musical.today Brighton, United Kingdom
Theatre Royal Brighton
952 seats
The Prince of Wales, later George IV, gave his assent for it, and it opened in June 1807 with Hamlet. Under 952 seats over four levels it is the smallest house on this tour, and for most of the twentieth century it was where London producers found out whether a play worked.
The building
It struggled until the actor Henry John Nye Chart bought it in 1854 and brought in Charles J. Phipps to expand it. When Chart died in 1876 his wife Ellen took over and ran it for two decades — one of the first women to manage a British theatre. There is a statue of her in the Royal Circle bar.
Ibsen, Rattigan, Coward and Orton all had plays tried out here before London, and the list of people who have worked on the stage runs from Olivier and Gielgud to Marlene Dietrich and Judi Dench.
Opening dates, capacities and architects on this page come from the theatre's own history pages and from Wikipedia.