The green and cream art deco facade of the Regent theatre in Mudgee is as familiar as an old friend to Simone Sheridan. She worked at the theatre in high school, when it was a cinema, the social hub of the town in central western New South Wales.
But the cinema closed in 2009 and the pigeons moved in. The 1934 building’s original glass doors broke and were boarded up. Parts of the ceiling fell on the seats and the floor.
It was sold in 2015, to a developer who planned to demolish all but the facade and build apartments, offices and shops. That plan faltered, and in 2018 the local council rejected an application to redevelop the building into a hotel, bar and function centre. It has been on and off the market, repossessed, pulled from auction, all the while continuing to deteriorate.
Sheridan decided to try to save the building in 2015, after seeing the successful campaign to save the Victoria theatre in Newcastle.
The Revive the Regent campaign began in 2017 and won the National Trust Heritage award for advocacy in 2019. In 2020 the Regent was listed on the NSW state heritage register.
Sheridan says she “couldn’t bear” the thought of the building being converted into a hotel. The campaign has angered some business leaders in town, but for Sheridan and other campaigners preserving the history is more valuable.
A network of national supporters for the building discovered it was designed by architect George Kenworthy, who also worked on the State theatre in Sydney and designed the Cremorne Orpheum theatre.
“Architects came forward, historians,” says Sheridan. “It did create that groundswell talk of: ‘Oh, this building is really interesting.’”
The cultural heart
The Leeton shire council stepped in to save the 100-year-old Roxy theatre in Leeton, in the NSW Riverina, when the primary contractor for its redevelopment went into liquidation in early 2023.
The deputy mayor, Michael Kidd, says it’s an important part of the town.
“It is the sort of place where mum and dad go out and have their first date at the movies. Then they have kids, and the kids go to an Eisteddfod there, they get a little older, and then they have their first date,” he says.
“There’s this cycle that we go through and there is an element of nostalgia. We like to have it as somewhere that people can get out and mix.”
The Roxy theatre received funding from Create NSW for redevelopment in 2019. The council is now underpinning the $12m development.
Kidd says while it could be seen as taking money away from filling potholes and other council tasks, he viewed the theatre as being vital to the long-term survival of Leeton. It’s also essential to the town’s character, given it hosts the annual Australian art deco festival.
It provides not just entertainment but an outlet for people in the town who are interested in pursuing theatre and the arts. The Roxy Institute of Performing Arts partnered with the National Institute of Dramatic Art (Nida), in a program to train young people in acting, writing, design and technical production. Enrolments are already oversubscribed.
“People think [rural life] is all about football and driving utes fast, but in every family there is always one child who just thinks a bit different to the others,” Kidd says.
The director of the redevelopment project, Katherine Herrmann, says she’s proud to be working to save “the heartbeat of the town”.
“It’s taken an enormous amount of courage by council and the community to undertake work set on a state listed building,” she says.
It has been done before. The Theatre Royale in Castlemaine, Victoria; Malachi Gilmore Hall in Oberon, NSW; and the Roxy theatre in Bingara, NSW are all regional success stories.
In Lorne on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, the 1937 theatre has just been taken over by Barrie and Chris Barton – the brothers and partners behind Golden Age Cinema and Bar in Sydney.
Barrie Barton says people have an “emotional bond” to public buildings like theatres “because they speak to the pre-existence of the community and the endurance of the place”.
“That’s a kind of cultural capital in its own right,” he says.
The Bartons plan to polish the Lorne theatre’s art deco features and install a new bar. They are running a pop-up summer season from 1 December, before closing in Easter for renovation.
Despite having the enthusiastic support of the surf coast community, Barton says there is a “delicacy” to operating in regional towns, particularly when restoring a heritage asset.
“You are in a sense mediating or negotiating various choices … and trying to do something which works for the community, but it also works commercially,” he says.
“We really do, for whatever reason, fall in love with old architecture and feel a sense of dismay and dislocation if it’s bulldozed or reconverted in an insensitive way. And what our business is trying to do is to take some responsibility for those old buildings that can’t be left to ruin.”
