This is a one page article from the magazine Picture Post, with photography by Felix H. Man.
The Alexandra Theatre, at 65 and 67 Stoke Newington Road, opened on 27 December 1897 as ‘The Alexander Theatre and Opera House’. It was an architecturally significant building and could seat at least 1,700 people. After changes of ownership, from about 1922 on, it was mainly used as a cinema. It showed live plays as well as films from about 1934. After the war, from 1945, it found difficulty in obtaining live productions and was used both as a boxing arena and as a venue for Yiddish productions. It became known as the Yiddish Theatre for a while, but closed down in 1950 and was demolished in 1960 to build a block of flats.
The photographs of the theatre were taken by Felix H. Man (1893 – 1985), whose portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery (NPG x29114). His original name was Hans Felix Sigismund Baumann. Felix Man was a refugee from Nazi Germany, an active photo-journalist from the aftermath of the First World War, who had emigrated to London from Berlin in 1934. He was the Chief Photographer for Picture Post from 1938 to 1945. ‘The Lights Go up in London’, a 1945 photograph, is in the Tate Gallery. After the war, he began to collect lithographs and he is regarded as an important innovator in European photojournalism.
Jewish Miscellanies 