Capitol Theatre

This guide to the Capitol Theatre starts inside a circus ring built in 1916 for the Wirth Brothers, complete with a hydraulic floor that dropped into a pool for seal and elephant acts. It follows John Eberson, the American designer hired in the mid nineteen twenties to turn the barn-like hippodrome into an atmospheric theatre, with painted skies and drifting projected clouds above the audience. The Depression closed the venue within four years, and by the nineteen seventies the council was considering bulldozing it entirely.