1855 Campaign

To celebrate the fact that drama has been performed in the ADC Theatre since 1855, we have been publishing 18 (and a half) facts about the building.

But how can you have "half a fact"? Well, if you are standing in front of the Cambridge Union, and look at the back wall of the ADC Theatre, you might notice this half-obstructed window:

What use is a window that is half obstructed by a wall? The window is a remnant of how the building used to look before the 2008 redevelopment. The window used to look into a backstage stairwell, but during the redevelopment this staircase was moved, and this window now looks into nowhere in particular.

Thank you for reading our 18 (and a half) facts about the ADC Theatre! We are planning to re-open our theatre as a socially-distanced space from October, but in doing so, we expect to make a lot less income than usual.

We receive no regular funding from the Government or the University of Cambridge, so in order to guarantee the survival of the ADC Theatre, please consider donating £18.55 by clicking here.

The auditorium of the ADC Theatre is raked, which means that the seats are on an upwards slope, that allows everyone to have the ability to see the stage.

The auditorium rake was entirely re-done during the 2008 redevelopment, in order to make it more consistent. There are some pictures of the auditorium with all of its steps removed, and we have it on good authority that this flat surface makes for a very good badminton court...

There is a space beneath the auditorium seats, also known as the 'rake void':

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

This is the ADC patch bay. It is a small room found above the ADC Theatre stage, containing lots of plugs and sockets that can be used to redirect the Theatre's lighting power. When a Lighting Designer plugs in a new light on-stage, the Chief Electrician plugs in the associated cable into a socket that 'patches' the light to an appropriate channel, that can then be controlled from the lighting desk during the show.

The patch bay was renovated in 2018 along with the rest of the building's roof. Before that, the patch bay was filled with 15A plugs and sockets and looked like the below:

The current door between the patch bay and the roof of the building looks like the below:

However the door did not always look like this. Since 1933, there was a metal sliding door that was intended to be fireproof, and due to its counterweighted system, was able to close itself after someone had opened it.

However, this sliding door had the tendency to slam violently shut, and after decades of repeated slamming, the bricks in the surrounding wall were getting damaged. Hence that metal door was replaced with this more humble wooden one.

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

The Corpus Playroom is the ADC Theatre's studio venue. It can be found in a street just off King's Parade. The space belongs to Corpus Christi College, but is managed by the ADC Theatre's staff, who put on smaller-scale and fringe shows.

The Corpus Playroom opened as a student-run space in 1979, with its opening production being the play Latin! written by Stephen Fry. Many different student societies would perform there, but the venue was managed and run by the resident society for Corpus Christi College, the Fletcher Players.

Some of the student societies that performed at the Playroom gave the venue different names. When Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club performed there, they would call the space ADC Elsewhere:

The ADC Theatre took over management of the Corpus Playroom in 2011, performing significant refurbishments in partnership with the College, including replacing the seats. The ADC Theatre works alongside the Fletcher Players committee to program a variety of shows in the Playroom, including plays, comedy shows and new student writing.

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

This is the roof of the ADC Theatre. But you might remember it looking more like the below:

The old roof needed to be replaced for structural reasons and to provide ventilation for the auditorium. In 2018, the ADC Theatre closed to the public for a refurbishment in which the roof was replaced.

The opportunity was taken to install two lighting bridges, creating more positions in the auditorium for rigging lights:

Students can also sit inside the lighting bridges, operating the spotlights that follow around performers on-stage.

Some shows have even rigged a snow machine on the lighting bridges to cover the audience in fake snow! This is a classic fixture of our annual production of The Nutcracker hosted by the Central School of Ballet.

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

The Larkum Studio is a rehearsal and performance room which can be found next to the auditorium. It was added to the building in the 2008 redevelopment, and named in memory of Charles Larkum, the former bursar of Sidney Sussex college who served as the Chair of the ADC Executive Committee:

The Larkum Studio is primarily used as a rehearsal space, but it has the technical capability to stage plays to an audience of around 30 people. Over the years, it has hosted a range of exciting shows, from Far From the Madding Crowd to the original musical Life With You.

One of the most ambitious shows put on in the Larkum Studio was Amygdala Wonderland in 2015, which required the room to be filled with tons of sand! (Below photo by Johannes Hjorth)

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

This is the ADC's counterweights gallery. It is used to fly lights and set items up and down from the stage. It is a newer system than the hemps gallery, having been installed gradually between 1989 and the 2000s.

The counterweights are so named because there is a large amount of weight on the other end of the rope that the user pulls, which exactly matches the weight of whatever is being flown. For this reason, unlike the hemps, the counterweights can be used to fly very heavy items, and the physical strength of the operator is not as important.

The weights that are used in the counterweight system need to be loaded into a cradle attached to the ropes, and this is done in a loading gallery positioned directly above the counterweights gallery. The metal weights that you see in the picture above are carefully loaded into the cradle, which will then balance the set item and make the item safe to fly.

Some of our largest shows, like the CUADC/Footlights Pantomime, have a lot of items which are flown in and out using counterweights. They need a detailed 'cue sheet' which explains to the counterweight operator (or in some shows, operators) which counterweight they should be flying, up or down, at what time.

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

There are many different lights on the Stage Manager's desk, which display important information, but what does the one that says 'No. 10 open' mean?

'No. 10' refers to the Number 10 door, which separates backstage from the Patch Bay, which is a room where all of the theatrical lights are plugged in:

Since the patch bay is filled with electrical equipment, it has its own sensors to detect if a fire happens. But on-stage, it is possible to turn off (a.k.a. 'isolate') the fire sensors, which it would be necessary to do if the show has a smoke machine or dry ice.

(Don't worry, by the way: whenever the on-stage fire sensors have to be isolated, this is carefully risk assessed, and there is always a Stage Management team overseeing the effect, armed with fire extinguishers in case anything goes wrong!)

If the Number 10 door is accidentally left open, then any on-stage smoke could get through, and accidentally set off the Patch Bar fire alarm! It is for this reason that the sign on the Patch Bay door refers to 'RTOPS': this is an affectionate acronym for "Red Trucks on Park Street", which is what would happen if the sensor was set off and the fire brigade had to come to the Theatre...

Hence this light on the Stage Manager's desk serves as a good reminder to close Number 10 door, and we thankfully haven't had any issues related to this in many years.

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

There have been performances in many parts of the ADC Theatre. There is the Stage and Auditorium of course, but there's also the Larkum Studio and our Bar. More unusual, however, was the time that some students chose to stage a play... in the Front of House toilets.

This production of the play Troubled Sleep in 2013 had such unique staging that it made national headlines. Since the play tells the story of two sisters, one of whom cleans toilets for a living, the director saw the ADC toilets as the perfect location for an intimate, small-scale production.

The play was only half an hour long, and only 8 audience members could watch at a time, which meant that the show was staged twice a night.

It goes to show that a play can be staged in the most creative of places. Perhaps more shows will be staged in the ADC toilets in future!

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

There is a trapdoor in the Stage Left Wing (also known as the 'PS Wing'). If you open it up, you will discover a small space (or void) that you can access underneath:

The PS Wing Floor Void is not used to store anything useful. So why does this space have green walls and a skirting board?

The answer is that this entire area was not always the Stage Left Wing. It was once the 'green room' where actors would wait before going off-stage.

During a previous redevelopment of the Theatre, brand-new dressing rooms and a green room was built, freeing up this space to become an off-stage wing. To make this new wing the same level as the stage, new floor was built, and this void is the last remnant of the green room that once existed.

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

If you have ever been backstage in the ADC Theatre, you might have noticed that the Stage Left Wing is oddly shaped:

There is a strange corner that juts into the wing, limiting the amount of space that is available. One might ask why the ADC does not simply knock down these walls and expand into this corner...

Except that this corner actually belongs to the University of Cambridge's private members' club, the Pitt Club. With the Pitt Club being a Grade II listed building, this corner of the ADC stage is likely to exist for a long time to come.

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

This large, thin sheet of metal can be seen suspended above the Stage Left wing. It is known as a thunder sheet, and is a very old-fashioned means of creating a sound effect. The operator shakes a rope that dangles from the thunder sheet, which shakes the piece of metal around and produces a sound that sounds a lot like a storm.

Although the ADC Theatre now has a digital sound system that has long supplanted the need for such old-fashioned effects, the thunder sheet is used surprisingly frequently in shows. It's difficult for a recorded sound played over speakers to replicate the volume and power that the thunder sheet has. And, of course, it is a lot of fun to use.

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

This is the ADC Vault. It is a ladder that can be found in the Technical Manager's Office, and leads down to an area that mostly contains lots of spare parts and old files.

You can tell from the brick arch that this is an old part of the building, and it was only discovered fairly recently. The ADC Management team knew that the Vault existed, as it appears on old building plans, but it was presumed that the space had been filled with rubble.

During one of the building's redevelopments, some technicians drilled a hole down in the floor of the old workshop, into where they knew the Vault would be, and let a small camera into the hole to find out if the space was empty. This is what they discovered...

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

This is the hemps gallery, which you can reach by climbing a ladder found in the Stage Left wing. This is one of the two flying systems that the Theatre has, which can be used to fly lights and set items above the stage.

The gallery contains hemp lines, which are ropes that run from the item being flown to a railing where they are tied up. This style of flying system is very old, and at the ADC Theatre it is only used to fly very light items that can be physically supported by the hemp operators. The more sophisticated counterweights system is used to fly heavy lights and pieces of set.

The hemps gallery is a very old part of the building and it has a few quirks. One mystery is that at the end of the gallery, there is a short length of ladder that seems to go nowhere. This is most likely in place to help a user climb over a short railing that presumably existed at the entrance to the gallery.

During an especially complex show like the CUADC/Footlights Pantomime, there will be lots of flying cues and sometimes multiple operators in the hemps gallery to fly everything in and out.

The sloping roof facing the hemps gallery is painted with chalkboard paint, which officially can be used to provide more details to an operator about what a hemp line is attached to, but is also affectionately used for graffiti related to shows.

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

If you look upwards while walking down the stairs leading from the auditorium into the yard, you will notice a lion painted against a blue background, just underneath the skylights.

This lion is unique for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is the only remaining part of the building still painted in that particular shade of light blue. Most of the walls in the ADC used to be painted in this shade of blue before being changed during the refurbishment.

This wall has remained untouched, both out of reverence for the lion and the fact that the wall is incredibly difficult to reach without a very precarious use of ladders!

But why is there a lion symbol? Eager-eyed people might notice that it resembles the lions found on the University of Cambridge's coat of arms. People who have performed on the ADC stage might know that this lion is the symbol for the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club (or CUADC), the resident student society for this Theatre:

This lion has had many names over the years, but it's most recently been affectionately named '"Rory".

The lion on the wall of the ADC Theatre was painted by Claire Butcher, who was the Designer on the CUADC Committee between 2006 and 2007, and the first Production Manager between 2008 and 2010.

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

This is the spiral staircase that leads from the Yard of the ADC Theatre to its Bar Terrace. During the evenings when the Bar is open it is frequently used as a way to enter and exit the Bar.

The ADC has not always had this spiral staircase. It was replaced during the building redevelopment in 2003-04... by complete accident.

How do you accidentally replace a staircase? Well, during the redevelopment the old spiral staircase was removed and taken to a storage site. When it came to putting the staircase back, it could not be found, and a new, custom spiral staircase had to be built instead.

What happened to the staircase? Was it lost? Stolen? This is just another mystery in the ADC's rich and strange history...

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

The ADC Theatre contains a lot of keys, which open various strange locks found around the building. But only one of these keys is called a haunted key.

The haunted key is that to the original front doors of the ADC Theatre, which survived the disastrous fire of 1933:

These doors were then relocated to the Front of House corridor when the Theatre was rebuilt:

So why is this key haunted? According to urban legend, when the Theatre burned down in 1933, there was still someone trapped inside...

Ever since, the Management of the ADC has been too afraid to lock these doors, for fear that they will be haunted by the ghost.

Around the time that the ADC Theatre closed for lockdown, the current Manager tried bravely (or perhaps foolishly) to lock the haunted doors, only to find that a slight misalignment in their heights meant that they could not be locked.

Is this simply a mistake in the way the doors were hung... or the intervention of a supernatural force?

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

Drama has been performed in the ADC Theatre since 1855, although the building has not always been called the ADC. The Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club was formed in 1855, and operated in a back room of the Hoop Inn. As the Club grew in popularity, the building gradually transformed from an Inn and Hotel into a Theatre, and there have been so many redevelopments and refurbishments that no visible vestiges of the original building remain…

…Except one. This archway and pillar, which can be found inside the ADC’s Management Office, is part of the original building. In fact, the arch was once part of the stables for the coaching house.

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.

If you have seen a show at the ADC Theatre, you will probably recall the large metal curtain that rises up from the stage during the interval.

This is a safety curtain. All sufficiently large theatres in the UK must have one of these: in the event of a fire, the safety curtain prevents it spreading from the stage to the auditorium, or vice versa. But the ADC's safety curtain is unique in the country in that it rises from the floor rather than lowers from the ceiling. There are other theatre safety curtains, like that at the Barbican or Lyttelton, which are split in half with one half going up and the other going down, but the ADC's rises fully upwards from floor to ceiling.

It might also surprise you to know that the ADC safety curtain is not controlled electronically. Instead, an intrepid student winds it downwards using a handle (pictured above). When the brake is released a counterweight system allows the curtain to rush upwards. Although its elements have been repaired and replaced, the core mechanism of this curtain is the same as it was when it was installed in the early 20th century.

The safety curtain lies at the heart of the ADC and is commonly part-jokingly considered to have a mind of its own, with a particular fondness for unexpectedly rising during particularly vigorous tap numbers (such as the 2018 production of The Producers, photographed above by Evelina Gumileva).

If you have enjoyed this fact about the ADC Theatre, and are able to support us during this difficult time, please consider donating £18.55 here.