Performance venues

London's stages and concert rooms: the West End houses and the playhouses that make their own shows, the grand halls, the churches with a musical life, the jazz basements, the comedy clubs, the clubs proper, the rooms above pubs where things start, and the booth on Leicester Square that sells off what the West End has not. What is on is listed under each venue, and in What's On.

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Orange Tree Theatre

A Victorian school hall in Richmond with the stage in the middle and never more than three rows between you and it.

PlayhousesWorth it for the building

Sam Walters and Auriol Smith started it on the last day of 1971 as the Richmond Fringe, in a room over the Orange Tree pub: eighty people on six church pews round the acting area, plays at lunchtime because the room had daylight and no lamps. It kept the pub's name after it left.

Since February 1991 it has been in St John's, a primary school built in 1867 across the road, and the shape has survived the move. A hundred and eighty seats in the round, no more than three shallow rows on any side, and an irregular timber gallery above them, which means the furthest seat in the house is close.

The programme is new plays and rediscovered ones - the second half is the unusual part, because somebody here reads the C19 and early C20 repertoire that everyone else has given up on and stages what turns out to still work.

Where
1 Clarence Street, Richmond, TW9 2SA
Nearest station
Richmond · 2 min walk

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