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Melbourne Theatre Company proudly announces that the name of the main auditorium in the new MTC Theatre in the Southbank Cultural Precinct will be the Sumner Theatre in honour of the Company’s Founding Director, and one of the most influential figures in modern Australian theatre, John Sumner AO, CBE.

The MTC Theatre, currently under construction at the corner of Southbank Boulevard and Dodds Street in Southbank, will feature the 500-seat state-of-the-art Sumner Theatre, as well as a rehearsal room/studio performance space capable of seating 160, function and VIP rooms, a full café and various bars, foyers and display areas.

“If we have seemed in any way farsighted in creating the finest and most flexible proscenium arch theatre in Australia, it is because John Sumner is the giant on whose shoulders we have sat,” said current MTC Artistic Director Simon Phillips. “What could we possibly call the auditorium of the new MTC Theatre but the Sumner Theatre? We owe him a great debt for which this tribute, in comparison, is meagre.”

“I am very honoured and humbled to have my name on the new theatre auditorium for Melbourne Theatre Company,” said John Sumner. “It’s tremendous and I really feel very moved.”

John founded Melbourne Theatre Company (then the Union Theatre Repertory Company) in 1953 and remained its driving force until his retirement in 1987. In establishing Australia’s first professional repertory company, he created a model for every successful state theatre company to this day, while his energetic management and exacting principles of stagecraft injected an ethos of tough professionalism that became the standard for Australian theatre as a whole.

During those 34 years, he produced some 500 plays and directed more than 100 of them, starring such notable actors as Zoe Caldwell, Patricia Conolly, Noel Ferrier, Frank Gatliff, Barry Humphries, Reg Livermore, Monica Maughan, Frederick Parslow, Alex Scott and Frank Thring.

John also directed the Company’s first Australian play, the landmark international success Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler, and encouraged the development of two generations of Australian playwrights, including Richard Benyon, Ron Blair, Alex Buzo, Alma de Groen, Nick Enright, Alan Hopgood, Jim McNeil, John Power, John Romeril, Alan Seymour and David Williamson.

The MTC Theatre is being built as part of a combined project between the University of Melbourne and the Victorian State Government and is expected to be completed in late 2008 in readiness for opening in the first half of 2009.