The acoustics of the outdoor Shakespeare theater—Rutland, UK

The outdoor Shakespeare Amphitheatre at Tolethorpe (Rutland, UK) is an unusual form of theater in that the actors perform in the open air while the audience is enclosed in a lightweight Teflon fabric auditorium. This unique format produces some unusual acoustic properties and problems. The early reflection patterns from and around the stage are quite different from a normal enclosed proscenium theater. The Teflon walls and roof, while effectively acoustically transparent at low and lower midfrequencies, become highly reflective at high frequencies. This not only impacts the transmission of sound through the structure but also speech transmission and intelligibility within the auditorium. The hyperbolic curved‐roof surfaces and flat parallel walls were found to cause undesirable sound focusing and reflections detrimental to speech intelligibility. The acoustics of the space was investigated by means of both directional and binaural time‐domain spectrometry techniques as well as more traditional acoustic me...