Rowena Cade: All the Stones a Stage

Rowena Cade: All the Stones a Stage

Exploring the life and legacy of The Minack theatre's creator.

Image by kind permission of the trustees of the Minack Theatre CIO

Perched above Porthcurno, where the sea carves into the coast, the Minack Theatre feels born of myth. An open-air stage of salty air, emerald waters and a sky of evolving colour – no set designer could compete. Shaped by the hands of Rowena Cade – tall, weathered, magnetic – a woman who quietly drew others into her vision. 

Born in Derbyshire in 1893, Rowena lived a sheltered life until the First World War scattered her family and led her west. In the 1920s, she and her mother bought the entire Minack headland and built a granite house on the cliff’s edge, using the surrounding stone from the coastline. There she was quickly drawn into a group of creative people and designed costumes and sets for local community productions.

In 1931, aged 38, she offered the cliff at the bottom of her garden for a performance of The Tempest. What then began as a single production became the work of a lifetime.

Granite was hauled, sand carried up from the beach in sacks – coaxing a theatre from the land. She made concrete with the sand and over time in her early years sculpted structures for specific productions – pillars, thrones, the great dais in the centre of the stage – now better known as the fish slab. Etched with Celtic designs, carved with a screwdriver before it hardened. Sand became scenery.

That first winter, she laboured with gardener Billy Rawlings. Materials were scarce – only what they could salvage from the land itself. They shaped terraces from tumbled boulders, shovelled earth from ledges above and fitted each stone into place by hand. It was cold, muddy work on a near-vertical slope above the Atlantic.

Over the decades, the Minack grew: granite walls, an access road and a 90-step path from the beach. Even during wartime, when the theatre fell silent, she is said to have crawled under the barbed wire to cut the grass that then covered the stage. As time went on, though her bones stiffened with age, she kept building – working well into her mid-eighties.

She wasn’t overtly sentimental about the Minack, though she devoted her life to it. She didn't have an overarching vision that she was striving to achieve, its development was more organic than that. She invited both amateur and professional companies to perform, never seeking recognition – only to bring life to the cliff. And that life continues to this day.

Image by kind permission of the trustees of the Minack Theatre CIO
Image by kind permission of the trustees of the Minack Theatre CIO
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