The Roxy Theatre and the Little Theatre Club, Mombasa

 

The Little Theatre Club came into existence in the late 1940s and still survives!

But before the Little Theatre Club (built in the 1940s) and the Regal and Majestic (built in the 1930s) there was the Roxy Theatre on Kilindini Road.

Amazingly we grew up in Mombasa without knowing about the Roxy Theatre!

It served as both a cinema and theatre!!

Before the Regal and Majestic was built, the Roxy Theatre was a popular venue for amateur theatre productions (Jahazi Vol 8 Issue 1 2019). Roxy and other theatres of the time showed a series of the lightest of almost exclusively British plays and revues, by both professional touring and local amateur groups, punctuated very occasionally by an obligatory Shakespeare or Sheridan production (A History of East African Theatre Volume 2).

The Roxy Theatre was also a cinema! Edward Rodwell indicated that,” the Regal was not the first cinema; there was the Roxy, opposite PWD headquarters in Kilindini road. There the projectors worked by a man turning the handle. The lighting came from two carbons that provided an electric flame rather like an oxy-acetylene burner. The same process could set fire to film.” (from: The Regal, ‘a fast and furious place’... The Standard, Friday September 27, 1985).

More about the fast and furious place later!!