'A Room Nearly Semi-Circular': Aspects of the Theatre and the Church from Harrison to Pugin

Abstract

The great urban churches that were built for Protestant worship in the three or four centuries after the Reformation have often been compared to theatres. With their common need to seat a large number of people within sight and earshot of a central point, theatres and churches have often adopted similar arrangements: galleried auditoria with carefully contrived patterns of seats and a minimum of columns. Floors were sometimes sloped to improve sight-lines, and private boxes might be provided in either type of building. During the later decades of the eighteenth century the idea of the semicircular auditorium was taken up by leading neo-classicists who went beyond Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico to Roman and Greek models for inspiration. Gondoin’s anatomy theatre (of 1769–74) for the Ecole de Chirurgie in Paris is the most celebrated example, providing a clear view of the proceedings for an audience of some 1,200. It was followed by a number of buildings for drama and opera, in which, as Pevsner noted, there was an associated move away from the provision of tiers of boxes. One might expect this enthusiasm for the practical values of the semicircular theatre to have had its counterpart in church building. To what extent it did is the subject of this essay.