Rowena Cade bought the Minack headland for £100 after the First World War and built a house on it; after an open-air Midsummer Night's Dream in a nearby valley in 1929, she offered her cliff garden for The Tempest and set about making the acting area and seating herself. With her gardener Billy Rawlings she built the theatre into the granite by hand — hand tools, concrete mixed with beach sand she carried up in sacks, the occasional stick of dynamite — etching seat-backs with the names of past productions using an old screwdriver, and kept at it into her eighties. Since 1976 the theatre has been run by an independent charitable trust that receives no external funding; members of Cade's family still sit among its trustees. Up to twenty weeks of professional and amateur productions play each summer above the sea at Porthcurno, and outside performances the theatre and its sub-tropical gardens are open to visit year-round, with an exhibition telling Cade's story.
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