The underground theatre that never was
Did you know St Peter's almost built a subterranean theatre under Hannington Quad dedicated to Samuel Beckett? This April Fools' Day, we are sharing this remarkable, but true, story.
In the late 1960s St Peter's College dreamed up an ambitious scheme to build a theatre in honour of the noted Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett -- a move that would have established St Peter’s as a hub for modern theatre in Oxford and beyond.
As St Peter’s College lacked both space and funding, collaborators came up with astonishingly inventive plans to realise the Samuel Beckett Theatre. The noted futurist architect R. Buckminster Fuller, well-known for his unusual architectural designs such as the geodesic dome, collaborated with Norman Foster on plans for a subterranean theatre underneath Hannington Quad. Further planning and fundraising efforts for the theatre were similarly ambitious. English Fellow Francis Warner involved such notable 20th-century theatrical celebrities as Richard Burton and Harold Pinter. The poet W. H. Auden supported New York fundraising events, and novelist Graham Greene and artist John Piper joined a star-studded line-up of sponsors. At one point, the concept had expanded so far as to include a proposed Henry Moore sculpture garden.
In the end, plagued by planning and funding complications, and as other theatres began to dominate Oxford's city centre, the Samuel Beckett Theatre never quite got off (or under?) the ground. Still, this story stands as a reminder that St Peter's, despite being described in the Daily Telegraph’s July 1970 incredulous article on the subject as 'the smallest and poorest of Oxford's 30 […] colleges', has never lacked ambition, creativity and remarkable friends. Decades later, and despite lacking a grand underground theatre, St Peter's is indeed a supportive home for the creative arts. This year, we are delighted to celebrate the realisation of the Music Room Project, a new, state-of-the-art performance space in the heart of (but not underneath!) College.
The story of the Samuel Beckett Theatre has been fully documented in the book, A Dream and its Legacies: The Samuel Beckett Theatre Project Oxford c.1967-1976 (Colin Smythe, 2019) by David Tucker, which has been a valuable resource for developing our news piece.