It takes a mouthful of qualifiers to establish this claim to fame. There's a theater from the 1700s that is...ready for it?
...
the oldest theater in the world that regularly uses original 18th-century stage machinery.
The theater is in Stockholm, on the grounds of Drottningholm Palace, on a beautiful little island that can be reached by ferry (or car, for the less romantic approach).
The venue stages productions that use the original 18th-century stage machinery, which was built in 1766.
To change the scenery, stagehands use hand-operated wooden winches, ropes, and pulleys. For special effects, they turn to the original mechanical wind, thunder, and wave machines.
Here's a video shown to visitors to reveal the behind-the-scenes workings.
Makes one wonder. Why? How did the theater's operators manage to preserve that outdated equipment? How did they resist the temptation to pitch it all out and modernize?
The answer is that after its first century or so of productions, the theater people lost interest in it. The space ended up being used as a warehouse. It was forgotten that the building had been a theater in the past.
But in the 1920s, it was rediscovered and preserved. Now it's a unique celebration of the past.
