One of the best known landmarks in Southsea, the Kings Theatre was first opened on 30 September 1907, following an initial period of planning in total secrecy, followed by a year's intensive construction work.

The front entrance and main foyer stand on the site of a former grocery shop in Albert Road, owned by a Ebenezer Perkins and the stage area is built immediately over a spring, which means that the depths down there still have to be pumped dry from time to time.

The building was designed by the renowned Victorian theatre architect, Frank Matcham, who was responsible for overseeing the building of more than a score of theatres, including the London Palladium and the Prince's Theatre in Lake Road, which was destroyed by German bombs in the second world war and was also employed in the rebuilding of Portsmouth's Theatre Royal in 1900.

The land available for the theatre was an odd shape indeed and probably presented Matcham with his stiffest challenge to date, particularly as there was no room for his usual ornate facia, of which the Prince's Theatre had an excellent example

Harry Brodribb Irving was a fine actor in his own right, but he suffered for years from comparisons with his more illustrious father and refused to take on roles made famous by Sir Henry whilst the old man was still alive - Harry did however play Hamlet just a year before his father's death.

In 1896, he had married Dorothea Baird, arguably the best known actress in Britain at the time and for two years they continued to be a part of Sir Henry Irving's theatre company; however, in 1898, he decided to make the break and in 1900 he and Dorothea, who were travelling the country, sometimes together, sometimes not, appeared in Beerbohm Tree's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which ran for 153 performances at Her Majesty's Theatre in the Haymarket, in London's West End.

After his father's death, Harry formed his own company, which included his beautiful wife and several other well known actors and began touring the country, so by the time they came to the Kings, they were a well-polished crew indeed, with a varied repertoire - the ideal choice to undertake the crucial opening nights of a brand new theatre.

By this time, Harry Irvine's reluctance to undertake his father's former roles had more or less disappeared and, for the opening of the Kings, his company staged Charles I, The Lyon's Mail and The Bells, but when the first chords of the National Anthem struck up, it was the Theatre Royal orchestra who were in the pit.

The lyrics for the anthem anthem was performed by the Portsmouth Orpheus Society and the local press reported that the audience "joined in with great gusto" - any opening night in the theatre is a special occasion, but this opening night in a brand new theatre produced an atmosphere all of its own!

According to the Portsmouth Times, busts of famous people, including Charles Dickens, Mozart, George Eliot and Beethoven, adorned the dome, but these have long since disappeared, most likely during the renovations carried out in the 1920s. The ceiling fresco of the foyer included the features of two local beauties of the day.

H B Irving as Hamlet, with Walter Hampden as Laertes, Maud Milton as the Queen and Oscar Asche as King Claudius -
Hamlet did not feature in the opening nights of the Kings, though.

By the end of World War I, however, with J W Boughton having died in 1914 and with so many theatres competing for audiences in Portsmouth and with the cinema craze reaching its first peak, all was not going well with the Kings and, by the early 1920s, silent movies were being shown in the afternoon, with music hall performances in the evening.

Then, in 1931, an operating box was built in the balcony and, from October 1931, the theatre started showing talking pictures for the first time. However, a year later, the Portsmouth Theatre Company, which also owned the Theatre Royal, decided to introduce films there and the Kings reverted to being a "proper" theatre again.

The war years - second world war, that is - were a curious mix for the Kings; initially, during the "phoney" war, of late 1939 and early 1940, the theatre closed, but it reopened again, to present shows, concerts and revues, all intended to boost the morale of the populace, in what was a very difficult time indeed (talk about understatement!)

The list of great actors and actresses who have graced the stage at the Kings is far too long to detail them all - during the war years the theatre presented a series of "Flying Matinees", in which the casts of then current hit West End shows would race down to Portsmouth to give a performance at the Kings and then hurtle back to London in time to stage their regular evening performance.

Dame Sybil Thorndyke and Noel Coward (left) are just examples of the quality and "history" of British theatre that foubnd its way to Portsmouth and the Kings.

Arch-Goon Spike Milligan famously appeared on television's Room 101 and asked for Portsmouth to be placed in the room and dumped, because of a bad audience reaction to his second one man show at the Kings in the late 60s, or very early 70s.

As it happens, I was present at his first Kings appearance, that

was (I think) in 1967, as I was then a trainee journalist at The News and had been designated to interview the great man after his show - our features editor knew that I was a great fan, as my dad had seen to it that I was brought up on a regular diet of Goon Shows on the radio.

Nervous as anything, I needn't have worried - realising what a young whippersnapper I was, Spike could not have been more pleasant and I interviewed him over a Chinese meal in Albert Road and ended up with a lovely article.

I was also present for his next appearance, which was generally received as well as his first, except for about a dozen very drink and very voluble sailors - at least, I'm pretty sure they were sailors - who heckled him throughout, until they were finally removed.

After the show, I was briefly able to see Spike, who remembered me from the previous show, but he was really down about the heckling and vowed he would never appear in Portsmouth again - a great shame.

My personal "attachment" to the Kings Theatre had started in the late 1950s, when my mother worked in the box office at the Kings, and also in the box office at South Parade Pier. and in those days she became a friend of Joan Cooper, who, in 1964, together with her husband Commander Reggie Cooper, bought the Kings, at a time when "theatre" was going through its worst patch in a very long time..

Anyone who ever had anything to do with the Kings in the decades after the mid sixties could never forget Joan and Reggie - Joan a former actress and Reggie at times coming across as almost a caricature of himself - which he played to perfection. Between them, they kept the Kings going against all odds, when weaker spirits would have shrunk from the task!

For many years, the original Lady figurine/statue that once graced the cupola, atop the Kings Theatre dome, was missing. Removed at some stage which is not quite clear, probably because the timbers of the cupola were in a poor state and unable to support its weight safely, the Lady simply disappeared and was presumed gone for all time.

Then, purely by chance, it reappeared in a Hampshire scrapyard and fortunately was recognised for what it was; returned to the Kings, it was cleaned up, nicknamed Aurora, after the Greek goddess of the Dawn, and placed on a plinth in the foyer. . In February 2009, after the original rotted cupola had been dismantled and replaced with a new one, a gold-painted fibre glass replica of Aurora was lifted into place, in a complicated operation involving a large crane and assorted scaffolding, to complete the original look once more.

In the past few years, the Kings has undergone a massive programme of refurbishment; owned now by the city council, who stepped in when lack of funds and income looked likely to see the end of the theatres useful days, and bought the building in 2001.

It is now leased to the Kings Theatre Trust Ltd, who originally had leased it on to an operating company called Kings Theatre Southsea Ltd, but this went bankcrupt in 2003, after what had appeared to be a very successful 18 months, and the Trust had to take overall charge of running the day-to-day business of the theatre itself.

It was not the first time that the Kings had seemed about to sink: when Commander Reggie Cooper died in 1987, Mrs Cooper was joined by local businessman Ivor Barnes, but Hampshire County Council had to purchase the building itself and lease it to the pair. The theatre continued to run day-to-day, but it was becoming obvious that the structure needed a lot of work on it and there was no money available to fund this, and only Portsmouth council's intervention bought the time and eventually brought the money, to assure the theatre's future.

Since 2003, over two million pounds has been spent on the theatre, including more than £400,000 raised by a huge fundraising operation; capacity has been reduced to 1,600 (the original capacity was 2,187) to come into line with modern safety requirements, but every effort has been made to keep as much of the original look as possible, and if Harry Irving and Dorothea Baird were to walk into the place today, they would recognise it immediately from their time more than a hundred years earlier.

With luck, were any of us able to come back in another century's time, we too would be able to do the same ...