Maddermarket Theatre

The Maddermarket Theatre is a British theatre located in St. John's Alley in Norwich, Norfolk, England. It was founded in 1921 by Nugent Monck.

The theatre was originally built as a Roman Catholic chapel in 1794. In the nineteenth century it had been used as a baking soda factory, a grocery warehouse, and as a hall for the Salvation Army. It was small, the main body of the building measuring only forty by forty-six feet. However, a vaulted ceiling gave it excellent acoustics; more importantly, it already had galleries on three sides. The building was quickly converted by the Guild of Norwich Players from a state of near-dereliction into an Elizabethan style playhouse. Nugent Monck, the founder of the Guild of Norwich Players used to say it was a half scale model of the Fortune Theatre, although later scholars have suggested that Blackfriars Theatre would be a more accurate comparison.

The Maddermarket Theatre opened in 1921 and was the first permanent recreation of an Elizabethan Theatre. The founder was Nugent Monck who had worked with William Poel. Poel was the first to restore Shakespeare's plays with the full text and to play them in the Elizabethan style without elaborate scenery.

Monck founded the Norwich Players, an amateur dramatic society, in the early years of the Twentieth Century. They first performed in his house, then at the Music House in King Street. Their success led to him purchasing an eighteenth-century former Catholic chapel in St John Maddermarket in Norwich, which was converted into the Maddermarket Theatre in 1921. The conversion took six weeks to complete with actors rehearsing and then helping to decorate it. It was intended to build a thrust stage but the dimensions of the building and lack of funds resulted in an end-stage being constructed instead. The original form of the building was a rectangular space 40 feet (12 m) wide by 30 feet (9.1 m) long with a gallery running around three sides. The ceiling was in the form of a plaster barrel-vault which gave the building its remarkable acoustic properties.

The stage occupied nearly half the space. A pillared canopy was constructed from which to hang the painted curtains, which Monck used to effect very rapid scene changes. There was a gallery to the rear of the stage and two entrance doors either side of the stage, the two downstage ones being under the side galleries. All of these features are still in place today, although often covered by modern sets.

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