The joys of provincial repertory theatre

Provincial repertory theatre, in which a semi-permanent company of actors performed a varied diet of plays for their community, week-in, week-out, has all but died out in Britain. Local theatres have become venues for visiting productions, one-off events and numerous outreach schemes, but the old continuity – a kind of magic – has gone.

I caught the last of it as a child. I was nine years old when in 1979 the brand-new playhouse in my area – the Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich – opened its doors to the public, and for the next four years it would be the centre of my world. If I wasn’t watching shows there (and I saw some half a dozen times), I was dreaming about it, reading scripts or writing to a local photographer for black-and-white photos of the company’s players. Other boys at school knew all the details of the Premier League. I knew the XYZ of the Wolsey and its company, right down to the wardrobe mistress and the man who ran the front of house.