The first play, 'The Tempest', was performed on the cliffside garden theatre Cade built at Minack, Cornwall, on 6 August 1932.
On 6 August 1932, a local drama group staged a production of Shakespeare's The Tempest on a natural grassy terrace above the sea at Minack Point, near Porthcurno in Cornwall. The performance took place on a rudimentary stage that Rowena Cade and her gardener, Billy Rawlings, had carved and levelled from the granite cliffside earlier that year, after a local am-dram society expressed the wish to perform the play with the sea as a backdrop.
This modest outdoor performance marked the founding moment of what would become the world-famous Minack Theatre. Cade, then in her late thirties, had spent months hauling turf, rock, and materials by hand and with the help of local workers to fashion terraces and a stage area overlooking the dramatic granite cliffs and the Atlantic Ocean.
The success of this first performance encouraged Cade to continue developing and expanding the site over the following decades, hand-building seating, steps, and elaborate Celtic-inspired ornamentation directly into the cliff face, often using only rudimentary tools, sand and cement carried up from the beach below. It represented an extraordinary feat of solo determination and physical labour by a woman working largely outside the professional construction and architectural trades of her time, and it laid the foundation for a theatre that continues to operate today as a unique fusion of nature, art, and human perseverance.