One rainy night in locked-down London, the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber put on a hard hat and a yellow safety vest and slipped inside the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, via a side entrance. He was accompanied by his friend Simon Thurley, an architectural historian and the former head of English Heritage, which oversees historic buildings and monuments, including Stonehenge and Hadrian’s Wall. The pair had their foreheads scanned and stepped backstage, where they peered up at a towering steel rig. “You could swing several double-decker buses from there,” Thurley said.
The Theatre Royal Drury Lane is the oldest continuously running theatrical site in London. When it opened, in 1663, London had no buses, double-decker or otherwise. It had a lot of fields. People arrived at the theatre mostly by foot, and sat under a cupola that leaked when it rained. When the first theatre burned down, a bigger one, Lane No. 2, was built. When that one was demolished, No. 3 went up; it also burned. (“Theatres are not good things to own, basically,” Thurley said.) The fourth Lane, the one that still stands, was designed by the architect Benjamin Wyatt. It opened in 1812, with a production of “Hamlet” and a now forgotten musical farce, “The Devil to Pay.” “The stage is in exactly the same place as it was in the early seventeenth century,” Thurley said.
In 2000, Lloyd Webber purchased the building, which he calls “objectively marvellous.” For the past two years, with Thurley’s help, he has been restoring it to its Georgian grandeur, a sixty-million-pound undertaking. There’d been some wear and tear since 1812. “The architecture had been greatly compromised,” Lloyd Webber said. The original auditorium was replaced in the nineteen-twenties, by one that “has always been very cold.” Among other changes, Lloyd Webber and Hurley have removed some two hundred and fifty seats, and brought the stage, circle, and stalls forward. “What we’ve done is to try to bring it back, as close as we can, to what we feel does justice to the building,” Lloyd Webber said.
When the pandemic broke out, the opening of the new Lane’s first production, “Frozen,” was delayed. All of Lloyd Webber’s shows in London and New York closed. (“The Phantom of the Opera” soldiered on in South Korea.) He ran into a talented viola player stocking shelves in a supermarket. (“It’s appalling.”) He threw himself into other projects—a cast album for his new musical, “Cinderella,” was recorded entirely during lockdown—including the Lane’s renovation. On the day of the visit with Thurley, he stood in the auditorium, where the orchestra seats will eventually go. “It’s been literally shrunk,” he said. The sounds of sawing and hammering, and workers whistling, could be heard; an ornate curtain on the stage read “For Thine Especial Safety.”
As a child, Lloyd Webber saw “The Tempest” at the Lane, and was awed by the space. Architecture has since become a passion. “It started with a love, when I was a little boy, of really old buildings,” he said, “ruined buildings, like castles and abbeys, and it developed into a love of churches.” Music came along at the same time, “in parallel,” and the Lane unites his interests, “like two worlds colliding.” He and Thurley often visit buildings, he said, that “other people might find a little extreme.” High Victorian. Heavy stuff. “But if you’ve got something like the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, if you’ve got a building like that,” he said, eyes widening, “one’s got the chance to slightly put something back into the buildings.”
The pair passed through a makeshift hallway and entered a rotunda. The walls had been repainted lavender, the hue sourced from a historic house, a departure from the original green. “The green was very unwelcoming,” Thurley said. He pointed out entrances marked “King’s Side” and “Prince’s Side,” which were designed to separate King George III and his son George IV, who hated each other. Nearby, a grisaille painting showed the composer Richard Rodgers at a piano, rehearsing “South Pacific,” which had eight hundred and two performances at the Lane. “I’ve put myself into the painting, listening to him,” Lloyd Webber said.
Next, they entered the Grand Saloon, a graceful Greek Revival room full of masked workers and scaffolding. The chandeliers were covered in plastic. “There isn’t a suite of rooms anywhere in Britain to touch this, of this date,” Lloyd Webber said proudly. Before the work, Thurley said, the carpet had looked “a bit sticky,” like in “a seaside hotel fallen on hard times.”
“I remember when you went to London theatres, and you found the theatre manager on the floor coloring in the holes in the carpet,” Lloyd Webber said, his eyes shining.
Thurley looked around. “I think it will knock people’s socks off.” ♦
