Nottingham Playhouse started not in this building but in a converted cinema on Goldsmith Street, where the company ran as a repertory theatre from 1948. Val May and Frank Dunlop directed in those early years, working with whatever the cinema would allow. By the late 1950s the city was ready for something purpose-built. The architect chosen, Peter Moro, had cut his teeth on the interior design of the Royal Festival Hall in London - so the brief was ambitious from the start. The result, opened in 1963, takes the form of a drum: a circular auditorium with a proscenium stage, seating 770, wrapped in modernist concrete and glass. Tyrone Guthrie directed the opening production, Shakespeare's Coriolanus, with a young Ian McKellen as Tullus Aufidius opposite John Neville in the title role. Peter Ustinov was associate director. It was, by any standard, a serious launch.

In 2001, Anish Kapoor installed Sky Mirror on the small green space of Wellington Circus between the theatre and the cathedral. The work cost £921,000. It is a single curved disc of stainless steel, six metres across, tilted to reflect the sky - which means on any given day it is reflecting weather, pigeons, the spire of the cathedral, the top edge of the Playhouse, and the people standing in front of it, all of them upside-down and slightly stretched. Some Nottinghamians grumbled. Most stopped grumbling once they saw it. In 2007, in a public vote to determine the city's favourite landmark, Sky Mirror won the Nottingham Pride of Place award - a sculpture, not a building, beating every traditional contender. It is now one of the most photographed objects in the city.

Productions made in Nottingham have a habit of ending up elsewhere. The 2013 adaptation of The Kite Runner by Matthew Spangler became the Playhouse's best-selling drama, toured the UK, transferred to the West End from 2016 to 2017, and revived on Broadway in summer 2022. The 1984 co-production with Headlong Theatre played the West End in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and toured Australia and the USA. Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III, staged here for the theatre's 70th anniversary in 2018 with Mark Gatiss in the title role, broke house records and reached around 500,000 viewers internationally through NTLive broadcasts. The producing-house model means up to thirteen new productions a year originate in this circular concrete drum, then scatter outwards across the country and the world.

By the 1980s, concrete interiors had fallen so far out of fashion that the Playhouse was 'refurbished' in ways that tried to hide its own character. The reckoning came in 1996, when the building was given Grade II* listed status; in 2004 a Heritage Lottery Fund grant paid for a sympathetic restoration that returned much of what had been covered. A second wave of work between 2014 and 2015 insulated the fly tower, installed double glazing and PV panels, and cut the building's energy use by over 35%. In 2019 The Stage named it Regional Theatre of the Year, repeated as Theatre of the Year in 2025; in 2023 UK Theatre called it the Most Welcoming Theatre in the country, recognising its access work. Across the road, Pugin's cathedral continues its own quieter conversation with the heavens, and Sky Mirror keeps catching the weather between them.