Robert and Joanna Barr Smith add an elaborate theatre to Torrens Park mansion, south of Adelaide, from 1885
The Lochinvar tableau (bottom right) presented by the Barr Smith children, with friends, in the drawing room of their parents' Torrens Park mansion (top right). A concert (left) in 1889 in the theatre that the parents had built for their children.
Images by Ernest Gail and W.S. Smith, courtesy State Library of South Australia
An elaborate 200-seat theatre was built in 1885 within the mansion of wealthy merchant and pastoralist Robert Barr Smith and his wife Joanna at Torrens Park, later an Adelaide southern suburb, to indulge their three children.
The Torrens Park mansion was built by Robert Torrens in 1853 and enlarged by Walter Watson Hughes, Robert Barr Smith’s partner in the Moonta Mines, who'd decided to remain in England. The Barr Smiths bought the house complete with furnishings and moved in during 1874 but kept adding to their household fittings with big shopping sprees in the United Kingdom.
Their teenage children Mabel, Jean and Joe were constantly dressing up and devising plays. In 1882, the children and friends presented two performances of the tableau Lochinvar in the drawing room. The cast included "Edward Hawker, Mabel, Lady Baker, George Dean, Misses Jervis and Price, Captain Haggard, and E. Colley".
During their 1883-84 trip to London, Robert Barr Smith started planning a private theatre for Torrens Park, to be entered through the greenhouses. The theatre, with stage machinery and dressing rooms, sets and costumes, gas lighting, antique mirrors, oval windows, a glass-roofed conservatory and an auditorium 20 metres by 10 metres to seat 200 people on William Morris chairs, was all devised by Barr Smith with “no architect".
Mabel, Jean and Joe took drama lessons in London with the former Shakespearean actress Isabella Dallas.
The theatre opened in 1885 with scenes from Romeo and Juliet and a two-act comedy Checkmate. One of the lead players for Checkmate was called back to his regiment and his place was taken by a young professor from Adelaide University (and a future Nobel Prize winner) William Bragg.
Bragg, during his first year (1886) in Adelaide, also took the male lead in a two-act comic drama at Torrens Park, entitled The Jacobite. Bragg's participation recalled his boyhood love of theatricals at King William College in England and it indicated his acceptance into the wealthiest level of Adelaide social strata. It also was significant in Bragg’s rise to scientific eminence. Seventeen years later, Robert Barr Smith provided the money for Bragg to buy his first sample of radium bromide and begin his extraordinary research. Later, in 1906, Barr Smith gave more funds for Bragg to buy a machine for liquefying gases.
Robert and Joanna Barr Smith were lavish hosts and the social events were often associated withconcerts, recitations, plays and tableaux, with sumptuous suppers and dinners. At times, the chairs were removed for dancing on the sprung floor.
The theatre became part of Scotch College in 1919 when it took over the Barr Smith mansion. It represented an historical theatrical continuum of the vibrant performing arts that became part of the educational experience at Scotch College.
The theatre was restored by Scotch College in 1981 to augment its performing-arts tradition that had produced many actors, musicians, dancers and film makers. The theatre was supplemented by an outdoor amphitheatre, a restored Victorian drawing room, an extensive music suite, SoundHouse music technology room and recording studio, a chapel and dance studios for its performance arts students.
