The design for the Hannah Playhouse took place in the mid 1960s and was designed by architectJames Beard with initial design by Ron Parker. In 1968 the Hannah Playhouse Trust was formed with the purpose of building a theatre venue on the corner of Courtenay Place and Cambridge Terrace. Sheilah Winn gave a gift of $300,000 for this purpose so the Hannah Playhouse was named after her maternal family – the Hannah's; who also founded the Hannah's shoe company. There were delays in starting the project which meant additional funds had to be raised. The theatre was built in 1973 and replaced the Downstage Theatre company's earlier premises upstairs on the same site. The Hannah Playhouse building was home to the company until 2013 when it closed. The building itself is still often referred to as Downstage Theatre. Raymond Boyce MBE, a leading New Zealand theatre set and costume designer, was on the board of Downstage when the playhouse was built. Boyce became design consultant to the architects influencing the design of the flexible stage area and auditorium. It was designed to be a dinner theatre with a flexible space that could accommodate an audience seated for dining, with options for the staging of the performance that could change for each show. It currently seats approximately 250 people in the auditorium, when it opened it had a capacity for 170 people at dining tables.
Significance
The design of the Hannah Playhouse is a building which sits in the 1960s 'brutalist' category which refers to the raw, undoctored concrete that features in both the exterior and interior of the building. The building is part of a small group of unique performance spaces because of its asymmetric design, there include the Heinrich Tessenow's Hellerau Festpielhaus in Dresden, Germany, Manchester Royal Exchange in England, and São Paulo's Teatro Oficina in Brazil. It featured in an exhibition about modern architecture in 2010 called Long Live the Modern at the Dowse Art Museum in Wellington, New Zealand. In the book that accompanied the exhibition the building is described thus:
"It asserts itself... by adopting a sculptural, asymmetric roof form that addresses the corner site; and by taking its lead from brutalism's uncompromising, anti-bourgeois spirit, typified by the enthusiasm for unpainted off-form concrete."
