The Egmore Museum Theatre is set to undergo renovation with plans to increase its capacity and provide a better ambience for the facility, Tamil Culture Minister ‘Ma Foi’ K. Pandiarajan said.
Built in 1896 by the British, as a replica of the Globe Theatre in London, the building is a heritage structure and an example of the Indo-Saracenic style of architecture.
The Museum Theatre has 558 seats in a tiered-seating arrangement. This is likely to be scaled up and work will be undertaken to improve the acoustics.
“The work is part of the Asian Development Bank’s funding proposal of ₹110 crore where the moment we give the utilisation certificate for the earlier two pending works that we have taken support from the Central government, they will provide ₹15 crore out of the Central government’s direct subsidy for the museums. We will be using this for renovating the Museum Theatre,” he said.
“We are going to use that for conservation-cum-upgradation of the Theatre. This includes renovation…of course acoustics is very good… we want to scale up the building without losing the heritage value,” he said.
The Minister said concept preparations and presentations by architects are being undertaken now to renovate the building without disturbing the heritage value of the structure.
Mr. Pandiarajan said a project report has been readied for a complete ‘Re-imagining Chennai Museum’ at an estimated cost of ₹128 crore. “We are implementing this, piece by piece and the interpretation centre built at a cost of ₹2.5 crore has just started functioning,” he added.
