The Theatre Royal, Bristol, has been built …

Years: 1766 - 1766
The Theatre Royal, Bristol, has been built between 1764 and 1766.

The design of the auditorium has traditionally been taken to have been based, with some variations, on that of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London.

Although Bristol architect Thomas Paty has supervised construction, the theater has been built to designs by James Saunders, David Garrick's carpenter at Drury Lane.

Saunders had provided drawings for the theater in Richmond, Surrey, built in 1765.

A long section (1790, at Harvard University Theater Collection) and a survey plan (1842, at the Local Studies Library) of the Richmond theater show close similarities with the Bristol theater in the proportions and in the relationship between the actors on stage and the spectators surrounding them on three sides.

The site chosen was Rackhay Yard, a roughly rectangular empty site behind a row of medieval houses and to one side of the Coopers' Hall.

Two (and possibly three) new passageways built through the ground floor of the houses fronting King Street give access to Rackhay Yard and the "New Theatre" inside it.

The theater opens on May 30, 1766, with a performance that includes a prologue and epilogue given by David Garrick.

As the proprietors are not able to obtain a Royal Licence, productions are announced as "a concert with a specimen of rhetorick" to evade the restrictions imposed on theatrers by the Licensing Act 1737.

This ruse will be soon abandoned, but a production in the neighboring Coopers' Hall in 1773 will fall foul of this law.

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