Old Rep

The Old Rep is a theatre located in Station Street in Birmingham, England, managed by Birmingham Ormiston Academy, with the theatre's technical department wholly run by Birmingham Ormiston Academy also.

The Old Rep theatre was built as a permanent home for Barry Jackson's increasingly well established amateur theatre group, The Pilgrim Players, later known as The Birmingham Repertory Company. Barry Jackson funded the construction of the theatre, and established his, by now, professional company there.

It was the original home of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and was the first purpose-built repertory theatre in the UK. It was the creation of Barry Jackson in collaboration with the architect S. N. Cooke, a colleague from the Birmingham School of Art. Both Jackson and Cooke took inspiration from the democratic nature of theatres they had visited in Germany. The design of The Old Rep was particularly influenced by Max Littmann's 1908 Künstlertheater in Munich. Building on a small footprint between Station Street and Hinckley Street meant that the auditorium had to be steeply raked. This feature added to the experience of audience members as no view of the stage was obstructed.