An arresting black-and-white photograph of a stuffed giraffe is not, perhaps, the starting point you would expect for an exhibition relating the history of Oxford Playhouse.

The exhibition at the Museum of Oxford, called Roars to Applause, has been put together by Don Chapman, retired theatre critic of The Oxford Times and author of Oxford Playhouse: High and low drama in a university city, which appears in paperback this month.

The exhibition is constructed around a timeline which flows through panels featuring highlights from each phase of the theatre’s existence — many readers will know that it celebrated 70 years in its Beaumont Street premises last October.

There are portraits of the people most important to its development, some spectacular costumes and costume designs, programmes, press cuttings and other ephemera.

The first section — on the early years (1923 to 1938) — explains the giraffe.

“It was the prize exhibit in the Big Game Museum on Woodstock Road,” said Don.

“A man called Charles Peel had been shooting game since he left Eton, and by the 1900s he had a vast collection of skins, which became the museum.”

It was very popular but Peel moved to Devon and could not supervise it from a distance, so it was sold and the giraffe given a new home in Exeter.

Freddie Ballard, one half of the local estate agency, and a leading light in the Oxford City Dramatic Club, decided to convert the Woodstock Road building to stage amateur performances between auction sales.

At this point the woman who is regarded as the founder of the Playhouse, Jane Ellis, a London actress, stepped in, wanting to find somewhere she could put on plays herself and thereby ensure a succession of meaty parts.

Her boyfriend discovered the Woodstock Road building and she (“a very forceful young lady but not the world’s greatest actress”, in Don’s words) was able to persuade J B Fagan, who she had worked with in London, to come to Oxford and direct the newly-formed Oxford Players.

“He was Belfast Irish,” said Don. “Very well-known — he brought Pirandello to Oxford and put on a wonderful Cherry Orchard, which transferred to London.” However, although he attracted some of the best actors of the era, including a young John Gielgud, Fagan was unable to make the company pay and left Oxford for Hollywood, leaving the theatre to become, briefly and bizarrely, a mini-golf course.

In 1930, three young actors took it over and formed the Oxford Repertory Company, but their middlebrow programme was no more successful financially than Fagan’s highbrow one, despite the efforts of talented actors such as Joan Hickson and Margaret Rutherford — a photograph shows the latter got up in a distinctly unbecoming headdress for a Christmas show. The theatre closed again in 1934 and was rescued temporarily by a partnership of dons and businessmen before a Christ Church and RADA graduate, Eric Dance, the possessor of a useful inheritance, got involved as an actor and director and had the Playhouse built on its present site.

Characterised by Don as absolutely devoted to his theatre but rather aloof (perhaps because he was homosexual at a time when it was advisable to stay firmly in the closet), Dance died in a Japanese POW camp in 1943.

His Playhouse continued to flourish and the 1938-1956 period of its existence was one of its most successful.

“During the war people were clamouring for entertainment,” said Don, “and post-war, the Playhouse hung on longer than most provincial theatres.”

In 1956 a new company, the Meadow Players, with a new director, Frank Hauser, took to the Playhouse stage.

“He was hugely respected by actors and had a long innings but found it no easier than his predecessors to make a go of it, even though several productions transferred to London,” said Don.

These included Sartre’s Kean, with Alan Badel and Felicity Kendal, and the Russian playwright Arbuzov’s The Promise, with Ian McShane, Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, scenes from which appear in the exhibition. Another photograph shows Dirk Bogarde and Hermione Baddeley in Anouilh’s Jezebel, and there are costumes from the same period: Barbara Jefford’s cream and gold cloak, worn as Cleopatra in the Shakespeare play, produced in 1965, and, from the following year, the dress that Judi Dench wore playing Silia opposite Leonard Rossiter in Pirandello’s The Rules of the Game. Mustard-yellow, with a black-trimmed jacket, it has a jet-beaded buckle and a matching hat.

From1961, Hauser got some finance from the university, which used the Playhouse for student productions — most notably Dr Faustus, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (pictured above) — but still he could not make it viable, so in 1974 the running passed to yet another company, Anvil Productions.

They, also, came up with successful shows — there are photos, for instance, of Gayle Hunnicutt and Richard Wilson in Dog Days, and you can see a beautiful shell-pink silk dress, complete with twinkly undergarment, worn in Pygmalion. In 1987, however, with government cuts in university funding, the theatre again faced ruin and had to close.

Its recent history, run by a trust and directed by Tish Francis and Hedda Beeby, has been happier. Having re-opened in 1991 as a receiving house, it started to mount its own productions, beginning with the late and much-lamented John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father.

Pantomimes were re-introduced, and a lottery grant obtained to modernise the building. It is very much to be hoped that a similarly successful plan can be put together to enable the Museum of Oxford to survive, if city council funding is finally withdrawn in 2010.

Roars to Applause runs from March 14 to May 10 at the Museum of Oxford, St Aldate’s, Oxford OX1 1DZ . Admission is free. Open Tuesday-Friday 10am-5pm, Saturday and Sunday, noon-5pm. Call 01865 252761.

Oxford Playhouse: High and low drama in a university city by Don Chapman, (pbk £9.99) is published by University of Hertfordshire Press ISBN 978-1-902806-87-7