Internal Strip Out – back of house
Progress on external demolition at the Citizens Theatre is now pretty evident from the street.
Perhaps less obvious is the amount of progress that has been made inside the rest of the building stripping out areas ready for the new layouts and design.
Floorplan showing redeveloped areas of retained building
The various areas in back of house are being treated differently depending on when they were built and what facilities and heritage they contain.
The main auditorium, stagehouse and paint frame shown in red will be largely the same in look and feel but will undergo critical works to stabilise them, improve access and sort out heating and ventilation.
The area shown in yellow was only built in 1996 and will remain largely as it was. It will have a staircase removed, the old offices replaced with the new toilet block for front of house, and some simplified circulation but will still house production storage areas and the main rehearsal room as before.
The back of house areas shown above in green contained a lot of poor quality accommodation with no natural light or ventilation and lots of small, awkward spaces that were only accessible through a labyrinthine network of corridors and stairs. The strategy is to take this area back to the main structure, open everything right up, then create more appropriate spaces and circulation as required.
It has been carefully stripped of most of the services, partition walls, ceilings and floor coverings ready for the creation of the new areas that will be more open, airy and modern in look and feel.
In these before and after photos you can get a sense of how much things have changed in this block already.
you can see the stairs are the same but pretty much everything else has been stripped right back.
This area is being cleared out to make way for a new dedicated dressing room block. The old dressing rooms were in a pretty poor state of repair and many had no natural light or ventilation. In the new design these have all been pushed to the outside walls with new triple glazed windows for light and air. They will also have accessible showers and flat level access to the stage for the first time. The dressing rooms also used to be on the ground and first floors with the showers on the second. No longer will actors have to suffer the indignity of wandering around the stairs and corridors in a towel after a shower!
The first floor is pretty much unrecognisable apart from the arched opening in the centre with the doorway beyond. It is being reconfigured for new wardrobe workshops and stores.
Partitions and ceilings removed – only the archway in the corridor and doorway beyond remain the same
Everything opened right up. You can see on the second photo there is a patch of paint of the left hand wall that shows where the radiator used to be in the first photo.
A new green room will be formed in the area opened up after stripping out the 2nd floor toilets and showers.
These are taken from pretty much the same vantage point outside the old props store. On the right hand side in both photos you can just about make out the circular light fitting that shows how they marry up.
The corridor, stores and both rehearsal rooms have been opened up to create the new space for an open plan office that will bring the whole company together in one place.
In the new layout all the rehearsal rooms move towards the front of the building where they can be more easily accessible from the main foyer and cafe area.
In all these back of house areas the next thing to happen will be the more significant alterations that are required; new structural openings, old openings blocked up, new floors, stairs to be removed etc. But already you can start to get more of a sense of what the spaces will be like, and once it is finished it will significantly improve the experience of actors, artists, technical teams and staff.
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