Empress Ryarna Theatre

Empress Ryarna Theatre, Bara ti'Emla

The Empress Ryarna Theatre is a Hesperidesian theater in Bara ti'Emla, Trellin. It was built in the 1880s, during the Pons Culturalis period, as a symbol and channel of cultural exchange between Trellin and the Empire of Exponent. The building was largely funded from the Exponential imperial treasury and designed as a collaboration between architects Publius Aratus of Divinitia and Kehérin Burar of Kzint. It was named for Ryarna, Duchess of Tkena, the consort of Exponential emperor Maximinius V and great-grandmother of Gaius Manius, who began the Hesperidesian theater project. In 1913, the theatre was seized by the provincial government on behalf of the Sidereal Crown, which had instituted a policy of isolationism across Trellin.

Today, ownership of the theatre remains with the provincial government. It is the foremost venue for opera in Trellin and is a centrepiece of the theatrical community in Bara ti'Emla, being used as a performative space for an array of theatrical genres. It is, in the words of the definitive twentieth-century guidebook to Bara, "unusual as the most lavish expression of and idol to the arts to stand apart from the Emlan acropolis, instead forming a focal point of its own and drawing the traditional artistic communities into that more modern urban space, an imposing yet unassuming link between past and future."