Key restoration work unveiled at Theatre Royal Brighton

Theatre Royal Brighton this week unveils its new terracotta colonnade after 18 months of work and the installation of 1,551 new terracotta sections.

Transcript

00:00Great. Good afternoon, my name is Phil here at Group Arts, Editors and Analysis Newspapers.

00:06Always lovely to speak to Sophie Denny, the Theatre Director at Brighton Theatre Royal.

00:10Now, you are in a 216-year-old building, which of course has implications, but it's a really

00:17happy story because you've come to an important, significant point, haven't you, in terms of the

00:22front of house. What's happened? We have. We've been waiting for it for over, well, nearly 18

00:28months now, so it's very exciting. The front section of the building, so our colonnade that

00:34runs across two separate spaces, we've been undergoing a sort of £3-4 million project

00:41for the last year and a half, and next week it will all be complete. I think anyone who lives

00:48locally or has walked up New Road has been able to see some sneak peeks. We've had the scaffolding

00:54and the hoarding come down over the last few weeks, so people have been able to see some of it,

00:57but all the lights and everything should be on and complete.

01:01And essentially it's replacing terracotta that should never, ever been painted on,

01:05let alone 24 times in the last 100 years.

01:08Absolutely. Don't paint terracotta is the absolute learning from all of this. But yeah,

01:14so it's been there for a long, long time, and yeah, in the 1920s they started painting it,

01:18and it's therefore started to decay and erode down. So yeah, we've replaced all the steels,

01:24all the underlay. I mean, the whole thing was sort of brought back to the bare bones of it,

01:29replaced, and then yes, we've had 1,551, I'm told, tiles come down over a couple of kilned

01:37sort of batches from a fabulous factory in Loughborough. So they've all been

01:42individually placed onto our colonnade over the last few months.

01:46For you as theatre director, it must be amazingly encouraging that the company,

01:51the group company is prepared to invest to this extent in your old lady, distinguished old lady.

01:58We're really proud. So yeah, AT&T Entertainment has got a huge array of venues across the UK

02:04and actually in Germany and the US, but we are the oldest in the portfolio. So it's something

02:10that we're really, really proud of. But also, yes, they want to invest in their buildings.

02:13They want to keep us going for our communities for the next 216 years to go. So yeah, it's a

02:19really lovely thing. It's a lovely thing for the team. It's a lovely thing for the community to

02:22be able to see. Fantastic. Well, that's great news.

02:25Lovely to speak to you, Sophie. Thank you very much indeed.

02:27You too. Thank you.