Vaudeville Theatre

Vaudeville Theatre, West End theatre, situated on the Strand, London. C. J. Phipps built a theatre on the site in 1870, and it was there that Henry Irving was first given the chance to play major roles, before he moved to the Lyceum Theatre. One very successful early show at the Vaudeville was the comedy Our Boys!, which had a four-year run from 1875, a record at the time.

The Vaudeville was substantially rebuilt in 1891, the year in which it housed the English premieres of Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. Later, the theatre was best known for cabarets, revues, and small-scale musicals, a tradition that began during World War I with Tabs (1916), featuring songs by Ivor Novello. Between the wars, extensive improvement work was done on the interior, and in 1947 William Douglas Home’s general election comedy The Chiltern Hundreds was successful.

Other popular productions included the musical Salad Days (1954), which ran for six years (2,329 performances); Chips With Everything (1962) by Arnold Wesker, based on the playwright’s experiences of National Service; and The Man Most Likely To (1968). Among the famous actors and actresses who have performed at the Vaudeville are Sybil Thorndike, who made her final West End appearance in a revival of Arsenic and Old Lace (1966) by Joseph Kesselring; Glenda Jackson, who played the poet Stevie Smith in Stevie (1977); Julia Mackenzie, who starred in Woman In Mind (1986) by Alan Ayckbourn; Pauline Collins, whose performance in Shirley Valentine (1988) by Willy Russell made her name; Michael Gambon and Jonathan Pryce, who apppeared in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1988); Alison Steadman (The Memory of Water, 1999); and Derek Jacobi (God Only Knows, 2001).

In the 1990s the theatre had successes with Someone Who'll Watch Over Me (1992) by Frank McGuinness, which later transferred to Broadway; Dead Funny (1994) by Terry Johnson; and Kindertransport (1996), about the plight of Jewish children during the Holocaust. In 1999 Steven Berkoff staged a 25th anniversary revival of East, his raucous account of life in London’s East End, and in 2001 Ray Cooney presented Caught in the Net, a sequel to his popular farce Run For Your Wife. The auditorium seats approximately 690.