Only By Failure The Many Faces of the Impossible Life of Terence Gray

From the Preface I hear the two worn and broken doors being unbolted and I enter through a narrow slit between them, leaving behind the sunshine of a fine sunny day in May. I walk across the empty foyer, my footsteps echoing on the bare concrete floor where once the walls and floor had been covered with carpet, and then through two doors into the semi-dark auditorium of the disused Regency theatre, the bustling Theatre Royal as it once was before being renamed the Festival Theatre in the nineteen-twenties and now standing silent and forgotten on the edge of a noisy Newmarket Road in Cambridge. In one glance, I take in my view of the empty sunken pit edged in red brick, below the level where I stand, and look across to the worn frontages of the two circles and then, above, up to the vast space of the gods, stretching up high into the darkness towards the ceiling, now full of holes from the theatre's many neglected years. As my guide and I walk on, round the back of the musty theatre, along the narrow corridors past series of doors which had once been the entrances to the boxes and I imagine the noise and the excitement of the evenings of the performances at the theatre, with the applause and the laughter. After a steep climb, we reach the highest level and stand on the dusty floor-boards of the large open space which we call the gods, where today there is ample room for at least a hundred or more others, and we look back, down towards the stage. I see the Greek trapezium above what was once a proscenium opening and, at the rear of the widened stage, the vast curving cyclorama, one of the first in England. Atmosphere seems to simply drip from the walls and the ghosts of actors past are almost to be heard, the voices of a century or more ago and others of more recent times; even the chanting of the congregations during the days when the theatre was used as a mission hall seems to be there in my mind's ears. Enid Collett, one-time secretary to Terence Gray and who died at the age of over ninety a year ago, told me that when she was taken back to the theatre, shortly before my own first visit, she had been reduced to tears when she saw the deterioration. She had known the building when it was furnished with plush chairs and the paint was new and bright and colourful and there was always the smell in the air of fine wine and the best gourmet food. The building, which had once been the Festival Theatre and before that the Theatre Royal, was recently purchased by the Windhorse Trust on behalf of the Buddhists of the Cambridge Buddhist Centre, the previous owners being the Cambridge Arts Theatre who bought the theatre from Gray's father. The Trustees of the Arts Theatre had used the building for over fifty years as a space for storage and scene-construction, lacking the resources and the will to promote a revival of the theatre, which would have made a second professional theatre in the city and Cambridge knows too well the implications of that kind of competition. The New Theatre in Cambridge, once a rival to the Festival Theatre, had been forced through falling audiences to become a cinema and, when demolished, an office block. Since my first visit, the Cambridge Buddhists have renovated the building, being able to inherit a new roof raised by courtesy of the National Lottery, and they now show their total commitment to the preservation of the theatre and the adjoining house. Their first "open day", when they displayed their new carpets and their bright new paint, was also the beginning of the new millennium, and the preservers of the ancient theatre even managed to recreate the exact entrance doors as they were when the Festival Theatre opened in 1926. They now use the theatre for meditation and for the presentation of their Buddhist festivals. On my second visit, I was able to see a large golden Buddha floodlit in the centre of the stage, looking so theatrical, and I realised that they hCornwell, Paul is the author of 'Only By Failure The Many Faces of the Impossible Life of Terence Gray' with ISBN 9781844710508 and ISBN 1844710505.