The Festival Theatre, Cambridge

Any self-respecting Cambridge luvvie will, at the drop of a hat, launch into a dull recital of all those stage and film luminaries who have passed through the Footlights. Lassie and Black Beauty have even been known to feature on some lists.

It might be thought, therefore, that Cambridge is simply bulging with playhouses and a theatrical tradition that goes back centuries. Not so. The history of drama in Cambridge has always been inhibited by the traditional hostility between town and gown.

Town wanted to let its hair down at the annual Stourbridge Fair, for centuries the biggest fair in Europe and the probable model for John Bunyan's Vanity Fair. The revels included strolling players as well as a motley crew of fire-eaters, conjurors and acrobats.

Gown, on the other hand, was more concerned that its young charges should remain pure and unsullied by such lascivious goings-on. And just as gown was powerful enough to insist that the railway station be built on the outskirts of the city, so, too, was the Theatre Royal banished to the suburbs of Barnwell.

Built in the early 19th century, probably by the architect William Wilkins (of National Gallery fame), the theatre was home to the Norwich Players, who laboriously made their way around an East Anglian circuit that stretched from King's Lynn in the northof the region to Ipswich and Colchester in the south.

Sadly, drama throughout Britain went through a bad time in the middle of the 19th century. In 1878, the Theatre Royal, Barnwell, closed down and became a mission hall. Pews filled the pit and improving biblical texts were daubed on the galleries.

It was revived as a theatre by the extraordinary figure of Terence Gray, who ran it almost single-handed from 1926 and renamed it the Festival Theatre. By 1933, he was finding the uphill struggle too much and he retired. But at least Gray had the satisfaction of knowing that during his 15 seasons at the helm he had pioneered an experimental form of theatre rather more daring than anything the conventional West End stage could muster.

The opening of the more accessible Arts Theatre in the centre of Cambridge in 1936 spelt disaster for the Festival Theatre, which was empty for most of the 1940s. In the 1950s, an electrical firm used the building for storage.

In 1962 the Arts Theatre took over, keeping its costumes here and occasionally hiring them out to the public. I once borrowed a rather dashing D'Artagnan outfit, only to find that other party-goers had had the same idea. I was just one of 94 Musketeers.

Now the old Festival Theatre is used for storage alone. Here, surely, is a sleeping beauty waiting to be kissed into life by one of the Cambridge old boys and girls whose name is up there in lights.

The Festival Theatre is on the Newmarket Road, Cambridge, opposite the `Cambridge Evening News'.

Andrew John Davies