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The Questors Theatre

venue in London

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ7759072 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Questors Theatre is a theatre venue located in the London Borough of Ealing, West London. It is home of The Questors, a large theatre company which hosts a season of around twenty productions a year, not including visiting companies, and is a member of the Little Theatre Guild of Great Britain and the International Amateur Theatre Association.

Activities

The Questors Theatre Club was founded in 1929 by a group of 17 amateur performers and friends, and pursued an adventurous artistic policy led by one of the founders, Alfred Emmet. Since 2005, The Questors Theatre has had a public licence, changing it from a club theatre and enabling public sales of tickets. The company also runs Questors Academy which provides actor training courses such as the Foundation Course in Acting, the Advanced Performance Course, Acting for All and a youth theatre, the Questors Youth Theatre.

Site

In 1964 The Questors completed the construction of a new theatre building, which was opened by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in April 1964, replacing the previous theatre building which had been converted from an old church. This new theatre's adaptable configuration was one of the first in a new wave of thrust stage theatres in Britain. In October 2014, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the opening, it was renamed the Judi Dench Playhouse.

The site also contains a studio theatre (the Constantin Stanislavsky Room, built as a rehearsal room in 1960 and converted into a studio theatre in 1968), three rehearsal rooms (the Bernard Shaw Room built in 1958; the Michael Redgrave Room, opened in 1968, converted from part of the original Mattock Lodge; and the Alfred Emmet Room built in 1998), a scenery workshop, and a members' bar (The Grapevine, opened in 1959, converted from part of Mattock Lodge).

History

The original building on the site, Mattock Lodge, is a house dating from the early 1850s, owned from around 1895 by Father O'Halloran who built a small church on the land behind the house, and on his death willed all the property to Miss Ann Webb as life tenant, who then lived in the house with her sister.

Editorial summary

“The Questors Theatre” enters the record as venue in London. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Questors, Theatre and venue can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1929, 2005, 1964, 2014—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Questors, Theatre and venue.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“The Questors Theatre” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Questors, Theatre and venue provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7759072. Authority coordinates are 51.512, -0.310. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929, 2005, 1964 and 2014.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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  2. Expand the search: follow The Questors Theatre primary sources, The Questors Theatre archive and Questors research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “The Questors 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.