The Tower Theatre Company is a performing non-professional acting group based in the St Bride Institute (on the site of the former Bridewell Palace), in the City of London. The building also contains the Bridewell Theatre, which is used for the majority of Tower Theatre Company performances.
The group presents about 18 productions each year in London, either at their base theatre, or at other small theatres in the London area. During the summer months they also perform touring productions, with regular appearances at the open-air Théâtre de Verdure, which is in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and at the Minack Theatre in Cornwall.
The acting company was founded, as the Tavistock Repertory Company, in 1932 at the Tavistock Little Theatre in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury (and so has nothing to do with the town of Tavistock in Devon). In 1952, it moved to its own premises in Islington at Canonbury Tower which included a 156-seat theatre known as the Tower Theatre. Over the years it has mounted nearly 1500 productions. The Tower Theatre's productions have always been mounted in publicly licensed theatres, with tickets sold to the general public rather than simply to members. The company mounted early productions of End Game by Samuel Beckett (1961, the first ever production to be designed by William Dudley) and The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter (May 1959). Both playwrights became major supporters of the Tower Theatre Company in later life. Famous actors to have worked with the company include Michael Gambon, Sian Phillips, Tom Courtenay and Alfred Molina
The lease in Canonbury expired in 2003 and since then the company has been searching for suitable new premises. It commissioned a new theatre at a site just off Curtain Road, in Shoreditch, London Borough of Hackney, but due to funding difficulties, it has now abandoned plans to proceed with the project. However, it is expected that another arts charity will be building the new theatre on the site, broadly to the same plans.
On 6 August 2008 archaeologists from the Museum of London excavating the site, prior to construction, announced that they had found the footings of a polygonal structure which they believe to be the remains of the north-eastern corner of The Theatre's foundations.