High above the stalls of the Lyric Theatre, lying on her back on a scaffold platform barely a metre below the ceiling, Maria Kowal is applying gold leaf to a plaster rose with a brush made from squirrel hair.

Each sheet of leaf is so thin that a breath would scatter it. She lifts it on the brush, lays it on the sticky surface and smooths it with a soft pad. Then she reaches for the next one. There are, by her estimate, around fourteen thousand to go across the ceiling as a whole. She has been at it, on and off, for eight months.

"People ask how I can do the same thing for so long," she says, without looking away from the rose. "But it isn't the same thing. Every one is a little different. The Victorians who made this weren't machines either."

Three years in the dark

The Lyric has been closed since the autumn of 2023, when a routine inspection found serious decay in the timber trusses supporting its roof. Engineers concluded that the building was unsafe for audiences, and the theatre's final performance of that season — a Christmas pantomime — was cancelled two days before opening night.

What followed was one of the most complex restoration projects the city has seen. The roof was replaced entirely. The auditorium's plaster ceiling, which hung from the old trusses, had to be supported, recorded, partly dismantled and reattached. Seats, carpets, lighting and stage machinery were all renewed. And, for the first time in the building's 130-year history, lifts were installed to give step-free access to every level.

The total cost has been around £11 million, funded through a combination of national heritage grants, council funding and a public appeal that raised more than £1.4 million from over 9,000 donors.

Rebuilding a ceiling

The ceiling was the heart of the project, and its greatest challenge.

Designed in the 1890s, it consists of hundreds of moulded plaster panels — flowers, scrolls, cherubs and a painted central dome showing an allegorical scene of the arts. Over the decades, it had been patched, repainted and, in places, badly damaged by water leaking through the failing roof.

Before anything was removed, the entire ceiling was laser-scanned and photographed in detail, creating a precise record of every panel. Damaged sections were carefully cut out, taken to a workshop on the edge of the city and repaired by a small team of specialist plasterers. Where panels were beyond repair, new ones were cast from moulds taken from surviving originals.

"We had to learn how the original craftsmen worked," says the project's lead plasterer. "Their tools, their mixes, the way they built up layers. You can't restore something properly until you understand how it was made in the first place."

"You can't restore something properly until you understand how it was made in the first place."

The painted dome

The central dome posed a different problem. Decades of smoke from gas lighting, cigarettes and stage effects had left it coated in a dark brown film, obscuring the painting almost completely. Some older audience members had no idea it was even there.

A team of conservators spent months cleaning it, centimetre by centimetre, using swabs and carefully chosen solvents. As the grime came away, the original colours emerged — deep blues, soft pinks and touches of gold — along with details no one had seen for generations, including the faces of several figures who appear to have been modelled on members of the theatre's original company.

"The first time we cleaned a small test patch, the whole team gathered round to look," says the senior conservator. "Someone actually gasped. It was like opening a window."

A theatre for everyone

The restoration has not only been about the past. The theatre's chief executive says the most important change is one audiences may barely notice: access.

The Lyric was built at a time when the cheapest seats were reached by narrow stairs at the back of the building, and wheelchair users could only sit in a small area at the front of the stalls. Now, two new lifts serve every level, and accessible seating is available throughout the auditorium, including in the upper circle.

"For 130 years, where you could sit in this building depended on your body as much as your budget," she says. "That ends next week."

The theatre has also introduced a scheme offering 50 tickets for every performance at £10 to people who live in the city's postcodes with the lowest incomes, as well as free tickets for local school groups at selected matinees.

Opening night

The Lyric reopens on Friday with a gala evening featuring local performers, a youth choir and a specially commissioned short play about the theatre's history. The first full production, a new staging of a classic comedy, opens the following week, and the venue's first Christmas pantomime in three years is already close to selling out.

For Maria Kowal, opening night will be bittersweet. Her work on the ceiling is now finished, and the scaffold that has been her workplace for months has been removed.

She plans to be in the audience on Friday. She has bought a seat in the upper circle — not for the view of the stage, she admits, but for the view of the ceiling.

"I'll probably spend the whole night looking up," she says. "Someone will have to tell me what the play was about."

Tickets for the Lyric's reopening season are on sale now. The theatre will run free public tours of the restored building on the first Saturday of each month.