Bitter Wheat Tickets - Garrick Theatre

The Garrick Theatre in London is a west end theatre located in Charing cross Road in the City of Westminster.  It opened on 24 April 1889 with The Profligate which was a play by Arthur Wing Pinero. In its early years, The Garrick appears to have specialised in the performance of melodrama, and today the theatre is a receiving house for a variety of productions. The theatre is named after David Garrick who is considered to be the most influential Shakespearian actor.

The Garrick Theatre was financed in 1889 by the playwright W.S. Gilbert, the author of over 75 plays, including the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. It was designed by Walter Emden, with C.J. Phipps who was brought in as a consultant to help with the planning on the difficult site, which included an underground river. Originally the theatre had a capacity of 800 seats on 4 levels, but the gallery (top) level has since been closed and the seatring capacity has been reduced to 656.

A proposed redevelopment of Covent Garden by the GLC in 1968 saw the theatre under threat, together with the nearby vaudeville, Lyceum, Adelphi and Dyuchess Theatres and only an active campaign by Equity, and theatre owners under the auspices of the Save London Theatres Campaign led to the abandonment of the scheme.

The gold leaf auditorium was restored in 1986 by the stage designer Carl Toms, and in 1997 the front façade was renovated. The theatre has mostly been associated with comedies or comedy-dramas.  Sydney Grundy's long-running French-style comedy A Pair Of Spectacles opened here in February, 1890 and Mrs Patrick Campbell starred there five years later in Pinero's The Notorius Mrs Ebbsmith.

The theatre suffered a short period of decline afterwards until it was leased by Arthur Bourchier, whose wife, Violet Vanbrugh starred in a series of successful productions ranging from farce to Shakespeare.  In 1900, the theatre hosted J.M. Barrie's The Wedding Guest and Rutland Barrington presented several stage works at the Garrick, including his popular "fairy play" called Water Babies in 1902, based on Charles Kingsley's book, with music by Alfred Cellier, among others. The only piece actually premiered by W. S. Gilbert here was Harequin And The Fairies.

In 1921, Basil Rathbone played Dr. Lawson in The Edge O Beyond at the Garrick, and the following year Sir Seymour Hicks appeared in his own play, The Man In Dress Clothes.  In 1925 Henry Daniell played there as Jack Race in Cobra and appeared there again as Paul Cortot in marriage By Purchase in March 1932.

More recent productions at the Garrick include No Sex Please We're British which played for four years at the theatre before transferring to the Duchess Theatre in 1986. On 24 October 1995, the multi-award winning production of J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls opened here, having played successful seasons at the Royal National Theatre's Lyttelton and Olivier theatres as well as the Aldwych and a season in New York on Broadway.

In 1986, the Garrick Theatre was acquired by the Stoll Moss Group, and, in 2000, it became a Really Useful Theatre when the Stoll Moss Theatres Ltd was bought by Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Really Useful Group. In October 2005, Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer purchased the Garrick Theatre, and it became one of five playhouses operating under their company name of Nimax Theatres Ltd, alongside the Apollo Theatre, Lyric Theatre, Vaudeville Theatre and Duchess Theatre.

The interior of the Garrick Theatre retains many of its original features, and was grade II listed by English Heritage in September 1960.