Theatre Royal Brighton this week unveils its new terracotta colonnade after 18 months of work and the installation of 1,551 new terracotta sections.
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00:00Great. Good afternoon, my name is Phil here at Group Arts, Editors and Analysis Newspapers.
00:06Always lovely to speak to Sophie Denny, the Theatre Director at Brighton Theatre Royal.
00:10Now, you are in a 216-year-old building, which of course has implications, but it's a really
00:17happy story because you've come to an important, significant point, haven't you, in terms of the
00:22front of house. What's happened? We have. We've been waiting for it for over, well, nearly 18
00:28months now, so it's very exciting. The front section of the building, so our colonnade that
00:34runs across two separate spaces, we've been undergoing a sort of £3-4 million project
00:41for the last year and a half, and next week it will all be complete. I think anyone who lives
00:48locally or has walked up New Road has been able to see some sneak peeks. We've had the scaffolding
00:54and the hoarding come down over the last few weeks, so people have been able to see some of it,
00:57but all the lights and everything should be on and complete.
01:01And essentially it's replacing terracotta that should never, ever been painted on,
01:05let alone 24 times in the last 100 years.
01:08Absolutely. Don't paint terracotta is the absolute learning from all of this. But yeah,
01:14so it's been there for a long, long time, and yeah, in the 1920s they started painting it,
01:18and it's therefore started to decay and erode down. So yeah, we've replaced all the steels,
01:24all the underlay. I mean, the whole thing was sort of brought back to the bare bones of it,
01:29replaced, and then yes, we've had 1,551, I'm told, tiles come down over a couple of kilned
01:37sort of batches from a fabulous factory in Loughborough. So they've all been
01:42individually placed onto our colonnade over the last few months.
01:46For you as theatre director, it must be amazingly encouraging that the company,
01:51the group company is prepared to invest to this extent in your old lady, distinguished old lady.
01:58We're really proud. So yeah, AT&T Entertainment has got a huge array of venues across the UK
02:04and actually in Germany and the US, but we are the oldest in the portfolio. So it's something
02:10that we're really, really proud of. But also, yes, they want to invest in their buildings.
02:13They want to keep us going for our communities for the next 216 years to go. So yeah, it's a
02:19really lovely thing. It's a lovely thing for the team. It's a lovely thing for the community to
02:22be able to see. Fantastic. Well, that's great news.
02:25Lovely to speak to you, Sophie. Thank you very much indeed.
02:27You too. Thank you.