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CORNWALL’S MINACK AND BALMORAL’S AMPHITHEATRE:

TWO CLIFF-SIDE THEATRES A WORLD APART
by Les Tod

ne of Cornwall’s major
Otourist attractions is the
Minack Theatre, which sits
on a cliff-side at Porthcurno,
near Penzance, England.
Famed for its live shows
presented in an amphitheatre
high above the sea, and for the
trials and achievement of the
remarkable woman who
created it, it is a world apart
from a similar cliff-side
theatre, known as the
Amphitheatre, at Balmoral,
in Sydney, Australia. Minack
survives and is celebrated as a
theatrical icon, but the
Balmoral Amphitheatre is
now all but forgotten.
The Minack was founded and
built by Rowena Cade, born in
1893 and one of four children.
From an early age she was
interested in performance. At
the age of eight she took the
title role in her mother’s
production of Alice Through
the Looking Glass in a small
local group. After World The Minack today.
War 1, Rowena bought the
headland at Minack and built a house there in the gully facing the ocean. And so was born high above the water below. She did much of
for herself and her mother using local granite. the Minack. the labouring herself, with the help of Billy
In 1928 she staged A Midsummer Night’s Rawlings, her right hand man for more than
Dream in the open air in a meadow. In 1932, As the years passed, Rowena began to hew a thirty years. Granite was cut by hand, rock
The Tempest was performed on a simple stage Roman style amphitheatre out of solid rock, was carried up from below, and sand was
carried on her back from a
Rowena Cade contemplating what to build next. nearby beach. There were no
cranes or horses or machines;
everything was done by
Rowena herself and her
faithful Billy.

World War II was not kind to
the developing theatre. The
Army and prisoners of war
sent in to clear the coastal
defences had reduced it to a
mess. Rowena Cade simply
put her efforts back into the
Minack, and its reputation
slowly spread. Granite walls
were built to separate the
theatre from the garden and
an access road and a car park
were added. Billy passed
away in 1966, but Rowena
continued with Tom Angove
assisting her. She developed
her own technique for
working with cement, using
old linoleum rolled up in
tubes, then filled them with
cement, to create the Roman
style columns, and using the
tip of a screwdriver to
decorate surfaces with

18 CINEMARECORD # 90