Chrome Plugin "Get Rid of the New and Annoying Facebook Image Preview" does just that!
I wrote a post a while ago about a
greasemonkey script for Firefox that allows you to get rid of the annoying theater picture viewing mode on Facebook. Well now for all you Chrome fans out there you can get rid of it too. Just use the
Get Rid of the New and Annoying Facebook Image Preview plugin for chrome. Just install and enjoy theater free image viewing on Facebook.
As several people in the comments pointed out you can hit the reload button in your browser to get rid of the theater view, but you have to do that each time you click an image. This plugin and the script for Firefox gets rid of it for good forcing Facebook to load the old view.