Our refurbishment and remodelling of the Hall for Cornwall, was featured on Radio 4’s flagship arts programme Front Row yesterday evening. They spoke to Julien Boast the CEO and Creative Director of Hall for Cornwall and BFF architects Helen Grassly and Aidan Ridyard.
The project increases the theatre’s audience capacity and provides a more intimate atmosphere, with improved sightlines and acoustics, whilst conserving and restoring important heritage elements of the Grade II* Listed buildings and bringing them into better use. Aidan explained to the programme how the historic fabric has been revealed and celebrated.
“You get these little slivers of space between the auditorium and the historic buildings that surround it and those little slots are the joy of it, because that’s where you can see that was the Town Hall, that was the Customs House and that was the Market Hall, so you can see those stories etched in the stone work.”
Originally a wide, arena-style space (good for rock but hopeless for drama), Burrell Foley Fischer have introduced circle and balcony levels and narrowed the width with new slip seats. Movable shutters allow the acoustic and atmosphere to be varied for drama, classical music, comedy and rock and pop gigs. Helen and Aidan discussed how they work.
“We have some huge flying shutters which provide the acoustic separation between the theatre and the bar, so the bar can still operate when a show is on, but they come down with a bit of a rattle and its quite a dramatic way for the show to start. So if you are in the bar you know its time to take your seat because these 6m high steel shutters come down, and as the show starts the ‘skins of the onion’ start to close down and it gets tighter and tighter into the space and you just get that one light and the magic begins.”
The debut show to tread the boards was the World Premiere of Fishermen’s Friends: the Musical, a brand-new production based on the true story of Cornwall's favourite singing sea-shanty sensations and the smash-hit 2019 Universal Pictures film. Julien Boast described the new dynamic relationship between performer and audience.
“When I watched the preview of Fisherman’s Friends there was a moment which I could hear a pin drop in the auditorium, I knew then that the relationship between the stage and the audience was working, so that was the bit when I sort of shed a tear because I had promised it to so many people and we had heard it on the first preview”
