Half Moon Theatre

The Half Moon Theatre Company was formed in 1972 in a rented synagogue in Alie Street, Aldgate, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Half Moon Passage was the name of a nearby alley. The founders, Michael Irving and Maurice Colbourne, and the Artistic Director, Guy Sprung, wanted to create a cheap rehearsal space with living accommodation, inspired by the sixties alternative society.

The Half Moon Young People's Theatre and Half Moon Photography Workshop were also founded at the theatre.

The company had its first success in 1972 with Bertolt Brecht's In the Jungle of the Cities, directed by Guy Sprung, and The Shoemakers by Witkiewicz (Polish artist and playwright), directed by Maurice Colbourne. Then in the summer of 1972, "Will Wat If Not What Will", by Steve Gooch, Guy Sprung and the Half Moon Company was a huge success. John Mortimer in the Observer calling it: "One of the best things in my term as a critic." In 1973, the company took part in the E1 festival that attracted local writers and actors. In 1975 the company set up a Management Council and began receiving an Arts Council of Great Britain subsidy. The company also formed other arts projects, a youth project that became known as the "Half Moon Young People's Theatre" and a photography collective formed by US photographer Wendy Ewald, the "Half Moon Photography Workshop" exhibiting in the theatre and from 1976 publishing Camerawork.

In 1974 an ambitious production of Henry IV, Part 1 and 2, was described by Michael Billington; "Bill Dudley has ingeniously transformed the auditorium into a medieval loft with a raked wooden platform bisecting the audience and a mini-drawbridge being lowered from a balcony for processional entrances. This means that the actors are rarely more than about fifteen feet away from the audience; and crucial speeches, like Falstaff's on Honour, can be addressed to individual spectators rather than hurled at a faceless throng".

By the late 1970s the success of the Half Moon Theatre Company meant that the original site, seating only 80 people, was far too small.

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