Milton Keynes Theatre

A ceiling that moves is this theatre's signature. Opened on 4 October 1999 to designs by the practice of Blonski Heard, it was built for a new town with no inherited playhouse and therefore no fixed idea of what its audiences would want. The auditorium answers by changing shape: the ceiling can be lowered or raised and the seating reconfigured, so that the room holds somewhere between roughly nine hundred and fourteen hundred people and sounds appropriate at either size. Acoustic modelling was carried out specifically to keep the moving elements from spoiling the sound.

Run since it opened by the Ambassador Theatre Group, it takes the full range of British touring work — large-scale musicals and West End transfers, straight drama on a smaller setting, the Christmas pantomime, and visiting opera and ballet companies for whom it is one of the more comfortable receiving houses between London and the Midlands.