Simon Callow surveys the scene from a box at the London Coliseum. “In choosing the theatres we have not attempted to be comprehensive. What we have tried to do is to show the diversity and originality of London’s playhouses,” he writes.

The Royal Opera House. “It is heartbreaking to read the detailed and enthusiastic accounts of the new building”—the theater had been completely redesigned in 1846, Callow writes—“particularly those sections that remark on the wonderful protection it afforded against fire, since after only nine years of successful life, on the night of 5 March 1856, the theatre burned to the ground.” With an endorsement from Queen Victoria, it was then rebuilt.

The narrow entrance, *left,* and a dressing room in Her Majesty’s Theatre. “It seems that with certain select London theatres, no matter how often they are closed down, or pulled down, or burned down, another theatre will pop up to replace them,” Callow writes. “Her Majesty’s Theatre is one such—the present theatre is the fourth on the site, and it is impossible to write the history of British drama or opera in England without reference to them.”

The brutalist staircase in the National Theatre. This is the youngest theater to be featured in the book, “and therefore the one with the shortest history,” Callow writes. “An idea as much as a physical entity.”

The Art Deco interior of the Apollo Victoria Theatre. “For a while, from the late 1950s, it seemed as if the live theatre was doomed: once noble playhouses were condemned to the wrecker’s ball, while the lucky ones—but oh, the humiliation—were converted into cinemas,” Callow writes. “The reverse process was a great deal less common, the most remarkable example being the transformation of the New Victoria, the flagship of the Gaumont-British Pictures, into the Apollo Victoria, home of mega-musicals.”

The London Coliseum. “As its name suggests, the London Coliseum looks beyond the British Empire to the Roman one,” Callow writes.

The Art Deco foyer ceiling in the Savoy Theatre. “From time to time, a theatre so embodies the spirit of its creator that merely thinking about it conjures up his spirit,” Callow writes. “Richard D’Oyly Carte was the altogether exceptional man who built the Savoy Theatre (and indeed the Savoy Hotel), a quintessentially Victorian entrepreneur who transformed everything he touched. But he was no buccaneer, as a glance at any photograph of him reveals: dapper, elegant, clear-eyed, with well-trimmed beard and neat coiffure. Nor was he a mere businessman. He was that too, none shrewder, but his clarity of thinking and certainty of purpose were at the service of what Americans like to call A Dream, but what he described as ‘the scheme of my life’, namely the creation of a native British tradition of opera, both comic and Grand.”

Four of the boxes in the Apollo Theatre. “The Apollo Theatre, which in many ways feels like the quintessential West End theatre, has a rather uncommon history in that it was built not by an impresario or an actor-manager but by a captain of industry, a rather sober one, at that,” Callow writes. “Henry Lowenfeld, Polish by birth, derived his fortune from his invention of a non-alcoholic beer called Kops.”

The main staircase in the Palace Theatre. “Variety certainly describes the theatre’s fare in the early years of the twentieth century, from comedy to Maud Allan’s Vision of Salomé, so risqué that she was taken to court; there was a specially written play by George Bernard Shaw, a solo recital by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and the first appearance in London of the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova,” Callow writes. “The quality of the performers is justly, though rather forbiddingly, commemorated in a stone over the stage door: ‘The greatest artists in the world have passed and will pass through these doors.’”

Two of the boxes in the Novello Theatre. “What’s in a name? In the case of the great actor-composer Ivor Novello, rather a lot, since his continued existence in the public imagination depends on the annual song award named after him and on this theatre—in which, as it happens, he never performed, though he lived, and died, in a flat above it,” Callow writes. “This theatre has had more changes of identity than perhaps any other London playhouse, being successively the Waldorf, the Strand, the Whitney, the Strand again and now—who knows how long for?—the Novello.”

Wilton’s Music Hall. “The building’s somewhat up-and-down career took a historic turn in 1846 when it was purchased by a sometime solicitor’s clerk from Bath called John Wilton, who fulfilled a long-held dream by opening a small music hall behind the pub; its success was such that in 1859 he decided to convert the tavern into a music hall of unparalleled splendour,” Callow writes. “Naturally, and quite properly, he named it after himself.”

The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane’s old box office. “‘The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane,’ proclaims the magisterial Survey of London, ‘is preeminent among all the theatres of London,’ and on reflection it is hard to contest its judgement,” Callow writes, adding, “[Andrew] Lloyd Webber started in the 1980s to acquire theatres, and one of his first was the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Over the twenty years of his ownership it has been slowly restored to its full glory, honouring its extraordinary history while remaining vitally alive to the new.”

Behind the Scenes

A new book pulls back the curtain on London’s
most beautiful theaters

By Simon Callow

Portfolio by Derry Moore

“When Derry came to me with his innocent invitation to write little introductions to his photographs of the theatres,” the beloved British actor and author Simon Callow confesses in the introduction to London’s Great Theatres, “he unwittingly touched a nerve of some magnitude.” It didn’t help that Derry Moore “was producing ravishing photographs of the theatres with indecent speed and brilliance.” The resulting photos find their equal in Callow’s delicate, charming essays, which combine his own passion with riveting histories of the British capital’s widely varying theaters.