Museum showcasing stage where Romeo and Juliet debuted reaches completion

An east London museum will allow the public to see the theatre where Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is believed to have first been performed.

Some four centuries after the Elizabethan Curtain Playhouse staged its final plays, the theatre’s archeological remains are nearly ready to go on show in Shoreditch as the team behind the Museum of Shakespeare prepare to open the building’s doors.

Designed by architect firm Perkins&Will, the museum will allow visitors to walk across a floating glass viewing platform above the Playhouse’s remains – where Henry V is also believed to have received its original staging.

It promises the public an immersion into a "fantastical retelling" of a day in the life of the nation’s most enduring playwright, culminating in an opportunity for visitors themselves to perform.

The museum experience is to be delivered by creative studio Bompas & Parr and fits inside a mixed-use urban quarter that also delivers more than 221,000 sq ft of workspace, 412 homes and 39,000 sq ft of shops, restaurants and bars.

Sunand Prasad, principal at Perkins&Will, explained: "The Stage project is a great example of the intelligent evolution of an urban quarter to create accessible, permeable and attractive space for people’s use and enjoyment. Built layers from several centuries, now repurposed, have been woven together with substantial new flexible mixed-use space gathered round a public plaza, to create the largest public space ever in Shoreditch.

"The discovered remains of the 16th-century Curtain Theatre that was London’s first Shakespearean playhouse, displayed in a new building that itself creates an amphitheatre, brings a magical extra dimension to the making of this new place for the busy neighbourhood."

No date has been announced for opening, but the space is expected to open to visitors next year.

The Curtain Playhouse is first recorded as welcoming theatregoers in 1577, and was the main venue for Shakespeare’s plays before the Globe, better associated with the playwright, opened at the end of the century.

It is believed that the Curtain Playhouse continued staging plays until 1624.