The wonderful story of the Minack Theatre

Down in the far south-west of Cornwall, beyond Penzance which is as far as the Great Western Railway goes, there’s a small coastal village called Porthcurno which can be reached from the A30 via St Buryan (a village named after a sixth-century saint who has a walk-on part in the King Arthur legends). Porthcurno – the name means ‘Port Cornwall’ – is famous for having been the place where underwater telegraph cables used to enter the sea; the first of those was laid in 1870 to provide communication between Britain and India, and Porthcurno’s importance as a major submarine cable station lasted until well into the twentieth century (that, by the way, is just part of a running theme about Cornwall being a centre of global communications, which also takes in the Falmouth Packets of the eighteenth century and the satellite station at Goonhilly).

Today, Porthcurno is a seaside village with a truly stunning beach surrounded by granite cliffs – it’s part of the Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (which itself composes of just over a quarter of the county). That alone would make the place worthy of note, but what concerns me today is what’s on top of the cliffs immediately to the west of the beach.

Accessible from Porthcurno via either the winding coastal footpath or a steep, narrow road stands an open-air theatre that is truly unique – for it has been carved into the clifftop, and the stage has as its backdrop the view out to sea. If you were to peruse a list of the world’s most stunning theatres, you would in all probability encounter this one, the Minack Theatre. And the story of how it came to be is as impressive as the place itself.

That it exists at all is due to the determination and vision of one woman – Rowena Cade, who was originally from Derbyshire but who moved down to Cornwall after the First World War. She bought the Minack headland above Porthcurno and there she built herself a home, Minack House. A Shakespeare enthusiast, she got involved with the local amateur dramatics group, and when in 1929 they were looking for a suitable venue to stage an open-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream she gladly offered them the use of a grassy meadow on her land. This was a great success, and a couple of years later they decided to do The Tempest.

But where could they stage that? Rowena Cade reckoned she had the answer – those cliffs below her house would be ideal, and what better backdrop could there be to a performance of The Tempest than the sea? She needed to make a few changes, though, and over the winter of 1931-32 she and her gardener, Billy Rawlings, worked hard to move granite boulders and carve out a stage and terraces for seating, hauling materials from either the house above or the beach below; that last one was essential as she needed sand to make concrete for the seats (it being more or less impossible to make seats out of the granite that was already there).

The Tempest was duly performed in the summer of 1932. The performers got changed in Miss Cade’s house, while cars parked atop the cliffs provided the lighting. Some of the audience had to take deck-chairs down with them, for there were only a few rows of terracing. It was a resounding success, even getting a positive write-up in the national media (The Times, no less). That spurred Miss Cade on, and over the next few years she and Billy Rawlings worked hard to improve the theatre. More sand was brought up from the beach to provide concrete for the seats, pillars, steps and walkways – which were decorated with Celtic carvings, done by Miss Cade herself with the aid of a broken screwdriver. The stage was gradually built up too – over time there was added a throne for Antony & Cleopatra, and a balcony for Romeo & Juliet.

The Second World War put a stop to theatrical proceedings – Cornwall’s beaches were potential landing-grounds should an invasion have happened, and the telegraph station down at Porthcurno, a major communications centre, was considered to be at risk from attack. Tunnels were dug underneath it, and up at Minack a pill-box was hastily constructed. That, though, did not stop the Minack Theatre from being used as a filming location for the 1944 movie Love Story. The theatre needed a lot of work after the war finished, and it wasn’t until 1951 that it reopened with Tristan of Cornwall (the pill-box had by this point become the box office).

From then, it went from strength to strength. Performances were staged every summer, regardless of the weather, a tradition that continues to this day (weather conditions have to be truly appalling for a show to be cancelled, and anyone planning on taking in a show at Minack should bear in mind that umbrellas are banned, however heavy the rain). Rowena Cade continued to work on the place during the winter, using whatever materials came her way; more seating tiers were added, along with an access road, a car park and some proper steps on the footpath connecting the theatre with the beach. There’s a lovely story about how she even indulged in a spot of wrecking when a Spanish ship carrying timber foundered on the rocks below. She made her way down the cliffs and helped herself, carrying a dozen or so 15-ft beams up to her garden single-handedly, one at a time. When the police came to inspect the wreck, they realised that some of the cargo was missing and started asking around; Miss Cade told them what she’d done, but the cops took one look at this somewhat frail-looking woman and decided that she was obviously having them on. Thus cleared of suspicion, she used the wood to build a dressing-room.

She was still doing heavy lifting and mixing concrete into her eighties – she had the theatre registered as a charitable trust in 1976 and died in 1983, aged 89. Her legacy lives on. Today, plays at the Minack Theatre attract some 80,000 people every year, with a further 150,000 just going to look around the place – which, needless to say, is most definitely worth a visit should you find yourself in the area (and, if you can time it so you can catch a local storyteller retelling the story of how the theatre was built, so much the better). It’s truly unique, and it still very much reflects the vision of its most remarkable founder.