Revamped Royal Festival Hall will offer ‘more diverse’ programming

Published Tuesday 29 May 2007 at 15:45 by Nuala Calvi

London’s Royal Festival Hall will reopen next week following a £91 million refurbishment to restore the Grade I listed building to its original glory.

Almost every surface in the 2,788 seat auditorium has been removed, adapted and restored to improve the acoustics of the space, while a new extension has been built to house staff and production facilities, adding an extra 35% of space to the hall.

Double-size interval bars have been fitted along with outdoor balconies overlooking the Thames, while all seats in the auditorium have been refurbished and given an additional three inches of legroom.

Southbank Centre chief executive Michael Lynch told The Stage the two-year revamp had “substantially improved” the experience of using the building for both audiences and performers.

“One of the major reasons for doing the project was to improve the acoustics in the room, particularly for artists,” he said. “To take advantage of that, we now also have 11 new stage lifts, which will allow us to have the entire audience and cast of shows on stage and easily visible. We can have the actors and dancers and set around the orchestra, something we’d never have been able to do before.”

Lynch also said the changes would make it easier for the venue to present a more diverse range of productions.

“The scope of what we do as part of the new programme will be wider,” he promised. “We usually only do musical theatre once or twice a year but this enables us to move from classical to contemporary music to musicals much more easily, so we’ll be able to provide a really interesting contrast in terms of what we offer.

“It’s enabling us to programme shows like Carmen Jones with Raymond Gubbay, using our two resident orchestras, something we just couldn’t have done in the same way before. The focus will still mostly be on music, but it just gives us much more flexibility in the way we do things and how long we do them for.”

An opening weekend, curated by artistic director Jude Kelly, begins on June 8 with massed choirs arriving by candlelit river barge at Festival Pier and continues with music, open-air dancing and spectacle across the Southbank Centre.

Some 24,000 free tickets will be distributed for special performances in the hall, continuing until dusk on Sunday night, before the official first night gala concert on June 11.