Newcastle theatres: the Victoria Theatre and the nights out of old Newcastle
Newcastle had stage-and-screen theatres all over town from the 1870s. The one that survives on Perkins Street is the oldest theatre building still standing in New South Wales.
By Ruth Ellery · First published · 2 min read
From the 1870s until well into the twentieth century, a night out in Newcastle meant one of a string of big stage-and-screen theatres across the city. Nearly all of them have closed or gone. The Victoria, in Perkins Street, is the one that is still standing.
Three Victorias on one site
The first Victoria Theatre was built on the site in 1876. It was altered in 1885 and pulled down in 1890, and the theatre that stands today was built in its place in 1890 and 1891. That makes it, by the State Heritage Register's account, the oldest theatre building still standing in New South Wales.
When the rebuilt Victoria opened, the front was lit up, a transparency of the Queen hung on the facade, and the 4th Regiment band played in Perkins Street.
Stage, then screen
For thirty years it was a playhouse and concert hall. Touring companies, singers and benefit nights all came through; in 1914 members of Madam Melba's concert company performed there to raise money for Newcastle Hospital.
In late 1921 the owners spent £20,000 refitting it for the pictures, taking out the upper balcony and a small hotel and rebuilding the dress circle. It ran as a cinema for another four decades, until it closed with a Bette Davis film, Who's Buried in my Grave. In November 1966 it was sold for £33,000, and in 1967 it opened as Eastham's Theatre Store.
The stage machinery was left in place, the heritage record says, as if the theatre might one day reopen, "the huge velvet stage curtain hanging forlornly at half-mast".
After the pictures
When the cinema closed, the Victoria became a shop. W. Eastham bought it for £33,000 in November 1966, and Eastham's Theatre Store opened in it the next year, trading until the business went into liquidation in 1982. Other retailers followed, among them Jeans Connection, which built an internal retail shell around 1998, and the Supertoys toyshop in 1999. Through all of it the auditorium survived behind the shopfronts.
A veteran hotelier bought the building in 2004, and it then sat empty and derelict for about a decade. In November 2015 it was bought by Century Venues, the owners of Sydney's Enmore Theatre, with plans to restore it. Because the interior was kept rather than gutted, the theatre that once seated 1,700, with 500 in the dress circle, still has the bones of a working house.
The Civic
The other great survivor is the Civic Theatre on Hunter Street, designed by Henry Eli White as part of the City Hall precinct and opened by the Premier, Thomas Bavin, in December 1929. It is still a working theatre, and it shares a State Heritage listing with City Hall.