St George's Guildhall, King's Lynn

As if the guildhall I posted yesterday wasn't enough there's another one just along the road, St George's Guildhall on King Street. This too is early 15^th century and claims to be "the oldest and largest complete medieval Guildhall in England with an unrivalled history as a venue for theatrical production." A local story has it that during a plague in London Shakespeare came to King's Lynn to stay at a mate's house along with his merry band of cut throats, imps, pimps and banjo players and performed one of his plays (what he wrote) here. It's a good story and King's Lynn has been dining out on it for centuries. Now academics seem to support it and academics have a direct line to God's own truth as we all know.
The place as you might imagine has history, a history which is too long for me to even attempt to condense and you can read all about it here.
It's now a gallery, theatre, arty smarty place with a cafe in the cellar (or undercroft as the locals like to call it) where subversives meet to plot the downfall of western civilisation, smokers can stand outside...

"Half-formed theatre company seeks other half"

Next door to the blue cone music centre that I showed you yesterday is the new Hull Truck theatre. It replaces the old tin shed on Spring Street, shown below. This new place cost £15 million (the old one £2.50!) and has all the trimmings that you would expect for such expenditure.
Hull Truck started in 1971 following an ad (see title) in Time Out magazine placed by an out of work actor called actor Mike Bradwell. The company's success rested on producing plays relevant to the audiences of Hull. Pandering to the lowest common denominator is not necessarily a good thing; you can have too many gritty realistic plays (one would be too many, in my view).
 The move to the new premises was followed by the recession which has not helped finances and the theatre will struggle, make that is struggling. No doubt there will be appeals for more public money to be spent on this place and no doubt more will be spent. Hmmm.

As always there's a website, it's here.

(Photo taken by  Keith D. )