A beautiful crumbling theatre in Notting Hill is under threat. The Coronet, which bills itself as the Print Room, faces the menace of renovation. The lovely rambling building has the tumbledown air of an abandoned Romanian palace. The raised stage sits opposite the dress circle of a former cinema and the auditorium, steeply raked, is bounded by a parapet decorated with plaster reliefs of scarred mermaids and broken-winged angels. A modern design team is bound to strip out all this ramshackle charm. The ragged, gloomy corridors, scented with damp brick dust, will be rationalised into glistening avenues of spotlit perfection. And the weird and ungainly bar area will become a money trap where cocktails worth 50 pence are sold for 12 quid by scowling waiters who think they’re Jimi Hendrix. Let’s hope the funding fails.
The vintage space has a vintage play, Five Finger Exercise, written in 1958 by Peter Shaffer who later created Equus and Amadeus.
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