History
The Stephen Joseph Theatre was founded in Scarborough by theatrical pioneer Stephen Joseph.
Stephen, the son of actress Hermione Gingold and publisher Michael Joseph, had seen theatre in the round in America and determined to bring it back to Britain. A series of events brought him to the seaside town of Scarborough on the North-East coast where in 1955 he established a tiny theatre in the round on the first floor of the Public Library.
The theatre flourished and in 1976 moved to a supposedly temporary home on the ground floor of the former Scarborough Boys' High School at an initial conversion cost of £40,000.
However, a permanent home proved difficult to find and it wasn't until late 1988 and the closure of the local Odeon cinema by Rank Leisure that the theatre's long-standing Artistic Director, Alan Ayckbourn, found a suitable venue.
By October 1990, the newly formed Scarborough Theatre Development Trust had gained the lease on the classic thirties building and fund-raising began in earnest.
This time, the conversion cost £5.2m of which £1.48m came from the National Lottery Arts Council of England; £500,000 from the Foundation for Sport and the Arts; £495,000 from the EC Objective 5 (b) fund; £400,000 from Alan Ayckbourn personally; £240,000 from the Chairman of the Development Trust, Charles (Mac) McCarthy; and other amounts ranging from hundreds of thousands to pound coins dropped in a collection bucket after each performance and from a myriad of other fund-raising initiatives.
The new theatre, known simply as the Stephen Joseph Theatre opened on 30th April 1996 and has two auditoria: The Round, a 404-seat in the round and The McCarthy, a 165-seat endstage/cinema. The building also contains a restaurant, shop, and full front-of-house and backstage facilities.
The Round boasts two important technical innovations: the stage lift, facilitating speedy set changes and the trampoline, a Canadian invention which allows technicians particularly easy access to the lighting grid.