'This is where the real magic happens': Preston Playhouse pulls back the curtain with behind-the-scenes tour

“We have a resident ghost. He’s called Albert, and he’s quite the benevolent one. So don’t shriek: just say, ‘How are you, Albert?’.”

That was the warning given by Rob Feeley at Preston Playhouse this week as he took guests through a sweeping backstage tour of Preston’s flagship theatre.

”They’ve had ghost hunters in here and all sorts. He married a local girl, went to war, came back, and his wife had done what a lot of war brides did and went off and married someone else, and took the kids with her.

“He’s come back to find his kids, because they’re buried here somewhere. Why buried? Because in 1847, this was built as a Quaker House, and we think the car park was the graveyard.”

The long-time actor and chair of the Gilbert and Sullivan Amateur Operatic Society is just one of the dozens of people who make up The Playhouse’s team of volunteers.

Alongside the five other groups making up the theatre’s ecosystem - including the Preston Drama Club, The Broughton Players, the Preston Musical Comedy Society, the Hall Players, and the Players Drama School - the team put together a sparkling line-up of plays, pantomimes, and other performances throughout the year.

It now remains as Preston’s last dedicated theatre, after the Charter Theatre was shuttered in 2019 following the collapse of the company which had operated it.

It had been due to reopen in 2023, before it was found to have been built with crumbling RAAC concrete. A decision on what to do with the building is set to be made before spring 2027.

On Sunday (September 13), the Preston Playhouse opened its doors to the public for a rare behind-the-scenes tour of its backstage areas.

It was just one event of many that formed part of Preston’s Heritage Open Days festival, which aims to give visitors a chance to explore the “hidden gems” across the city.

“This is where the real magic happens,” Rob said. “The stage is where it comes to life.

“Once you get on stage, the adrenaline is going, and you become the character. In any play or any group, every single person is just as important as the other.”

High above the 210 seats making up The Playhouse audience sits the tech box, which controls the lighting, sound, and various effects as they happen on stage.

“The script usually has directions,” said actor and committee member Al-Yasa Khan. “If it says 2pm on a Friday, we think, ‘Okay, what would this office look like at 2pm?’.

“The director might then say he’s changed it a bit, so then he’ll talk to us and make annotations. We have notes, the sound will have notes, the lighting will have notes, the stage manager will have notes...

“With tech, if it goes well, you don’t realise it. It’s if it goes wrong that suddenly you know.”

As well as operating the tech box, it’s up to the crew to manage everything going on behind the curtain - often while shows are being acted out live.

A series of rope pulleys and ship knobs control the cloth hangings that frame the set, a job which “is not for the faint of hearted”, according to Rob.

Meanwhile, the set pieces themselves are handmade in a “glorified man-shed” behind the theatre.

“We store a lot of our sets in the shed, and everything’s done in here, too,” Rob said. “It’s all mixed and matched, borrowed, made, you know - it just goes on and on a bit.

“These days most companies don’t have a stage crew, so what happens is we have members of the company who come and do the show, and then at the end, come and lug it down.

“We do it all ourselves, painting it, building it, putting it up, putting it down. We get no funding, this is all run by amateurs, for amateurs. It costs around £7,000 a month just to run it without anything.”

After two hours of performing, another for the aftershow, and the mammoth task of dragging an entire set to an outdoor shed, it’s time for the performers to hang up their costumes and head home.

The Playhouse dressing rooms - of which there are several - lie in the cold underground beneath the stage.

Once used as record storage rooms during the Second World War, they have since been refitted with mirrors, lighting, and plumbing.

They’re just a stone’s throw from the costume and prop rooms, which have been stocked through donations from the wider community.

“Sometimes actors will wear their own suits, and sometimes we come up with period ones,” Rob said. “It’s the same with the props, but we have many cases of somebody ‘going to Heaven’, and family members finding themselves with lots of period costumes.

“If they ask us if we want any, we’ll take what we need and swap them, but a lot of it goes to charity.

“You can find anything you can imagine in the prop room: period stuff, antique pieces, bottles, trophies, baskets, suitcases... People donate stuff to here, too.

“Some of the mirrors have all these fancy lights, but since we have a brand new lighting system [on stage], we tend not to use them: before they were put in, everybody had to wear makeup.

“You have to accentuate it and slap it on to make it look good, and even men had to wear makeup. If you went on stage with nothing on, you’d just look unwell.

“You have to look alive on the stage. And when you go back up the stairs, you’ve come full circle - straight back to main floor.”

After months of rehearsals between the various theatre groups, a scattering of chairs and an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s are the only clues on stage for what the next few months will bring at Preston Playhouse.

The latest theatre season is set to launch on September 23, opening with the Preston Drama Club’s ‘Prescription: Murder’, starring Mark Kendal as the beloved Lieutenant Columbo.

It will be followed by the Broughton Players’ ‘The Girl on the Train’ and the Hall Players’ ‘Two 2’, with a host of other performances on offer further ahead.

“We’ve seen these actors two, three, four times over the years, and it’s always truly magical coming to see them,” a local resident told the Lancashire Evening Post.

“They’re all volunteers, they all have lives outside of this, but what they perform really just shows the talent of each of them. It’s incredible.”

“I’ve only been here a year, but it’s been so welcoming,” Al-Yasa said.

“There’s so much you can learn from here that you can get experienced in and then use on your CV. There’s the writing, the tech, the social media everything.

“We’ve had people who have volunteered here and ended up on the West End. This is such a massive help for everyone.”

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