Traverse Theatre
Traverse Theatre
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| Address | 10 Cambridge Street Edinburgh Scotland |
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| Coordinates | 55°56′51.43″N 3°12′17.25″W / 55.9476194°N 3.2047917°WCoordinates: 55°56′51.43″N 3°12′17.25″W / 55.9476194°N 3.2047917°W |
| Capacity | 256 & 100 (2 stages) |
| Opened | 1963 |
| Website | |
| www.traverse.co.uk | |
The Traverse Theatre is a theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was founded in 1963 by John Calder, Jim Haynes and Richard Demarco seeking to extend the spirit of the Festival throughout the year.
The Traverse Theatre commissions and develops new plays or adaptations from contemporary playwrights. It also presents a large number of productions from visiting companies from across the UK. These include new plays, adaptations, dance, physical theatre, puppetry and contemporary music.
The Traverse is a pivotal venue in Edinburgh, particularly during the Edinburgh Festivals in August. It is also the home of the Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival and the Imaginate Festival.
The Traverse Theatre began as a theatre club in 15 James Court, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh, a former doss-house and brothel also known as Kelly's Paradise and Hell's Kitchen. It was "a long, low-ceilinged first-floor room barely 15ft wide by 8ft high" with 60 seats salvaged from the Palace Cinema placed in two blocks on either side of the stage. The theatre is named because Terry Lane mistakenly believed that the staging arrangement is called 'traverse'; he later realised that it is 'transverse' but it was already too well known to change it. In its first year of operation, a Theatre Conference was organised by director Jim Haynes, John Calder and Kenneth Tynan and including a Happening involving Allan Kaprow among others. The first performance was on 2 January 1963.
Following a surveyor's report in March 1969 which stated that the internal floors of James Court were unsafe, the Traverse moved to a former sailmakers's loft at 112 West Bow in the east end of the Grassmarket. This larger space had a 100-seat theatre with flexible seating configurations. The first performance in this venue was on 24 August 1969. In its early days the theatre included exhibition space for the visual arts, until 1966 when the administrators for that space – including Richard Demarco – moved away to establish what became the Richard Demarco Gallery.
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