There has been a theatre on this site as far back as the 17th Century, when there was a venue called the Vere Street Theatre. The current theatre was built much later in the 1960s, and was originally known as the Royalty Theatre. It was used for a variety of performances, and included some of the strangest features of anything theatre, including a dolphin talk with a real dolphin that could come out of the stage floor. Not surprisingly, this was not a successful time for the theatre, and in recent years has been renamed the Peacock Theatre.