Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 21/06/2026 00:44:00

Opened in 1882 as the Royal Avenue Theatre, the Playhouse is a West End theatre tucked at the foot of Northumberland Avenue, close to the Thames at Charing Cross. Behind its classical stone front lies one of the best-preserved sets of Victorian stage machinery in London. The theatre was built for the impresario Sefton Parry to a design by the architect F. H. Fowler, with an original capacity of around 1,200. It opened with a revival of an Offenbach operetta. Disaster struck in 1905, when part of the neighbouring Charing Cross station collapsed onto the theatre during building work, killing six people and wrecking the auditorium. The manager Cyril Maude rebuilt it, reopening in 1907 under the name the Playhouse. The new theatre had a smaller, richly decorated interior, and its reopening included a sketch written specially for the occasion by George Bernard Shaw. Over the following decades it staged many successful plays and saw the stage debut of the young Alec Guinness. Beneath the stage survives a complex of Victorian machinery, with bridges and a thunder-run, said to be second in importance in London only to that of Her Majesty's Theatre. The building is protected as a Grade II listed structure. From 1951 the building served for a quarter of a century as a BBC radio studio, where many famous broadcasts and recordings were made. It was eventually restored as a working theatre, reopening in 1987, and is now run by the Ambassador Theatre Group. In 2021 the interior was dramatically reconfigured as the Kit Kat Club for a long-running revival of the musical Cabaret, with the audience seated in the round at cabaret tables. The production, starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley, won seven Olivier Awards, and the changes cut the capacity to around 550. The theatre stands at the river end of Northumberland Avenue, near Embankment and Charing Cross stations and a short walk from Trafalgar Square.