About
The Cheltenham Playhouse has existed since 1945, with parts of the building dating back to 1806. Since 1945, the charity has worked hard to preserve aspects of the historic buildings, whilst providing arts venue for community groups, artists, and audiences. The building is not only of historical interest to their visitors but, they believe, has many stories for future generations.
The Cheltenham Playhouse is one of very few truly independent local venues. The charity is solely responsible for all upkeep and restoration of the Grade II listed building.
There are many plans for the Playhouse going forward including building restoration, they have already started renovating rehearsal rooms and toilets. There are plans to update bboth the Lounge bar and Green Room bar giving them a new lease of life, they plan to create an environment that will become a social hub for creatives and the community in Cheltenham. They have plans to redecorate more of the rooms on offer including the meeting rooms and the last few rehearsal spaces as well as staff offices.
They have launched a new scheme called The Three C’s (Community, Collaborate and Create). This programme put in place to: support smaller local artists/groups that often get missed by larger scale schemes, give a wider context to help audiences identify performances they are seeing or interested in, provide the opportunity for community groups, young people (looking at getting into the arts) and early career artists to showcase in a theatre, and offer workshops and unique performance opportunities to explore and share a wide variety of works with visitors. All the above ultimately means they aim to build a home. A home for Communities, Art(ists) and People to experience, explore and excel in their art, whatever that may be. As an independent venue, they can offer a unique level of openness and flexibility to grow local works, which they feel takes priority in their role as your local intimate performance space.
Community is at the heart of everything they do at the Playhouse and one of their biggest aims is to keep this affordable and accessible whether that be through hire costs or ticket prices. They aim to keep these amounts as low as they can, allowing the Playhouse to be accessible option to the arts whether that be from an artist’s perspective or an audience perspective.
Cheltenham Playhouse is a registered charity and receives almost no external funding. Community is at the forefront of everything they do there at the Playhouse and they strive to bring their audiences accessible, affordable, and captivating productions, shows and events. While also providing hire spaces for creativity and culture. Your generous donation can make a significant impact to them and their ability to continue being an arts centre and continue producing exceptional theatre experience.
If you feel able to make a donation to help them with this, they’d be very grateful.