page_title: Leeds Playhouse
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Leeds Playhouse / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Redevelopment at Leeds Playhouse, Leeds, West Yorkshire. Taken on the afternoon of Thursday the 13th of December 2018.
context_page_description: Leeds Playhouse is a theatre in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, in the north of England. It opened in 1990 as the West Yorkshire Playhouse, successor to the original Leeds Playhouse, and was rebranded in June 2018 to revert to the title "Leeds Playhouse". It has two auditoria and hosts a wide range of productions and engages in outreach work in the local community.
context_section_description: The origins of Leeds Playhouse lie in the Leeds Playgoers' Society, founded in 1907 as an off-shoot of the Leeds Arts Club, to stage contemporary drama by writers such as Shaw, Ibsen and Chekov, and hold lectures and discussions on contemporary drama. The idea of creating a Leeds Playhouse dates from 1964, when a campaign was started for a permanent home for modern and contemporary theatre in Leeds. Despite some opposition from the local council on the grounds that Leeds already had a theatre (the Grand Theatre), a public appeal was launched to raise funds at a mass meeting in Leeds Town Hall on 5 May 1968. The meeting was addressed by Peter O'Toole, Keith Waterhouse, and the actor and joint artistic director of Nottingham Playhouse, John Neville, amongst others. £20,000 was raised by public subscription, but the project still needed support from Leeds City Council. The Council eventually promised £25,000, and £5,000 annually if necessary. This, along with grants from the Arts Council and the Gulbenkian Foundation, meant that the project could go ahead and the Leeds Playhouse opened in 1970 in premises loaned to the Leeds Theatre Trust by the University of Leeds. The first performance was held on Wednesday 16 September 1970 with Tony Robinson, who later went on to play Baldrick in the television series Blackadder, starring as Simon in Alan Plater's play Simon Says, directed by Bill Hays. The following month Robinson also appeared in The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare, where he played Abraham Slender.
  The Leeds Playhouse turned into the West Yorkshire Playhouse in March 1990 when it relocated to the Quarry Hill area of the city as part of a major regeneration scheme. In June 2018, it rebranded as Leeds Playhouse once again.
caption: Redevelopment at Leeds Playhouse (13 December 2018)
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