinness, Single Spies (1989), and The Lady in the Van (1999) starring Maggie Smith. In 2001 a celebrated production of Medea, directed by Deborah Warner, starring Fiona Shaw, transferred from the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. The Queen’s Theatre is managed by Really Useful Theatres and the auditorium seats 1,160.