Romeo and Juliet to return to Shoreditch birthplace
SHOREDITCH could soon get a new theatre on the spot where Romeo and Juliet first kissed and where Shakespeare first performed as an actor.
Two weeks ago, Hackney Council granted the Tower Theatre Company , an amateur dramatics society, permission to build a £7 million, 135 seat auditorium on the site of a long-lost Elizabethan performance space known simply as The Theatre.
Earlier this year, archaeological digs at the site in New Inn Broadway near Old Street yielded amazing discoveries including part of The Theatre’s inner wall and the gravel on which the star-crossed lovers first kissed.
Chairwoman Penny Tuerk said the Tower Theatre Company wanted to put the finds on public display once construction of its new premises are completed.
She said, “After the discoveries were made, Sir Ian McKellen came to look at them. It sounds extraordinary because it’s a bit of compacted gravel, but it’s actually where people stood to watch the first performance of Romeo and Juliet.
“If we can agree with English Heritage on a way of displaying them that’s not going to degrade them, we hope to display them. We’re talking to experts but my understanding is that we could stabilise them, and then one has to deal with the issue of humidity in the ground, so they could be displayed behind Perspex or glass.”
Along with English Heritage, the Museum of London Archaeology is involved in caring for items found during digs on the archelogical goldmine. These have recently included rare pieces of 16th Century pottery.
Penny Tuerk also said she wanted involvement in the project from other local arts organisations, including Graeae – the UK’s foremost disabled-led theatre company, which next month will officially launch a permanent base of its own in a converted tram shed on nearby Kingsland Road after thirty years without a home.
Tuerk said, “The Theatre was the first public theatre in London. Shoreditch is a new hub for people working in the arts but there is a great need for an accessible, smaller scale theatre there.”
Because of Elizabethan legal records, archaeologists had known The Theatre had existed in Shoreditch but they did not know exactly where until they carrying out excavations in New Inn Broadway.
During Shakespeare’s day, Shoreditch was just outside the City of London, in which dramatic performance had been had been outlawed by religious clerics.
The Tower Theatre Company is currently working to raise, through donations, the remaining £3.3m it needs to build its new base.
It will reach a decision as to whether to put the fragments from The Theatre on public display after spring next year, by which time archaeologists from the Museum of London will have completed excavations they hope will yield further discoveries.