The plaster is drying again on the Gaiety Theatre renewed. After six years of renovation, it opened on Thursday; reviews are favourable. And its long journey from the heart of the genteel, racially exclusive Mall to the home of an art gallery, a museum, a multi-purpose hall and an amphitheatre in a bustling, crowded modern city is worth noting. Founded, among other reasons, to safeguard the intellectual property of London dramatists, it used to take in enormous sums —

Rs 10,000 a night, sometimes — and, in 1896, produced as many as 29 plays. But it fell on hard times in the 1960s; only one play was produced that entire decade, even though it had been thrown open to Hindustani theatre as early as 1928.

But, for once, something that inspired geniuses from Kipling to Amrita Shergil to Prithviraj Kapoor to K.N. Saigal — who started off as a musician in its pit — was not allowed to die. Prithviraj’s son Shashi, and his wife Jennifer Kendall, asked the man who designed Bombay’s Prithvi Theatre, Ved Segan, to restore the Gaiety. Twenty-five years later, it’s done, opening with a Kathak recital. History, decay, private enthusiasm, government effort: a route that could well be duplicated elsewhere.