Luxurama Theatre

The Luxurama Theatre was a theatre and film venue in Wynberg, Cape Town.

Also known as The Luxurama or The Lux.

The theatre was built in 1963 by the Quibell Brothers, originally a company of building contractors, on land they owned in Wynberg, Cape Town. The venue opened in 1964 under the management of Ronnie Quibell.

For a while (1964-67) it was run as an “open” entertainment venue, exploiting a weakness in the apartheid legislation of the time to allow performances attended by multi-racial audiences. This situation allowed it to be used both for controversial plays (e.g. Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, produced by Leon Gluckman and Leonard Schach was performed to multi-racial audiences in 1964), and performances by visiting overseas artists such as Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, The Troggs, etc who came out to the country on condition they could appear before non-segregated audiences.

In 1967 the gap in the law was closed and the theatre was forced to conform to apartheid laws. For this reason Dusty Springfield cancelled her tour that year. Others (e.g. Adam Faith, Percy Sledge and Peaches and Herb) still performed there for a while in the 1960s.

Thereafter it became an occasional venue, showing low-grade films and used as a political meeting place by the United Democratic Front and other groups.

In 2015 the Baxter Theatre Centre and Alistair Izobell presented a musical tribute to the venue, called Remembering the Lux. Devised and directed by Izobell with a cast featuring himself, Terry Fortune, Terry Hector, Loukmaan Adams, Niesa Abrahams, Leslie Kleinsmidt, Giempie Vardien, Nur Abrahams and Felicity Keran, accompanied by a 5-piece live band.