Mermaid Theatre
theatre and conference venue in London, England
The Mermaid Theatre was a theatre encompassing the site of Puddle Dock and Curriers' Alley at Blackfriars in the City of London, and the first built in the City since the time of Shakespeare. It was one of the first new theatres to abandon the traditional stage layout; instead of this, a single tier of seats surrounded the stage on three sides.
History
The 20th-century theatre was the life's work of actor Bernard Miles and his wife, Josephine Wilson. His original Mermaid Theatre was a large hall at his home, Duff House, St John's Wood, in north west London. It seated 200 people, and during 1951 and 1952 was used for concerts, plays and an opera production of Dido and Aeneas with Kirsten Flagstad, Maggie Teyte and Thomas Hemsley, conducted by Geraint Jones, which was recorded by His Master's Voice. For the third season in 1953, the Mermaid Theatre was moved to the Royal Exchange.
Miles was encouraged to build a permanent theatre and, raising money from public subscriptions, and his revenues from publicity spots for the Egg Marketing Board, he oversaw the creation of the new building on land formerly occupied by a warehouse that had been damaged by bombing in the Second World War.
The new Mermaid Theatre opened on 28 May 1959 with a production of Lock Up Your Daughters and it was the venue for many other productions, such as Cowardy Custard and an annual staging of Treasure Island, with Miles reprising his role of Long John Silver, which he also played in a television version. The Mermaid Theatre also ran the Molecule Club, educating children about science.
Other notable productions include the 1978 première of Whose Life Is It Anyway?, with Tom Conti and Rona Anderson.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mermaid Theatre” is theatre and conference venue in London, England. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mermaid, Theatre and theatre, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6819864. VIAF identifies the subject as 316597695. Authority coordinates are 51.511, -0.102. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1952, 1953 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mermaid Theatre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.