The Barn Theatre Season at Smallhythe Place

A brief history

The 17th-century Barn Theatre was the brainchild of Ellen’s daughter, Edy Craig. Throughout her time at Smallhythe, Edy wished to convert the barn into a theatre, but her mother would not allow it. After her mother passed away in 1928, Edy held the venue’s first performance the following year.

The working theatre hosts productions to this day and is a venue for hire for special occasions such as weddings.

Transforming a barn into a theatre

The timber frame, four-bay structure of the barn suggests it was originally designed to fulfil a multi-functional purpose, incorporating cattle housing as well as crop storage and processing. Later, in the mid-19th century, several changes were made to the building to increase the crop storage area and various lean-tos were added to the outside. Since then, the main structure and features of the barn have changed very little, except for rethatching the roof in 2009.

Our famous patron

At the start of 2020 the National Trust announced Joanna Lumley OBE as the new patron of the Barn Theatre at Smallhythe Place in Kent, the former home of Victorian actress Dame Ellen Terry. Read more about this here.