Brooke Theatre, Johannesburg
Personal memories	Photo taken from from a very rare Dept of Information booklet, 1969

	The theatre was a rat hole, with dirty dressing rooms, squashed backstage and it stank of sweat, greasepaint and cigarettes.  There were definitely funny things that crawled in the seats - you could feel them if the show wasn't too good, and you got bored. But it was Johannesburg's own rat hole theatre, that saw passionate productions, underpaid staff, financial balancing act all year round, the dedication of its owner.  There was no other place like it.  It was not a pleasure to work there, but it was a privilege. One job in that place and you actually felt you had graduated into theatre, maybe not the big time, but it the modern version of the strolling player The bar also stayed illegally open, and many was the time we left at 4 am, having to be at rehearsals in just 5 hours time.
The last show I remember as a stage manager was "The Golden Years of Music Hall" produced by Capital Films.  It was an attempt to recreate old time music hall. It succeeded because it had the oldest cast of all time, people that you thought were dead.  Elsie and Doris Waters, Leslie Serony, Sandy Powell, Margery Manners, Walter Landauer - their combined ages added up to longer than the Roman Empire.  These were people theatre historians knew about.  No wonder the average age of the audience was the same as the average of those on the stage.	Not much seems to be recorded about the theatre itself. It fell victim to the theatre purge of the 1970's. The only reference I can find is in Brian Brooke's autobiography "My own personal star" (Limelight Press 1978). It is big on names-dropping, detailed on parties, but no read for someone interested in the theatre itself. Click here and you can read the last four pages of his book. The text relates to the opening.  According to the text it is August 1955.