Tucked into Little Germany – Bradford’s Victorian warehouse quarter – the Bradford Playhouse is a 266-seat proscenium arch theatre with both circle and stall seating, plus a studio space that can be reconfigured for different lighting, sound, and seating arrangements. The building sits in the centre of Bradford, West Yorkshire, and has been a working theatre since the late 1930s.
Origins and early history
The theatre’s roots go back to 1929, when an amateur group called the Bradford Playhouse Company began renting Jowett Hall, a former Temperance Hall that had already seen use as a cinema. The Bradford company had grown out of the Leeds Civic Playhouse Company, and by 1932 it had separated from its parent organisation to operate independently.
J. B. Priestley and the theatre’s identity
When the Bradford company became independent in 1932, the writer J. B. Priestley – a Bradford native – became its president, a position he held until his death in 1984. His sister Winnie, who had been secretary of the Bradford branch of the Leeds Civic Theatre, went on to serve as secretary of the independent Bradford Civic Theatre; she is commemorated by a plaque inside the building. In his 1934 book English Journey, Priestley wrote warmly of the civic theatre movement, describing such venues as “little camp-fires twinkling in a great darkness” and arguing that they opened “little windows into a world of ideas” for communities affected by industrial depression. For much of the twentieth century the theatre was known as The Priestley, a name that reflected this long association before the venue reverted to the Bradford Playhouse name.
Fire, rebuilding, and the current building
Jowett Hall burned down in April 1935. With financial support from Priestley himself, who donated royalties from several of his plays, the company purchased the site and rebuilt. The new building opened in January 1937, launched by Sir Barry Jackson, and combined a theatre with a cinema under one roof. Film screenings continued alongside theatrical productions until 2001. The studio space that now accompanies the main auditorium has flexible technical arrangements, making it suitable for a range of productions beyond the main stage programme.