Modern Theatres 1950 to 2010

The English theatre tradition goes back to Shakespeare, whereas German theatre building goes back to the Italian model. In the second half of the past century, traditions were questioned everywhere. New concepts with frontal stages and large foyers were built, resulting from an international dialogue. In his essay, the author shows the relation between theatre architecture and social artistic context.

In 1960, the management of Birmingham Repertory Theatre outlined their intention to construct a new theatre to replace their early twentieth-century building.

They had in mind the competition that theatre faced from cinema and television, as well as new ideas of staging and the actor/audience relationship. They were also interested in the place of theatre within a modernising cityscape, and the role of culture in everyday life. As a result, they proposed a fundamental re-thinking of the theatre building: ‘The live theatre, if it is to stay live, must in future think along entirely different lines from hitherto.’¹ Birmingham Rep’s search for a new kind of theatre, designed from first principles, evoked the central premise of twentieth-century modern architecture. Modernists typically argued that the architectural styles and strategies of the past were no longer adequate in the face of the century’s apparently unique challenges and opportunities.

Some of the themes evident in the buildings that resulted are the subjects of this brief essay, which, within the limited space available, offers an architectural-historical perspective on British theatres of the second half of the twentieth century. The examples considered here are principally drawn from the United Kingdom, but many of the themes have international parallels.

One starting point might be the sheer diversity of post-1950 theatre architecture. With reference to post-war theatre design in the United States, the historian Arnold Aronson has suggested that:

If there was a general consensus that a new form of theatre was indeed needed, there was most assuredly no single answer to the question, “What form should the new theatre take?” And that multiplicity of answers, in fact, became the answer: there was no longer a uniform style of theatre and thus there could not be a standard model of theatre architecture.²

In these circumstances, theatre design was shaped by the ideas of a varied cast – actors, directors, architects, engineers, and, increasingly, theatre consultants – and in an increasingly international context. The results were bespoke expressions of those ideas. Thus, for example, the new Birmingham Rep of 1971 contrasted with the new Crucible Theatre in Sheffield of the same year.³ Both were ‘producing’ theatres originating their own shows with public subsidy. However, directorial preferences meant that the Rep features a single straight-rake of seating facing a proscenium-arch stage, whereas the Crucible has a ‘thrust’ stage. Externally, the Rep’s concrete arches and expansive glazing (by the architect Graham Winteringham) recall contemporaneous developments in Brasilia.⁴ Meanwhile the Crucible’s angled geometries embody a broader strain of polygonal monumentality advocated by certain 1960s architects.⁵

The modern architecture of Britain’s post-war theatres was sometimes understood to connote the progressive intentions of those who commissioned, worked in, and funded these new buildings.⁶ In the late 1940s and 1950s, Scandinavian examples such as the Gothenburg Concert Hall (1938-40) and Malmö City Theatre (1940-44) offered particular inspiration; both were visited in the late 1940s by the designers of London’s Royal Festival Hall (1951).⁷ These Scandinavian buildings clearly expressed their constituent parts – stage, auditorium, and so on – as distinct masses. They also suggested an emerging design tendency in which the solid wedge of the auditorium was juxtaposed with a more open, glazed front elevation. This balance of mass and transparency inspired the design of the Festival Hall, where the foyers flow around and below the auditorium. It is also found in such West German examples as the new theatres at Münster (1956) and Gelsenkirchen (1958).⁸ These theatres were among the first new professional theatres in post-war western Europe and were viewed with considerable interest by British designers even if, as British visitors often concluded, their vast scale and complex stage technologies seemed unrepeatable in less well-funded contexts.⁹

Theatre as a status symbol

Like their West German counterparts, many of the new British theatres that sprang up from the late 1950s represented a distinctly ‘civic’ conception of the type. From the end of the 1940s, small but growing amounts of public subsidy were made routinely available to British theatre – and especially to the country’s Repertory companies – as a result of the formation in 1946 of the Arts Council of Great Britain and the passage in 1948 of the Local Government Act (which permitted local authorities to devote a small proportion of their ‘rates’ (tax) income to culture and the arts).

The country’s first purpose-built civic theatre was Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre of 1958, which was also the first all-new permanent professional theatre built in Britain since 1939. Looking not unlike a mini-Festival Hall, it was designed to be the focal point of a new public square. A wave of new theatres followed, all around Britain. Although the largest example of the theatre-building boom of the 1960s and 1970s was the National Theatre in London (Denys Lasdun, 1964-76), the story is dominated by developments outside London. Theatres such as Nottingham Playhouse (Peter Moro, 1963), Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre (Renton Howard Wood, 1971), Colchester Mercury (Norman Downie, 1972), and Eden Court, Inverness (Law and Dunbar-Nasmith, 1976) were accomplished in their design; many contributed to a ‘renaissance’ in non-London theatre and achieved notable artistic reputations.

British theatres were frequently invoked in debates about civic pride. For example, Henry Wrong, the first administrator of the Barbican Arts Centre in London, argued in the early 1980s that just as railway stations had during the nineteenth century replaced cathedrals as symbols of a town’s status, so had arts centres taken the place of stations in recent years.¹⁰ At the same time, a ‘civic’ approach could prompt critical comment. In some cases (e.g. Leicester and Derby), new theatres were deliberately constructed in shopping centres, rather than among municipal buildings. The idea was in part to embed theatre in everyday life.¹¹ By the end of the 1970s, more ‘vernacular’, less monumental approaches to theatre architecture were also evident. A ‘domesticisation’ of the theatre is evident in such examples as the Wolsey, Ipswich, by Roderick Ham, who was, with Moro, one of the leading designers of theatres in 1960s and 1970s Britain. The Wolsey consciously evoked the East Anglian vernacular; with its tiled roofs and projecting windows, it suggested a house scaled up to the size of a public building.

Another approach embraced impermanency. During the 1960s, the architect Cedric Price and the director Joan Littlewood explored the idea of a ‘Fun Palace’, a centre conceived not as a static monument but rather as something more flexible and responsive to the changing needs of its users. A framework into which structures could be inserted to accommodate a diverse range of activities, the Fun Palace was to be a key influence on Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ Pompidou Centre in Paris of 1971-77. Similarly representative of a search for the impermanent was the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester (1976), whose metal and glass theatre ‘module’ was inserted into a vast redundant Victorian hall. Meanwhile architectural polish could be abandoned completely in the form of the ‘found space’. Advocated by prominent directors including Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, this kind of venue was typically created within historic, often decaying buildings, the imperfections of which were left on show to create an evocative dialogue between architecture and performance.

If the location and architectural language of a theatre could, therefore, make some deliberate statement, so too could a theatre’s interior spaces. Typical of the period is the provision of increasingly expansive foyers with room for refreshment, display, and socialising, and the opening of these spaces all day, not only at performance times. Similarly typical was the abandonment of the older tendency to segregate patrons’ access to a theatre’s front-of-house areas by ticket price. Key examples include the accomplished Thorndike Theatre, Leatherhead (1969), where Roderick Ham arranged the public spaces as a series of spatially exciting balconies and galleries, connected physically by stairs and visually by the provision of views.

Yet more significant was the rethinking of the auditorium. The early twentieth century saw a growing number of attempts to re-imagine the actor/audience relationship without the perceived separation of the proscenium arch. The intensity of the discussions increased during the 1950s.. Re-thinking the actor/audience relationship could be a thorny subject in which individuals had often-conflicting views, as the protracted discussions which took place between 1964 and 1966 among members of the National Theatre’s Building Committee reveal.¹²

Various arguments were advanced in support of change, including the potential to distinguish theatre from cinema and television by emphasising its three-dimensional, live nature. Such qualities were implicit in the kind of ‘in-the-round’ staging favoured by the director Stephen Joseph during the 1950s and 1960s, and they also informed the ‘thrust’ staging preferred by Tyrone Guthrie. Guthrie was inspired in part by his experience at the end of the 1920s of Terence Gray’s Cambridge Festival Theatre, where the audience and actor inhabited a single space with no proscenium arch, the auditorium being connected to the stage by a flight of steps.¹³

There were nonetheless many who remained convinced of the value of the basic principles of the proscenium-arch stage.¹⁴ One solution to the debate was to embrace flexibility, i.e., to create a space which could be rearranged to accommodate a number of different actor-audience relationships. Such spaces could seem to be especially modern, especially if the changes were carried out by mechanical means (as they would have been in Walter Gropius’ unbuilt but oft-cited Totaltheater project of 1928). Yet while flexible studios were from the 1960s onwards increasingly built on university campuses and as adjuncts to conventional theatres, flexibility at a larger scale has typically proved more difficult to achieve. As a result, ‘formed’ auditoria have remained more typical among larger theatres, perhaps with a degree of flexibility in the forestage area. The Derngate in Northampton (1983) is one of the successful examples to attempt greater flexibility. Its design reprised the idea of movable galleried ‘towers’ previously explored by the theatre consultant, Theatre Projects, in a successful theatre at Christ’s Hospital school (1974); the towers at Derngate were to be moved with air-cushion technology. The result is that the auditorium perimeter can be rearranged to allow theatre, music, arena events such as boxing, and banquets.

Renewal and Tradition

The way in which Derngate’s galleries and walls are ‘papered with people’ locate its auditorium within a line of development that begins in the mid-1960s with the Forum at Billingham and continues in the 1970s with Eden Court Theatre in Inverness and the National Theatre’s Cottesloe (Dorfman) auditorium. In 1984, of the smaller but similar Wilde Theatre opened at Bracknell the designer Francis Reid concluded that this kind of auditorium – by now dubbed the ‘courtyard’ – was ‘the form that seems likely to characterise late twentieth-century theatre building’,¹⁵ and indeed examples continue to be constructed internationally. A key figure in the evolution of this type was Iain Mackintosh of Theatre Projects Consultants, a fan of the galleried theatres of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At Eden Court and the Cottesloe, Mackintosh advocated a densely packed and tiered arrangement of the audience as a counterbalance to the single-tier straight rakes that had been common in the 1960s, Birmingham Rep included. Mackintosh’s work demonstrates the growing significance in British theatre design of the theatre consultant, a role which emerged in West Germany during the 1950s with largely technical responsibilities but which often in Britain also encompassed conceptual matters, especially where architects had little theatre experience. In Britain, Theatre Projects Consultants was founded in 1957. Around the same time, the historian Richard Southern was increasingly finding work as a consultant, his projects including Nottingham Playhouse and, in London, the Barbican Arts Centre. By the 1960s the profession was increasingly organised. For example, the Association of British Theatre Technicians was founded in 1961 as a British chapter of the International Association of Theatre Technicians (AITT). Its Theatre Architecture and Planning committee played a key role in reviewing design proposals to highlight potential functional problems.

How should we conclude this very brief account? One theme which emerges is the growing number of figures involved in conceiving and designing (and operating) theatres. The process often takes in those who may make decisions about funding, actors and directors whose ideas may inform the design itself, as well as architects, theatre consultants, engineers and, increasingly, project managers and ‘cost consultants’. This proliferation of professional roles is not unique to theatre, but it does pose challenges for a type of building where subjective and intangible factors are often accorded as much significance as more measurable kinds of function. A second theme in post-1945 British theatre architecture is that of diversity – that a theatre might equally be a purpose-designed, multi-auditorium complex or an ad-hoc conversion. Continuity, too, is important, whether that be understood in terms of the continuity of history in a ‘found space’, the preference of the Arts Council of Great Britain during the 1960s for traditional high-cultural practices, or the extent to which the tiered ‘courtyard’ auditorium revives something of the Elizabethan inn yard. The survival of the proscenium arch is also notable. Ultimately, however, our conclusion has to relate to the very architecture of theatre. Britain’s modern theatres not only played (and continue to play) a significant role in accommodating and framing performances, but reflect broader debates – about the actor/audience relationship, the design of the modern city, and the place of culture in contemporary society. By looking at the buildings designed for theatre we can therefore start better to understand modern architectural, urban, and social history.

Alistair Fair is ‘Chancellor’s Fellow’ and Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. His book, Modern Playhouses: an architectural history of Britain’s new theatres, 1945-1985, is published by Oxford University Press in April 2018.

1^ Library of Birmingham, MS 978/1/6/1/1, ‘The Birmingham Repertory Theatre: its Present and Future’, November 1960, p. 3.

2^ Arnold Aronson, ‘Ideal Theatres: One Roof or Two?’, in Setting the Scene: Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Theatre Architecture, ed. Alistair Fair (Farnham, 2015), pp. 179-99 (p. 180).

3^ Elain Harwood, Space Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945-1975 (New Haven and London, 2015), p. 419.

4^ ‘Repertory Theatre, Birmingham’, Architects’ Journal 154/51 (22 December 1971), pp. 1431–37.

5^ Philip Goad, ‘Post-war and Polygonal: Special Plans for Australian Architecture, 1950–70’, Architectural Theory Review 15/2 (2010), pp. 166–86.

6^ E.g. Alistair Fair, ‘“A new image of the living theatre”: the genesis and design of the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry’, Architectural History 54 (2011), pp. 347-82.

7^ Miles Glendinning, Modern Architect: the life and times of Robert Matthew (London, 2008), p. 91.

8^ For West Germany, see Elain Harwood, ‘Theatres in West Germany, 1945-70’, in Setting the Scene: Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Theatre Architecture, ed. Alistair Fair (Farnham, 2015), pp. 103-32.

9^ Ibid., p. 126.

10^ Bristol, Richard Southern Archive, 79/1/8-0015/2, undated Sunday Times clipping of c. 1981.

11^ Library of Birmingham, MS 2339/3/4/4, minutes of a City/Repertory/Arts Council subcommittee, 24 November 1960.

12^ Daniel Rosenthal, The National Theatre Story (London, 2013), pp. 92-94; 107-109.

13^ Iain Mackintosh, Architecture, Actor and Audience (London, 1993), pp. 48-50.

14^ Fair, ‘“A new image”’, pp. 369-72.

15^ Francis Reid, ‘Theatre of Change’, Architects’ Journal 179 (6 June 1984), pp. 24–27.