Qualla: Gielgud Theatre

Gielgud Theatre: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. Beerbohm was a tabby cat named after the actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and he made a habit of walking onstage at least once during every production at the Globe Theatre. Actors learned to improvise around him. He chose his favourite dressing rooms with the same imperiousness, settling in with Peter Bowles or Michael Gambon or Penelope Keith for the run of a show, then moving on. When he died in March 1995 at the age of 20, the theatrical paper The Stage gave him a front-page obituary, the only cat ever to receive one. His portrait still hangs in the corridor by the stalls of what is now the Gielgud Theatre, a building that has carried three names since it opened on Shaftesbury Avenue in 1906.

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Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

Gielgud Theatre: Sprague's Twin Houses

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photo: Andreas Praefcke, CC BY 3.0. The architect W. G. R. Sprague designed the theatre as a pair with the Queen's Theatre next door, which opened the following year. Both were built in a Louis XVI style with circular Regency staircases, oval galleries, and ornate gold-leaf interiors. The Gielgud originally seated ...

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Image: Photo: Andreas Praefcke | CC BY 3.0

Gielgud Theatre: Becoming the Globe

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dcs57, CC BY-SA 4.0. Later that same year, the American impresario Charles Frohman took over management of the theatre. He renamed it the Globe Theatre, picking up the name that had been free since the original Globe on Newcastle Street was demolished in 1902. The new Globe's reopening production, Hi...

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Image: Dcs57 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gielgud Theatre: Records and Naked Wizards

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KF at English Wikipedia, Public domain. There's a Girl in My Soup by Terence Frisby opened in 1966 and ran for 1,064 performances, a theatre record that lasted seventeen years. Andrew Lloyd Webber's production of Daisy Pulls It Off, opening in April 1983, finally broke it with 1,180 performances, the longest run the th...

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Image: KF at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Gielgud Theatre: Restoration

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Patterson, CC BY 2.0. In 2003, the impresario Cameron Mackintosh announced plans to refurbish the Gielgud and link it through a joint entrance with the Queen's Theatre next door, which would later be renamed the Sondheim. Mackintosh's Delfont Mackintosh Theatres took operational control from Lloyd Web...

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Image: Ian Patterson | CC BY 2.0

Gielgud Theatre: The Modern Stage

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0. Recent decades have produced an unbroken stream of major productions. The Audience by Peter Morgan starred Helen Mirren in 2013, Blithe Spirit brought Angela Lansbury back to the London stage in 2014, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time reopened here after the A...

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Image: Another Believer | CC BY-SA 4.0