The Questors Theatre
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| Location |
Ealing London, W5 United Kingdom |
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| Coordinates | 51°30′42″N 0°18′35″W / 51.51156°N 0.3097°W |
| Public transit |
  Ealing Broadway West Ealing
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| Type | Non-professional community theatre |
| Capacity | 320-355 (Judi Dench Playhouse) 100 (Studio) |
| Construction | |
| Opened | 1929 |
| Rebuilt | 1964 |
| Website | |
| www |
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The Questors Theatre is a theatre venue located in the London Borough of Ealing, west London. It is home of The Questors, a large non-professional theatre company which hosts a season of around twenty productions a year and is a member of the Little Theatre Guild of Great Britain and the International Amateur Theatre Association.
The Questors theatre club was founded in 1929 by a group of 17 amateur performers and friends, and – pursuing an adventurous artistic policy led by one of the founders, Alfred Emmet – has grown into a vibrant non-professional theatre company which in the 2013-14 season staged productions of 17 plays (drawing all actors and backstage teams from its membership), and 2 student productions. In August 2014 the company had 1,344 members (of whom about 300 were actors and about 200 worked backstage and front-of-house, with the remainder supporting the theatre as audience members). The company also runs Questors Academy which provides actor training and a youth theatre.
In 1964 The Questors completed the construction of a new theatre building, which was opened by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in April 1964, replacing the previous theatre building which had been converted from an old church. This new theatre's adaptable configuration was one of the first in a new wave of thrust stage theatres in Britain. In October 2014, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the opening, it was renamed the Judi Dench Playhouse.
The site also contains a studio theatre (the Constantin Stanislavsky Room, built as a rehearsal room in 1960 and converted into a studio theatre in 1968), three rehearsal rooms (the Bernard Shaw Room built in 1958; the Michael Redgrave Room, opened in 1968, converted from part of the original Mattock Lodge; and the Alfred Emmet Room built in 1998), a scenery workshop, and a members' bar (The Grapevine, opened in 1959, converted from part of Mattock Lodge).
The original building on the site, Mattock Lodge, is a house dating from the early 1850s, owned from around 1895 by Father O'Halloran who built a small church on the land behind the house, and on his death willed all the property to Miss Ann Webb as life tenant, who then lived in the house with her sister.
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