Visiting The Minack Theatre Will Certainly Be One Of The Highlights Of Your Cornwall Holiday

With it's breathtaking beauty and dramatic location, we're sure it will be one of the reasons you'll want to come back to Cornwall again and again.

The Minack theatre was the brainchild of Rowena Cade who lived at Minack house which overlooks Porthcurno Bay. It's an open air theatre situated 4 miles from Lands End which is constructed above a gully with a rocky granite outcrop. The Minack Theatre lends it's name from the Cornish word 'meynek', which means a stony or rocky place.

Way back in 1929 a group of villagers staged shakespeare's play 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' in a local meadow, which they repeated the following year. They then decided that their following production would be 'The Tempest' (Argued by some critics to be Shakespeare's last play ever written by him).

The setting of this play was a remote island and Rowena Cade offered her garden which overlooked the sea as a suitable location for them to stage their production. Rowena and her gardener made a terrace and some rough seating, by hauling materials up from the beach below via a winding and steep path.

The play was performed with massive success with the sea as a dramatic backdrop, and over the course of the winter months every year throughout her life, Rowena along with the help of two local men Billy Rawlings & Charles Angove, resolved to improve the theatre so that others could perform there each summer.

It was this hard work that Rowena did which made the Minack theatre what it is today. Rowena Cade died on the 26th March 1983 aged 89 years, but since 1976 the theatre has been registered as a charitable trust by a local management team.

Today the theatre is still used to stage a full summer season of 17 plays between June & September. The Minack Theatre is also open for visitors throughout the year and is very popular with tourists due to it's amazing views and scenery.

If you're thinking of visiting Cornwall this summer, check out our great selection of cottages In Cornwall, holiday lettings in Cornwall and holiday accommodation in Cornwall.