Minack Theatre

Rowena Cade owned the headland at Porthcurno and in 1929 offered it to a local group staging The Tempest; she and her gardener Billy Rawlings then cut a terraced auditorium into the granite by hand, carrying sand up from the beach below on their backs to mix concrete, and worked on it every winter for the next fifty years. Cade was still hauling beams in her eighties and died in 1983. The stage sits above a drop to the sea, so performances run with gannets and sometimes dolphins passing behind the actors, and the theatre now stages about twenty productions across a season from Easter to September. It is a rare thing in that the setting genuinely competes with whatever is on stage, which directors have to work around.

What you actually see

• The cut auditorium - granite terraces carved by hand over fifty years.
• The Atlantic backdrop - open sea directly behind the stage.
• The Cade story - an exhibition on the woman who built it herself.
• The subtropical planting - succulents and aeoniums in the terraces.

When to go

May to September for performances, which run afternoons and evenings; daytime visits run year-round when no show is on. Evening performances in June and July have the longest light.

Honest expectations

Seats are concrete terraces and cushions are essential; performances go ahead in rain and the audience sits through it in waterproofs. The theatre is exposed to wind off the sea. Parking is limited and the path down to the seats is steep with many steps.

Nearby

Porthcurno beach is directly below; Land's End and Penzance lie west and east.