A theatre has two circulation systems that never touch, and the whole building is designed to keep two groups apart
The Stage Door Pub and Kitchen holds a 4.2 from nine hundred and seventy-four people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is beside the Old Vic.
And a stage door is not a nicety. It is a wall.
What it is for
Keeping the cast and the audience apart.
A theatre has two entirely separate circulation systems, which do not touch at any point – and the whole building is designed around that separation.
The audience comes in at the front, into the foyer, and goes to their seats.
The company comes in at the side or the back, into the dressing rooms, the wings, the green room – and they can move around the entire backstage without ever crossing a member of the public.
Why
Practically: because an actor in half a costume, running between a quick change and an entrance, cannot be crossing a foyer full of people holding drinks.
And because the machinery of a theatre is genuinely dangerous. There is a great deal of moving scenery and a fly floor carrying tonnes of counterweight, and it is not a place for the public.
But the deeper reason is the illusion.
You are not supposed to see Hamlet having a cigarette in a dressing gown.
The entire enterprise depends on it, and it always has, and the architecture enforces it.
The green room
Which nobody can explain.
The name is attested from the seventeenth century, there are a dozen theories, and the honest answer is that nobody knows.
That the room was painted green, to rest the eyes after the glare of the stage. That it comes from a scenery term. That it derives from a specific room at a specific theatre.
Every one of those is repeated confidently. None is documented.
Eight postcodes and eight hundred and nineteen articles. The tellable version wins.
And they meet anyway
Which is the good part.
Because the stage door has one other function, and it is the one everybody actually knows.
It is where the audience waits, afterwards, in the cold, to see somebody come out.
Which is the exact opposite of what the door was built to prevent – and the actors do it anyway, in coats, in the rain, signing programmes for people who have been standing there for forty minutes.
The building was designed to keep those two groups apart.
And every night, at the back, they meet.
Verdict
Good pub, cheap, honest number.
Go, and use the front door.
The ghost light
Which is left burning on the stage of an empty theatre, every night, in essentially every theatre in the world.
A single bare bulb on a stand, in the middle of the boards, in the dark.
And the superstition is that it is for the ghosts – so that they may perform, or so that they are not disturbed, and every theatre has a story about theirs.
The actual reason is that a completely dark stage has a hole in it.
The orchestra pit. And a person walking into an unlit theatre will fall into it, in the dark, several metres onto concrete – and people have.
It is a safety light with a ghost story attached, and the ghost story is why nobody has ever forgotten to switch it on.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Quit.