The redevelopment of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, to open in 2010, is a £113 million project to transform the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (original architects: Elizabeth Scott, Maurice Chesterton, and John C Shepherd, 1932). This theatre - which replaced the 1879 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre destroyed by fire in 1926 - was the latest development in British theatre design since Shakespeare went to London. Now listed Grade II*, it was a radical art deco design with many original features. But will they be preserved? For an inspirational vision statement on theatre architecture, see this introduction by W. Bridges-Adams (1889-1965):
THE SHAKESPEARE MEMORIAL THEATRE
STRATFORD-UPON-AVON
Foreword by W. Bridges-Adams, Director of the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival Company, in G.A. Jellicoe, The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, London, Ernest Benn, 1933.
Nothing is harder to design than a good theatre. It conforms to no ordinary conditions; even its shape, as a rule, is unknown to geometrical terminology. It must house a thousand people who are not only to hear and see, but also to think and feel, as one. It is a place of illusion; a large portion of it is supposed not to exist, and the fourth wall of its visible interior is a vast mirror in which we see our lives reflected. It is at once a grand-stand for a spectacle and a family-circle in which a story may be told. It is everything from a temple to a peep-show.
If capacity, acoustics and sight-lines were all, an architect with the cantilever system at his disposal would find his task easy. But this is an elementary part of the business. There are certain modern theatres excellent in such respects which defy you to prove that everyone has not a comfortable seat from which he can both hear and see. Some of them have beauty. But a play is never quite at home in them: they lack theatre-sense. It is as if an atheist had built a cathedral.
As the theatre-builder’s craft has developed, theatre-sense has shewn a tendency to decline. This explains the relative popularity of some of our older London playhouses. In them, the seats are uncomfortable, audibility poor, and visibility worse. But their horseshoe tiers take the stage, as it were, to their embrace, the play’s magnetism runs round the house in an unbroken circuit, and it ‘goes’. The Greek theatre had this quality; the Elizabethan, which was almost a cockpit, even more so. The old Stratford Theatre had it, as any true actor who played there could tell you; it was its solitary virtue. But under the successive influences of masque, of opera, of scenic realism and of the film, the theatre of to-day has begun to lose sight of it.
Moreover, to combine the amenities which modern democracy expects with the old allure that went with gaslight, orange peel and green baize, is no light matter. A volume might be written on decoration. It must be beautiful; it must be entirely self-effacing. Here, paradoxically enough, even the baroque theatre was not unsuccessful. Allegory, sprawling downwards head-first, like Mr Tulkinghorn's Roman, with a trumpet in one hand and a ton of plaster velvet in the other, did somehow contrive to direct your attention to the stage. In this important particular our discreeter moderns have been known to fail.
Hardly less dismaying, especially where a theatre for Shakespeare is concerned, is the problem of providing for our inconstant and widely differing notions of what constitutes stage illusion. The Elizabethans were fortunate; almost as fortunate as Miss Ruth Draper is to-day. For them, time and place were what one said they were; the rest lay with poet, actor and spectator. The nineteenth century was equally happy, if assurance be happiness.
‘Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?’ asks Chorus. The nineteenth century proudly replied that it not only could, should, and called in engineers to prove it. The twentieth, in reaction against realism, sought illusion and, after the war, cheapness in something it called Presentationalism, and found a certain holiness in the apron stage. Quickly tiring of this, it is now turning again to spectacle and the Big Show. So the stream runs (though with cross-currents, since Inigo Jones flourished in the seventeenth century and William Poel in the nineteenth); and so it always will. It is Talma’s ‘four boards and a passion’ against a picture in a frame. Meanwhile Shakespeare is still with us, and the actor carries on.
The task in which Miss Scott engaged in 1927 was to plan a large modern playhouse which would harmonize with its surroundings. Fake Tudor was an evasion of the difficulty which she properly disdained. As to the problems hinted at in the foregoing lines, and the added problem of foreseeing any and every fashion in which Shakespeare may be worthily performed by succeeding generations, - how well they have been solved the patron may see for himself.
The Laughing Audience has collaborated with design teams to procure new theatres or refurbish old ones, as at Richmond and Edinburgh. We can assist commissioners in preparing feasibility studies and fundraising plans – often in a shadow client role. We are inspired by the theatre’s past and present, its study and practice. For the RSC and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 2004, we worked with the RGA Consulting team to produce a heritage access plan for archives and interpretation: see the summary here.
