As the name suggests, London’s King’s Head Theatre was for most of its life a theatre in a pub – in fact the only pub theatre since Shakespeare’s time. In 2024 however, after over 50 years of operation, the theatre moved to a new location right next door.

Seats in the auditorium were banqueting chairs arranged on demountable tiers. Fortuitously, around the time when the theatre decided to replace the seats with something rather more comfortable, one of the producers visited another theatre and sat on Audience Systems’ seats, and the plan for the new improved auditorium was born!

The chairs are our Accolade model in a confident palette of pink and purple – the perfect choice for a theatre whose artistic policy is “joyful, irreverent, colourful & queer”. They are arranged in small runs and mounted on our Matrix floorbars, allowing the theatre the freedom to lay the seating out how they wish. Later in the year, for example. the thrust stage layout shown here will be converted into a more traditional end stage layout.

With our Matrix system, there’s no real installation for Audience Systems to do – we manufacture the seats and floorbars to order, deliver them, and they’re ready to go! After the first time the seats were put in place, Alex Lewer, Technical Manager at the theatre contacted us to say, “Good news – all went absolutely flawlessly. We installed all the new seats last night and had no problems at all – and it looks stunning!”

The new seats were in in time for a production of a “Stalled” – a brand new musical extravaganza which is set, as you can see from our main photo, in a ladies’ bathroom. Celebrating the power of friendship, it was the perfect début for our vibrant and supportive seats!