Secret seats – Have you ever visited Edinburgh Royal Lyceum’s forgotten ghost gallery?

Next time you visit Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum, look up. High above the heads of the audience is an all but forgotten upper balcony, closed to the public for nearly six decades. Unlike the rest of the auditorium, its seats are emerald green, not rich crimson, layered with dust and forgotten by audiences, a ghost gallery that is a portal to Edinburgh’s theatre-going past. Below ‘Must See Theatre‘ brings you a rare glimpse of the secret seats no one has sat in since 1966.

Did you know? Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, designed by architect CJ Phipps for theatrical managers James Howard and Fred Wyndham and built at a cost £17,000, opened on 10 December 1883, taking its name from the 1834 Theatre Royal Lyceum and English Opera House, home of Shakespearean actor Henry Irving.

A Victorian Picture Frame Theatre by design, decorated in an Italian Renaissance style with an original capacity approximately 2,000, the Lyceum opened with Much Ado About Nothing starring Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, who is reputed to be the Blue Lady who haunts the building. 

The first theatre in the UK to have an iron safety curtain and the first in Scotland to have electric house lights, the Lyceum was bought by the City of Edinburgh in 1964 and has since been refurbished, to differing degrees, four times – 1929, 1977, 1991 and 1996. 

A year after the four month 1965 facelift of the auditorium, the ghost gallery, or ‘Gods’  was closed to the public to accommodate lighting equipment, reducing the capacity of the theatre to 1,647, the number of seats was further reduced in 1996 refit to the current 658.