Opera House

Originally named the New Theatre and renamed New Queen’s Theatre in 1915, it became the Opera House in 1920. For some years before its closure in 1979 it was Manchester’s principal touring theatre. It spent the next five years as a bingo house but was sold to the Palace Trust in 1984 and returned to live theatre use. The Trust had previously refurbished the Manchester Palace Theatre. In 1990 the two theatres were acquired by Apollo Leisure. The Opera House has become the home of large-scale musicals.

The stuccoed façade is an impressive essay in the neo-Classical manner of C R Cockerell (via the nearby Theatre Royal). The whole façade is channel-rusticated. Above the ground floor there is a broad frontispiece of 3+5+3 bays, the centre with an order of Ionic engaged columns, the outer pairs of columns advanced, with the cornice breaking forward. On either side the order is expressed with pilasters. Above the three middle bays is a large relief of a horse-drawn chariot, framed within a semi-circular arch. This rises into a very broad pedimental gable with a bracketed crowning cornice.

The large auditorium has two very deep, slightly curved cantilevered balconies of approximately 500 seats each, which overhang to an excessive degree, evidence, perhaps, of the architect’s unfamiliarity with theatre design, producing poor sight-lines at the rear and a feeling of oppressiveness.

The space between the balcony fronts and the stage is architecturally impressive. It displays an assured handling of Neo-Classical motifs. Flanking each side is a stack of superimposed boxes between pairs of giant fluted Corinthian columns. The upper boxes are a later insertion, following the removal of heavily-draped canopies over the dress-circle boxes. The balcony and box fronts are formed of enriched iron balustrading. Spanning between the entablatures over the giant columns is a deep, coffered segmental arch which forms the tympanum above the high rectangular proscenium, filled by a large circular medallion flanked by winged gryphons. The immensely high main ceiling, covering the full width and depth of the auditorium, is in the form of a coffered segmental tunnel vault.

The theatre is ingeniously planned to take maximum advantage of the site, with the stalls below street level and the main entrance foyer formed within the void of the first balcony - the rear wall of the auditorium thus forming the wall of the street façade.