ON STAGE
S tanding on Park Street in ADC Theatre, which lays claim to being England’s oldest university playhouse. Founded nearly 200 years ago in the back room of The Hoop Coaching Inn, plays have been performed on site since 1855, and it’s also the former stomping ground of many national treasures. Historically owned and managed by the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club, it’s a fun venue where the shows are put on by students and Cambridge locals alike; a space in which up-and-coming talent can test out new ideas, making for diverse and exciting seasons of shows. ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the Cambridge, the first stop on this tour of some of the area’s most celebrated stages is the men and women merely players’, as the Shakespeare quote goes. But if you were a woman before 1935, you wouldn’t have performed on the ADC stage, as women’s parts were traditionally played by men. Thankfully, things changed, and Rachel Weisz, Miriam Margolyes, Naomie Harris, Emma Corrin and Olivia Williams have all trodden the boards since. As the first theatre in the city to have a full fly tower back in the late 1980s, it had a significant facelift in 2018, with refurbished auditorium seating and lighting bridges. The original wooden front doors remain, but are now inside the theatre having survived a fire in 1933. According to urban legend, someone was trapped inside as the theatre burned down, and so after
The ADC Theatre has a haunted key. This opened the original front doors of the theatre, which survived the disastrous fire of 1933. Did you know?
IN THE LIMELIGHT Both the ADC Theatre (above) and the Arts Theatre (left) have had future stars begin their budding careers on their stages
CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK MAY 2026 09
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