In the space of five months, we’ve gone from a theatre who couldn’t cover our basic costs to one which now has substantial funding to work with and account for. And as big as these figures seem, they are not enough to do what we want to do, or what the nation needs us to do.

But they’re a start. They lay a strong foundation. And we’re telling you a little bit about how we’re using them in this blog.

So the roof saga was an unexpected element in our planned renovation of the WVS, which focussed on the bathrooms and the foyer. One of the things we knew we were going to have to do was to deal with the front windows of the theatre, and also of the front doors. The main door, a double metal fire door, had seen better days, while not all of the windows were necessary. They are all permanently closed and permanently shuttered—the theatre has been ready for hurricanes for years, we could say. But there were structural challenges around the doors and the windows of the foyers and we knew we would have to deal with that.

As everybody knows who embarks on renovations of any kind, once you start in one place, it’s addictive. Really, what it is is that as you renew one area, the remainder looks even shabbier than before, and if you’re not careful, your job is growing.

People may have thought that our $400,000 fundraising target for this year was ambitious, or they may have considered the contribution of $340,000 we received from the Bahamas government was sufficient to meet our needs, or they may think that now we’ve got it we don’t need anything more.

Far from it!

That figure was what we needed to make sure the Dundas does not have to close its doors before its centenary, but it doesn’t begin to touch everything that we need to do around the premises.

Part of our renovation programme involves moving our office. Currently it resides in the main theatre building, towards the back corner—a space where it has been ever since the building was converted into a formal theatre in 1978. Long-term plans for the property involve moving the administrative and box offices out of that building altogether. Ultimately, we plan to build dedicated spaces for those offices. In the meantime, we are moving the offices into what was originally the caretaker’s cottage.

This month (May 2025), we finally pulled the trigger on the air-conditioning system. As a cultural non-profit company, we got out customs duties waived, and we put our order in!! Work has AT LAST begun!

One of the things we found out about the Black Box was that there were trees impacting it. When Struckum donated their termite-ridding services back in 2022, they were not able to fumigate the Black Box because of these trees. So one of the first things we did when we started to collect contributions was invest in some tree trimming and tree removal, mostly around the Black Box and the caretaker’s cottage.

The first instalment of the money arrived on March 5, and renovations began in earnest. Work began on the Winston V. Saunders theatre as soon as we could mobilize. First up: repairing the bathroom roof which had been damaged three years earlier in Hurricane Isaias. And we couldn’t repair the roof without refurbishing the bathrooms, could we? So the bathrooms were completely gutted.

The first thing we did was build the Treehouse Deck: an outdoor space converting some of the grounds that were not easy to reach owing to a tangle of tree roots into a deck where things can happen. We started building it in March 2025. Watch its progress below.

We began this year in a state of near-despair. Our main theatre had been closed since 2020, and there was no hope on the horizon of its being able to re-open. The cost was beyond our capacity. We were producing theatre—good theatre—but all we had was a 70-seat theatre which had no hope of raising the kind of revenue we needed to make even the most basic repairs we needed. Audiences knew that if they were at the theatre and there was a rainstorm, the actors might appear onstage with buckets or umbrellas, because the Black Box leaked over the stage area. And the 85-year-old main theatre was crumbling. Trees were growing out of walls.

And then: A raffle was launched, and the government of The Bahamas came through with enough capital investment for us to rejuvenate!!

We went to work making the theatre the space of our dreams.