York Guides

In 1744 a Mrs Keregan built the New Theatre in the Mint Yard, the first theatre on the site of the present Theatre Royal. She had inherited the management of a company of actors, based in York and travelling to other towns - variously Newcastle, Scarborough, Leeds, Beverley and Hull - from her husband, Thomas Keregan, in 1741. He had led an itinerant company of actors, the Duke of Norfolk's Men, who had performed each year since 1715 in York in the Merchant Taylors' Hall during the Lent (Spring) and Lammas (August) Assizes, times of year when York was crowded with visitors. York was, in the 1730s, becoming a fashionable place for the gentry to winter in - transport was not yet good enough to encourage a London winter season for northern gentry - and Keregan extended his Lent Assize season to play for this audience. In 1734 he built York's first permanent theatre in Lord Irwin's Yard, the Minster Yard, the present site of the Residentiary. His theatre was a converted tennis court, as the first theatres used in London at the Restoration had been. The Corporation favoured the building of 'a commodious playhouse in this city,' seeing it as a means of contributing to the 'Entertainment of the Nobility and Gentry resorting to this City and incouraging them to spend their Winter Seasons here'.

Keregan opened his theatre on 1 October, 1734, and Tate Wilkinson, in The Wandering Patentee,2 reproduced the playbill for that night. The house consisted of a pit, surrounded by boxes and, above, a gallery, and was a rectangular shape, very like the extant Georgian theatre in Richmond, Yorkshire.

The theatre had been banned by order of Parliament in 1642 and, although clandestine performances continued, was not officially re¬established until the Restoration, when Charles II granted Royal Patents to two of his courtiers, Sir William D'Avenant and Thomas Killigrew. These two, who had written for the stage before the Interregnum, thus held a monopoly of public theatrical presentation in England. The Patents, with the monopoly they entailed, came to rest in Covent Garden and Drury Lane, which became the only legal public theatres in the country. Their monopoly was increasingly encroached upon in the early 18th century, however, both in London and the provinces, until the Theatre Licensing Act of 1737. This reaffirmed the Patent Houses' monopoly: any person acting 'for hire, gain or reward' in any place other than Covent Garden, Drury Lane or the place of the King's residence, was now 'deemed a rogue and a vagabond', and was liable to punishment by a heavy fine- in Bristol in 1773 four actors were each fined £50 - or by imprisonment with hard labour. Keregan's theatre in the Minster Yard was, then, illegal. But although there are no records of the building being used as a theatre after 1737, Keregan and his company were not deterred from performing elsewhere in York. They seem to have been encouraged in their evasion of the law by the Corporation. They were, after all, a valuable tourist attraction. As long as an information was not lodged against them - the Corporation would not break the law but only overlook it - the company continued to play, using the expedient of advertising the performance of a concert, with the play, interludes and afterpiece being given gratis during the interval. This expedient was used until the Theatre was granted a Patent in 1769, exempting it from the terms of the Act of 1737.