Gielgud Theatre

The Gielgud Theatre, originally called the Hicks Theatre, opened on 27 December 1906. It’s first two productions, the musicals The Beauty of Bath and My Darling, were both written by Seymour Hicks, who the theatre was named after. When Hick’s wife missed several performances of The Dashing Little Duke (1909) due to illness, he stepped into the role personally. In that same year, Charles Frohman became sole manager of theatre and quickly renamed it the Globe Theatre. Lady Randolph Churchill (Winston Churchill’s mother) wrote the reopening production, His Borrowed Plumes. The next two decades were peppered with successful productions such as Fallen Angels in 1925, Call It a Day in 1935 (which ran for 509 performances), and John Gielgud’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1938 (in which Gielgud both starred and directed). Gielgud’s next production, Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, has a successful premiere in 1949, and that success was followed up in the next decades with A Man For All Seasons (1960, also its stage premiere), There’s a Girl in My Soup (1966, ran for 1,064) and Daisy Pulls it Off (1983, 1,180 performance, the theatre’s longest run). With the opening of Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank, the theatre was renamed the Gielgud Theatre in 1994, both in honor of the actor’s contribution, and to avoid public confusion over two similar venue titles. An extensive refurbishment took place between 2007-8.