Copper Hall

Copper Hall stands on Scholar's Reach and is, the Collegium insists, not a theatre. It was raised for prize-givings, instrument trials, guild exhibitions and lectures with demonstrations, and for performances needing apparatus no ordinary stage could supply; a moving drawing shown here may outdraw a sermon and still be entered as a proving demonstration. Its galvanic horns came out of these demonstration halls, and at its benches Lucia Saye, a yard family's daughter born around 4598, learned to play them and formed the Last Lanterns at eighteen. The Collegium still records the band's first nights as experiments.

It is now the High South's great secular stage, giving concerts, touring plays and full opera with a confidence Oxford thinks faintly improper. Its chief draw is Milo Crow, still young, an instrument maker with a showman's instinct, whose devices pass every test as optical experiments and are pure entertainment to everyone watching. After a demonstration the Hall sells presentation pieces and little mechanical novelties, and the queue forms while people are still clapping. Below the Hall is the coffee room, kept for demonstrators and patrons by Mistress Sarah Fordham, where Hester Pyecroft, Warden of the Concord, is to be found at whist for small sums. Assay Day, 9 June, is the Hall's great night.

The Last Lantern went from here to London's Southbank Rooms in 4618, in a performance Cambridge thinks overblown, and the yards still claim the song. This autumn the Broken Sample's trial book holds sixty pounds on whether the proving rooms will pass Crow's new device, meant for November, for an optical experiment or turn it away as apparatus, and someone has lately staked twenty pounds at long odds that it will be refused.

Book early for Assay Day, and go down to the coffee room if you want a patron. Bring something to stop your ears: the galvanic horns are louder than anything else in the realm.