Curtain up again at the Corinthian, by Rosalind Ashby
An original contemporary newspaper feature.
For eleven years the Corinthian Theatre on Hebbleton’s market square was a place for pigeons. Its doors were chained, its windows boarded and its famous green dome, once visible from every hill around the town, had faded to the colour of an old penny. Local children grew up believing it was haunted. Last Saturday night, it was full.
Every one of its 640 seats was taken for the opening performance, a variety show that ran for almost three hours and ended with the audience on its feet. Outside, a further two hundred people who had failed to get tickets stood on the cobbles in the wind, listening to the applause through the open doors.
It is hard to overstate what has been achieved. When the Corinthian Trust bought the building for a single pound in 2019, a structural survey described it as ‘beyond economic repair’. Water had poured through the roof for a decade. The plasterwork cherubs above the stage had lost their faces, and the sprung dance floor had rotted through in places. Restoring it has taken six years, £3.2 million and, by the trust’s own count, more than 40,000 hours of volunteer labour.
Those volunteers were everywhere on Saturday: tearing tickets, selling ice creams, guiding elderly guests up the steep balcony stairs. Margaret Fawcett, seventy-four, spent two winters on her knees regilding the balcony rail with a brush no wider than her little finger. ‘My mother brought me here in 1958 to see a ventriloquist,’ she told me, ‘and I swore then that it was the most beautiful room in the world. I wasn’t going to let it fall down.’
She need not have worried. Under new lights, the auditorium glows like the inside of a jewellery box. The cherubs have their faces back. The dome, repainted in its original sea green, is lit from beneath so that at night it hangs over the rooftops like a second moon.
The show itself was a deliberate mixture of old and new: a brass band from the town’s secondary school, a magician who had performed here as a teenager in the 1990s, a stand-up comedian who mocked the town’s parking charges to roars of recognition, and a closing number in which the whole company, volunteers included, crowded onto the stage.
Not everything is finished. The café in the old box office will not open until next spring, and the trust still needs to raise £400,000 to repair the fly tower above the stage. But on Saturday nobody seemed in the mood to count costs.
Shortly before midnight, as the audience drifted out across the square, I watched a boy of about eight stop on the steps and look back at the glowing dome. ‘Is it open every night now?’ he asked his father. Not every night, perhaps. But it is open. For a town that had almost forgotten what the building was for, that is triumph enough.
The reopening of the Corinthian Theatre in Hebbleton is described as a triumph. How does the writer try to show this?
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.