Opening night was “wonderful,” Mr Sambrook added.<\/p>\n
“The big satisfaction was seeing what I had drawn actually come to life and work as I thought it was going to.<\/p>\n
“I’m very, very proud of it. When I go into the auditorium, when it’s full, when it’s packed, I feel touched by it, that what I’ve designed is full, and there’s 600 people in there enjoying what the various directors have put on the stage.”<\/p>\n
Mr Sambrook \u2013 who was born and bred in north Staffordshire and still lives locally \u2013 has retained a connection to the building, and has been consulted on alterations and extensions in the intervening years.<\/p>\n
It was part of the building’s ethos that theatre was made there “by local people, for local people, but also representing local voices and local people on the national and the international stage,” according to its creative director, Theresa Heskins.<\/p>\n
She described her job as being “the best job in the world,” with her own time at the theatre reaching two decades just a few months after the theatre’s milestone anniversary in 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Opening night was “wonderful,” Mr Sambrook added. “The big satisfaction was seeing what I had drawn actually come…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344341,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-344340","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}