In a state of the art, purpose-designed building, the Christchurch Court Theatre has returned to the heart of the city.

“We stayed the course and my God, we’re delighted with what we have.”
Court Theatre actor and artistic advisor Ross Gumbley is not talking about the new Auckland apartment where curmudgeonly cow-cockie Dickie Hart, his character in the recently opened End of Summer Time by Roger Hall, now lives.
Rather, he is talking about the new $56 million dollar theatre building that has been wooing audiences since opening its doors in early May.
In helping plan the new theatre, Gumbley and his team attended nearly 2,500 meetings with designers, builders and architects to create a building that is intimate, operational and distinctly home grown.
Taking a break from rehearsals, he points to the West Coast blackwood flooring, the laminated timber columns from Rotorua, the steel work made in nearby Bromley that dominate the expansive foyer.
“This foyer is the finest Aotearoa has to offer,” he tells Frank Film.
Education and engagement manager Ben O’Brien-Limmer is similarly enthusiastic.
“We’re really pinching ourselves, just what a gift this is,” he says.
The Court Theatre had been without a purpose-built home since its establishment in 1971. Just months after being evicted from its home in The Arts Centre by the 2011 earthquake, the Court opened its new home in The Shed, a reformed railway shed in Addington. Back-of-house was cold and occasionally leaky and the stage was too big for most sets, but still, “our audience fell in love with Addington,” says Gumbley.
When the Christchurch City Council agreed to fund the new theatre building as an anchor for the arts in the post-earthquake city rebuild, it was important to get it right.
“They wanted a building that you walked into and was warm and inviting, the antithesis of corporate,” says Athfield Architects’ Matthew Webby, who was employed to design the theatre alongside UK theatre specialists Haworth Tompkins.
In a sea of large glass and aluminium buildings that has come to define the new CBD, that sense of intimacy and materiality was considered critical to the design of the building and the theatre spaces.
“At this scale of auditorium you can get a really close connection between audience and actor,” says Webby.
From the front row seats of the Stewart Family Theatre, which can fit an audience of 379 people, the stage and its performers are within arms’ reach. In the Wakefield Family Front Room auditorium, artistic director Alison Walls says seating for 150 people can be adapted for a traverse or round stage, allowing the audience to wrap around a performance completely.
The acoustics are just as immersive. Gumbley says that from the back of the house, you can hear the pages of a script being turned back-stage. In the control booth, technician Geoff Nunn says the theatre’s technical rig is “exactly the same” as you’d find in London’s West End theatres.
It is not just experienced actors enjoying the new spaces. In one of the rehearsal rooms, associate artistic director Tom Bain takes a crew of young actors through the steps for The Spongebob Musical: Youth Edition, the first junior show in the new theatre opening on 1 July.
“It’s colourful, it’s joyous, it’s over the top,” he says.
With an already well-established patronage, many of whose names are engraved on the back of the theatre’s seats, the Court Theatre is focussed on engaging Christchurch youth. The company runs three youth groups, offering acting classes for various age levels and culminating in youth-led productions.
“There’s always been a focus on bringing through that next generation of performer and live theatre goer,” says O’Brien-Limmer. “However, it’s reached a whole new level coming into a space like this.”
The Court Theatre is Aotearoa’s only producing house with all its departments under the same roof. Looking through the windows from Colombo Street, the public can see straight into the theatre workshop, where the company designs and constructs all sets, props and costumes for its shows.
“It wouldn’t be the dream job if I had to carry this stuff from one location to here,” says workshop manager Matthew Duffy, who now has direct access to the main stage. He gestures to a prop he built recently for Spongebob – the front half of the Krusty Krab burger joint – which would only be on stage for a minute or so. “It’s a smaller stage (than Addington), so it's better for us,” he says. “We can spend more time per square metre.”
Two months on from the theatre’s opening, says Gumbley, it is still very much early days for the theatre, “but you know, we’re going to get this right.”

Participants thanks:
Matthew Duffy
Ross Gumbley
Ben O’Brien-Limmer
Matthew Webby
Charles Collins
Alison Walls
Jorja Baylee
Tim Bain
Geoff Nunn

Thanks to:
Court Theatre’s staff and youth companies
Athfield Architects

Archive footage provided by
Frank Film

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Written article by Eva Kershaw

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