The Empire strikes back

The redevelopment of London's Hackney Empire is nearing completion. Jay Merrick takes a journey into the venue's glorious past and, on a site visit, finds reasons for being optimistic about its future

Something's going down in Mare Street, the main road at the heart of the London Borough of Hackney. And it wasn't – as if by stereotypical cliché – the two bored looking Rastas having their doings checked out in Reading Lane by no less than six policemen on a sunny morning last week. Charlie Chaplin knew this place well and his ghost must have looked on with wry interest. Hard times, indeed, for some.

But the tableau would not have held his gaze for long. Across the square, opposite the shiny new Hackney Museum and alongside the sweeping horizontal lines of the Town Hall, something else is being fronted up; something that's going to give Mare Street a bigger rep than the bizarrely chic Wetherspoon pub and the £25m Ocean club opposite. We speak of the one and most verily only... ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for... the Hackney Empire!

Well, almost. Standing, booted and hard-hatted, in the gods with artistic director, Roland Muldoon, all is dust and a dense cat's cradle of internal scaffolding. Visualising what the auditorium will look like when it opens at the end of July is difficult. It remains, though, a wonderful physical experience. How did the Empire's architect, Frank Matcham, know that this space, with its vertiginous upper rakes, would deliver acoustics that caused Arup's sound engineer to murmur: "Perfect." ? Did Matcham sense that the atmosphere within the clasp of the balconies would become legendary, and so much so that – as Muldoon put it – "everybody shuts the fuck up, up here".

Matcham knew what he was doing. Between 1890 and 1915, he and his two proteges, Bertie Crewe and WGR Sprague, designed and built more than 200 theatres in Britain. There are 25 left, and the Empire is one of the two or three greatest. When it opened its doors in 1901, the opulence of its design, its 3,000 capacity and the first all-electric specification, must have seemed like the last, expiring breath of Victorian architectural excess. In Frank Matcham: Theatre Architect, by Brian Mercer Walker, the cumulative effect of the theatre is described perfectly as "a riotous assembly of ideas; a toy for Ludwig II".

Matcham was more than a toy boy. He was an innovator whose architectural touch was founded on a rare order of instinct rather than academic excellence. He may have purloined the form of the Empire from the great Italian opera houses, but he used a steel frame to pull it off – possibly the first time this structural solution was used in a British theatre. The way he set out these frames was excellent: they produce semi-cantilevered balconies which only required pencil-columns to the rear. Result: sight-lines undisturbed by pillars. He was up for newness. At the London Coliseum, Matcham's masterwork, the architect concocted a vast triple-revolve stage whose concentric tables could be rotated at 20mph.

His overriding effulgence remained rampant, though, and made a huge impact on Mare Street. The Empire's main façade – designed in a huge rush – was an absurdly grandiose statement: the mass of brick and terracotta, the semi-circular arch above the entrance, set between domed twin towers crowned with flambeaux. But that was just a taster. You had to go inside to get Matcham's full monty. Here, he deluged the balcony-fronts, ceiling and secondary forms with Moorish, rococo and Gothic motifs. And a painted script above the benches at the top of the auditorium which read: "No shouting, no spitting". One hopes they did nothing of the kind when Marie Lloyd sang "My Soldier Lassie" – though her suggestive delivery of "Come into the Garden Maude" is likely to have provoked a bawdier reaction.

The audiences who file into the small foyer in July, past the relief-portraits of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, will find much the same theatre. There has been some manipulation of seating arrangements – notably in the gods and at the very back of the stalls – but Matcham's auditorium remains as it was, even if Muldoon continues to fret about colour schemes. "We've had some arguments about that," he admitted. "They keep asking me what I want, and when I tell them they say they're not sure. When Mecca ran the place as a bingo hall up until 1986, they had some very strange colours – purple, green, that kind of thing. If you look back to 1901, before modern lighting, you had to have light colours. It's the reverse now."

Oswald Stoll, the managing director of Moss Empires Ltd, didn't give a damn about paint colours at the end of the 19th century. He wanted a profit not only from his new theatre, but from the land development that went with it. He issued a £50,000 share prospectus and was pleased to learn that Matcham put the cost of building the theatre, and shops and flats on surplus land, at £36,000. That didn't stop Stoll from cutting costs – and triggering furious redesigns – at the last minute. Basement dressing room? Out. Steep, pitched roofs with ornamental crests facing the Town Hall? Out. Oh, and Frank, another thing: reduce the Mare Street façade by 17ft. These machinations remind us that architecture is never only a ring-fenced question of design; it's about a process. And for Matcham, no two processes were the same. His theatres were not churned out from a pattern book, like the rococo repeat exercises of C J Phipps; he went for something different almost every time. His designs were eclectic: he took the phrase "variety palace" literally, and we can – thanks to £15m in funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Arts Council and a raft of private supporters – enjoy this blast from the past for decades to come.

Even so, it took Tim Ronalds Architects to solve a problem that not even Matcham could have dealt with. The only thing about the Empire that has proved completely unsuitable in the modern era are its backstage specifications. The answer was a modern flytower, and Ronalds has delivered a good one, 15 metres higher than the stubby original. "This used to be an all-hemp house," mused Muldoon. "When the Almeida came here with Ralph Fiennes' Hamlet, it took us two weeks to get everything in. The only great thing about the Empire then was its inefficiency. And when we had the Royal Ballet, they asked how many showers we had. One, I said."

The architects have dealt sensibly with other aspects of the Empire's redevelopment. They have not messed around unduly with the façade running from the original, ornate entrance elevation to the corner of the Town Hall square. But they have done a Matcham on the elevation facing the square, with the words "Hackney Empire" whacked up in huge sans serif letter-mouldings. Oswald Stoll would have loved the pizzazz of this touch. Though the Empire was never the technical and physical wonder that the London Coliseum turned out to be, the words that he once used to describe the giant of St Martin's Lane can, shortly, be applied to the grande dame of Mare Street. The Empire will be the "Theatre de luxe of London, the pleasantest family resort imaginable."

The age of empire: 100 years of music, drama and laughter

Opening its doors in the heyday of music hall, the Empire brought acts from all over the world to the people of Hackney – the "queen of the music hall", however, the svelte Marie Lloyd (near right), lived just round the corner from the theatre. Lloyd, with shrewd psychology, would open her shows by gazing demurely towards the hoi polloi high above the stage in the gods and singing the first line of "The Boy I Love is up in the Gallery". It is part of Empire lore that south-Londoner Charlie Chaplin, on stage from the age of five, played the venue before heading off to Hollywood.

Between the wars, burlesque, reviews, plays and concerts competed with variety for the public's attention – Louis Armstrong came over from New York's Harlem to play. The punters flocked to the theatre to see the stars of the silver screen in the flesh – or at least a facsimile of them: a tattered handbill found during the recent refurbishment of the gallery declares "Hollywood Doubles! Now in its 4th Year."

Before the dawn of the television age, it provided the opportunity to see entertainers made famous by the radio and recording industries, the likes of Charlie Chester, and Tony Hancock (right), that genius of radio comedy, whose droll mutterings came over crystal clear because of the building's superb acoustics.

In its time, the Hackney Empire has served as bingo hall and television studio, centre of Black theatre and comedy-circuit stopover. Liberace was photographed in tears in a dressing room after being outed by the Daily Mirror. Orson Welles used the place as a studio while shooting F for Fake. Ralph Fiennes delivered his Hamlet from its boards. Just before 2001's closure for refurbishment, it was the perhaps unlikely setting for A Beat Weekend, held in homage to Jack Kerouac and his crew of angel-headed hipsters. Now the Hackney Empire is on the road again.