A Lively Theatre

By Richard Pilbrow

Two theatres for drama

Two drama theatres open this year in New York and London. They are both restorations. In July the “Selwyn” built in 1918 takes off as the “American Airlines Theatre”—home to the Roundabout Theatre Company. Last February the Royal Court, previously home the most trail-blazing English drama since “Look Back in Anger,” re-opened.

My career began as a stage manager in London's West End where many theatres, despite their limited stages, have auditoria that are miracles of compacted humanity. On my first visit to New York in the early sixties, I was amazed by how even more intimate the smaller Broadway theatres appeared. The English Playhouse is comparatively narrow with a proscenium that rarely exceeds 30'0” in width. The auditorium is usually a deep horseshoe with overhanging balconies. Its American counterpart is much wider (perhaps a product of the land plot ratios of New York City) with a wider proscenium opening, a shallower stage and auditorium, and balcony very close to the stage. To the sides the angled, step-down boxes are a ubiquitous feature of an American Theatre and replace the horizontal boxes of the West End.

The American Airlines Theatre

The reborn Selwyn is a fine example of its period. A proscenium theatre with a single balcony, it brings its audience into very close proximity to the stage. In the 1920's the play's action would have been all behind the ‘picture frame,' a confinement that is unacceptable today, so the renovation has had to improve the sightlines to a new forestage with an increase of rake in the balcony seating. The original side boxes on two levels have been replaced and the orchestra rake improved.

The Royal Court Theatre

The new Royal Court is a tiny gem. The proscenium opening is only 21'0”wide. The auditorium is very vertical, tightly wrapped with two balconies. The refurbishment has stripped away the old plasterwork and exposed the Victorian cast iron structure of the balconies and bare brick walls. This rough- hewn feeling contrasted with luxurious new leather bench seating creates both a feeling of a found ‘rough' space and enormous theatrical dynamism.

George Devine and the Sixties

By a stroke of irony in the 1960's there were plans to gut the interior of the Royal Court. All the balconies were to be replaced with a single rake of seating. George Devine, founder of the English Stage Company, believed— as we all did at the time—that balconies were a bad thing. Post-war society believed in social equality, so “good” theatres had seating all on one level as balconies only represented an outdated class system. Boxes with their bad sightlines were supposedly only for upper class ladies to display their charms!

The Royal National Theatre

This was the atmosphere that surrounded the great drama theatre developments of the twentieth century, the National Theatre of Great Britain, the Barbican Theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at New York's Lincoln Center. The National Theatre had been a dream since the time of Bernard Shaw. Sir Laurence Olivier was appointed the Company's first Artistic Director and design on the new building began. An architect Denys Lasdun was selected based on a distinguished record of modern architecture and a professed innocence concerning theatre. At his interview he confessed himself eager to be educated by the Building Committee. And what a committee! Sir Laurence himself, Norman Marshall, Peter's Hall and Brook, George Devine, Michael Elliott, John Dexter, Bill Gaskell, Tanya Moiseiwitsch, Roger Furse—a pantheon of the great and good in British Theatre. All were determined to create a new theatre for drama that would be unsurpassed. At first the theatre was to be adaptable from proscenium to thrust, then that compromise was dropped and two theatres were decided upon. A flexible proscenium theatre and a new form of ‘modified' open thrust-stage theatre. Meetings went on for many months. Unfortunately few members of the committee often agreed with each other, and a view expressed one week was only rarely held subsequently. It was very confusing to an “innocent” architect.

I was Sir Laurence's lighting designer at the time, but upon George Devine's unexpected death, was co-opted onto the committee, apparently to provide a more ‘practical' viewpoint. We did visit several West End theatres with Sir Laurence and a group of actors. Sir Laurence and we ran up and down with tape measures and tried to work out how far away you could sit and still experience great theatre. Sir Laurence finally formed the opinion that he couldn't act to anyone seated more than 65ft away. This dimension drove the design of both the Olivier and the Lyttelton Theatres. Never once did we think anything else about West End theatres other than: "weren't they shabby, restrictive to designers and unpleasant for audiences". The new theatres eventually emerged. Their large stages and sophisticated equipment have allowed many spectacular productions since, but they are far from being intimate theatres and small scale drama is overwhelmed.

Both theatres were built to rigid geometric principles and a conviction that a limited dimension to the furthest seat was all-important. Yet those old theatres that we used to establish this one measurement, were complex and curvaceous. Most importantly, their design was less interested in the distance to the furthest seat, but was focussed upon how many of the audience could be placed how close to the stage. Physical intimacy was their predominant characteristic.

The Barbican Theatre

The Barbican was almost an improvement. It was designed, not by a camel-like committee, but by the then director of the RSC, Sir Peter Hall and his long-time scene designer John Bury. They completed a model that was given to the architect to faithfully realize. They were aware of the need for physical intimacy and used three balconies with side “ski-slope” seating raised one above the other, each stepping forward toward the stage. Theoretically good, but in practice disappointing. An audience seated in the balconies feels disquietingly suspended in space and isolated from the remainder of the audience. Even worse, to bring everybody as close as possible, the auditorium is very wide, far wider than is comfortable for anything other than spectacular productions.

The Vivian Beaumont

By coincidence, across the Atlantic in New York a similar story was unfolding. Lincoln Center was determined to build a “state-of-the-art” theatre for drama and the great designer Joe Meilziner led the development of its design. He argued against an adaptable thrust/proscenium compromise but was overruled. The resultant Vivian Beaumont shares many of the problems of the Olivier. It's very large for anything other than spectacular theatre (indeed its principal successes seem to have been with musicals), its adaptability allows a reasonable semi-thrust, but the proscenium is very poor. The single balcony around the perimeter of the room (like that of the Olivier) feels far from the stage and disconnected from the action.

So what went wrong?

Why did the greatest theatre minds of the age fail? Even further: why is the world littered with overlarge, usually fan-shaped auditorium, barren in feeling, entirely lacking in intimacy—all the product of the twentieth century? Why do old theatres feel so much more “theatrical”? And why do so many actors and audiences prefer the old to the new?

A Brief history

A quick skirmish through theatre history might be instructive.

Greece & Rome

Conventional theatre history begins with the Greeks. Greek theatre was a ritual event in which the whole of free society participated. Theatres grew in size to accommodate vast crowds. In later Rome a debased literary form was overtaken by spectacle and again performance took place before vast crowds.

Of course these are the buildings that have survived. Storytelling, drama, dance and music must have always taken place on a smaller and more intimate scale, in palace, clearing, village square or home. In fact how does an audience gather if there is no building at all? The first spectator stands in front, then as more assemble they gradually surround the performer, first in a semi-circle, then a full circle. Children will crawl through and sit on the ground at the front and as the crowd grows denser, those at the perimeter might climb into a neighboring tree or onto a balcony. What they will not do is stand in straight parallel lines, stretching away from the performer into the distance.

The Elizabethans and Courtyards around the World

But to jump 1200 years, the theatre that spawned the greatest flourishing of drama the world has ever seen was the Elizabethan. The recent rebuilding of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London has been a triumphant success. The astonishing feature is the active role played by the audience, particularly the standing audience in the pit surrounded by encircling galleries packed with humanity. These theatres were to nurture the plays of Shakespeare, but also Marlowe, Johnson, Kidd and many others—perhaps the most glorious period of playwriting ever known. And this theatre form was not unique to Britain. The same period saw similar style “Courtyard” theatres in Spain, France and Germany with Lopa de Vega, Calderon , and Moliere creating timeless drama. Even further afield, China, Japan, Persia and India all saw highlights of creative energy in theatres where the stage was set in a courtyard surrounded by tiered audiences. Societies around the world adopted these three-dimensional spaces ‘clustering' their audiences around the performer as their first places of theatre. And great playwrighting was always the outcome.

Evolution around the Actor and Audience

These courtyard theatres seem to represent the essence of theatre, bringing together actor and audience. Theatre after all is a place not for just looking and listening, but a place of participation, of joining in the creative process, of meeting. In live performance the audience play a vital role that we often overlook with our view of the stage from production desk or wings. An actor, singer, dancer or musician will always respond to their audience. As a producer I always watched the audience. Only when they were in the house would one have any real idea of the play's impact. As a stage manager I vividly remember standing in the prompt corner as an actor would exit. It would either be: “Where did you get that lousy mob out there!” or “Wow! We're flying tonight!” No two live performances are ever the same and it is the audience's reaction that is often the principle difference.

For four hundred years theatres gradually evolved. They moved indoors. Commercial pressures demanded more seats;, even in the vastly popular world of Italian Opera growing to two thousand seats or more. But always with multiple tiers clustered around a central courtyard with singers and actors on a forestage at one end that jutted into the auditorium. The principle action took place in the audience space.

Spectacle & The Picture Frame

Theatre has also always been a battleground between the demands of the word, the performer and spectacle. Generally as theatres grew larger, driven by the ever-growing urban audience, the demand for realistic spectacle also grew. Stages grew bigger and with the demand for more seats the forestage diminished, thus pushing the actor unwillingly behind the proscenium. For the first time this created a theatre of two worlds, that of the audience and that of the separated performer.

Only in these latter decades of the nineteenth century with the development of the cast-iron cantilever was it possible to bring the balconies closer to the stage than in the traditional horse-shoe-shaped opera house. The diminished forestage and advancing balconies, with the constant imperative of bringing all the audience as close to the performer as possible led to the development of the West End Theatres of the late Victorian age, and the early 20th century Broadway equivalent.

The First Revolution—Wagner and Art Theatre

Just as theatre was reaching its zenith of popularity—as the only form of widespread entertainment—with multiple balconies and boxes, Richard Wagner entered the scene. He was a revolutionary in politics as well as in music. He saw his work as that of an artistic merging of music and drama. He seized the opportunity to build a theatre for its performance in Bayreuth. He wished his orchestra to be invisible, so they were lowered and placed partly below the stage. But boxes could see down into this pit, so he decreed their removal. This also satisfied his social objectives to remove the vestiges of class snobbery with people in boxes distracting from his serious work upon the stage. Finally in order that that concentration be complete, all seats must face the stage in a single level of stadium type seating without aisles—the world's first “continental” seating format.

In Britain and the USA toward the end of the nineteenth century, serious devotees of theatre were also growing frustrated with ‘popular' theatre, symbolized by realistic scenery (even with real rabbits in “Midsummer Night's Dream”) and multi-level balconies and boxes. The movements toward naturalism, the emergence of the director's coherent control of production, coupled with this dissatisfaction, led to the desire for a new playhouse. Some sought a return to a Shakespearean simple open platform but others were fascinated with the purity of Wagner's vision. In "The Theatre of Today" by Hiram Kelly Moderwell published in 1914, the author wrote about the newly emerged "ideal art of theatre". He dismissed with "utter contempt" the ordinary "horseshoe" theatres that "make the stage partly or wholly invisible.” He hails the new Wagnerian theatre and in particular Professor Littman of Munich for his new style of theatre (the Kunstler Theatre in Munich), in which "there shall be no bad seats; there shall not even be any worse seats". His "amphitheater playhouse has all its rows nearly parallel to the proscenium and its floor rising at such an angle that every spectator can look clean over the head of his neighbor in front. A new democratic playhouse". The Goodman Theatre in Chicago (1927) was a deliberate copy of the vaunted Kunstler Theatre of Munich. But fifty years later, enthusiasm for the frontal auditorium had waned. With hindsight, there were actually far too many bad seats—almost all those more than half way back — and the lack of encircling audience made the theatre seem more an antiseptic lecture hall than a theatre.

Cinema and the Multi-purpose Hall

But the tidal wave of cinema took the revolution further. Movies captured the world's imagination and swept all before them. In cinema design, the view to the screen has to be frontal. The vestigial side boxes, still popular in the vaudeville houses that were used as early cinemas, were replaced by exuberant decoration. The flickering image on the screen meant that all seats had to face the stage. But in the process the fan-shaped auditorium, with as few levels as possible (to ensure 'modern' democratic seating) seemed to sweep all before it from the late 1920's to the 1970's completely confusing the difference between frontal cinema and three-dimensional live theatre. Architects, engineers and theatre people were all consumed by the urge to build new "democratic" frontal-view, fan-shaped theatre. This came to be coupled with the modern movement in architecture's then fashionable simplicity. The result: many architects of the twentieth century produced theatres that today seem quite dreadful. Vast auditoria with the majority of seats to the rear; with poor acoustics and entirely lacking in any intimacy or ‘theatricality.'

The Second Revolution—Back to the Future

The Thrust and open stage

But parallel to this ‘deadening' of theatre design into a cinema-like form with the audience confined to the passive role of spectators, the movement to break out from behind the proscenium grew. Beginning in the 1880's in England with William Poel, in France with Jacques Copeau, and Russia, experiments proliferated into thrust, arena and other forms of ‘open' stage. These were later taken up in the USA with the work of Nina Vance, the Alley Houston and Washington Arena Stage. It was the English director Sir Tyrone Guthrie who brought the thrust stage to greater popularity. In 1936 after an outdoor performance at Elsinore of the Old Vic Company's “Hamlet” was ‘rained-off' and quickly re-staged in a ballroom, he began to realize that the thrust stage had a dynamic of thrilling potential. After the war his work at the Edinburgh Festival was followed by the creation of the “Guthrie” thrust stages at the Stratford Ontario Festival, Minneapolis, and Sheffield, England. His influence was to be profound, albeit usually modified and compromised from his original vision. It influenced a bevy of “semi-thrust” stages across the American Regional theatre even to the major developments of the National and Vivian Beaumont Theatres. Guthrie had an aversion to excessive scenic or lighting effect. He believed in text, actor and costume taking the stage. But few of his followers held such a puritanical view. For example Sir Laurence Olivier's brief for the Olivier Theatre was for a modified thrust stage but with “full scenic possibility.” He could see no reason why by adopting a new/old form of more vital, open actor/audience relationship he should jettison 2000 years of stagecraft. But Guthrie too was a man of his time. He also was influenced by the then current antipathy to multiple balconies. His theatres either had a single balcony around their perimeter or (in his final return to his “ideal” form in Sheffield) no balcony at all. Years were to pass before the rediscovery of the multi-level courtyard form, the Young Vic and the Cottesloe (the National's third space) that proved that vertical encirclement has a powerful role to play in creating theatricality and intimacy. Recent thrust and arena stages set within a courtyard, the RSC's Swan, Chicago's Shakespeare Theatre, and Manchester's Royal Exchange combine an open stage within a three- dimensional auditorium.

Restorations

It was the restoration of the Theatre Royal Nottingham that opened my eyes to an alternate to the fan-shaped auditorium. The National had just opened, and was an immediate cause for disappointment. The Theatre Royal was a Victorian ruin that underwent a major restoration. Only on opening night did I realize that this was a fantastic theatre! It was typical of all those West End and Broadway theatres in which I worked as a lighting designer and producer. But we would never dream of building one like it anew. Why not? Its encircling balconies massed the audience incredibly close to the stage. The boxes were evidently conduits of energy between stage and audience, linking vertical levels together. It reeked of theatricality, it was amazingly intimate, it was a space vibrant with emotion. It was a revelation! Well, other restorations have confirmed the power of the past. The Geary Theatre in San Francisco and the New Amsterdam in New York are both supreme examples of reborn exciting theatre space.

The New Proscenium

So we set out on a voyage of discovery. How to build with modern architecture theatres that possess the qualities of theatrical tradition: atmosphere, theatricality, and—above all—intimacy. Theatres not simply as places to watch and listen, but places of exhilaration, of feeling, of meeting between actor and audience, places in which the intangible spirit of performance sparks an acceleration of energy. A place where live performance matters.

In Toronto the Bluma Appel converted a Beaumont-style single-level amphitheater into a balconied proscenium, adding 70 seats in an auditorium one third smaller in area. Vertical stacking compresses the audience footprint and aids the interplay of energy. The 900-seat Newmark Theatre in Portland, OR and the 275-seat Leo K Theatre in the Seattle Rep are two examples of extreme intimacy in modern theatres of differing scales.

Flexibility

But nobody wants an antiquarian revival of the past. Of all the arts, theatre, music and dance constantly change and develop. In the olden days theatres were built of wood and plaster. They were frequently altered and remodeled to suit changing fashions of performance. Today's world of concrete and steel is less manipulable, but flexibility must remain a vital ingredient.

The 500-seat Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago is a very intimate theatre. Its form is “American-classic,” but as befits the gritty performance style of the company, it is finished in steel and raw concrete. The whole surface of the forestage and stage is demountable to allow any shape or level of acting area to be created.

The new 500-seat San Jose Repertory similarly has a highly flexible zone between audience and stage where floor, overhead and side boxes may all be re-configured.

In Calgary, the Max Bell Theatre has 700 seats in ‘opera house style' with an exceptionally flexible forestage. Similarly the Derngate Centre in Northampton, England and the Cerritos PAC in California employ air casters to move towers of boxes into various configurations, changing the entire space from concert hall to theatre of various sizes and shape. There is no one ideal form of theatre—but from proscenium to black box a dynamic relationship between actor and audience will support playwright and performer.

2000

Only in the last twenty years has a second design revolution occurred: a return to tradition as a guide to the future. Today's very few successful new opera houses, such as the Glyndebourne Opera House in Sussex, England; Helsinki, Finland; and the Bass Hall in Fort Worth, Texas, are inspired by memories of the eighteenth century. And a new interest in modern, flexible courtyard theatres, that are being built around the globe, owe their inspiration to world theatre's earlier roots in the sixteenth century.

The form of theatre, a form that brings every spectator into vibrant relationship both with the stage and with each other will bring theatre architecture back to life. That form is one that had slowly evolved for three centuries before being lost and then rediscovered over the space of the last one hundred years.

The Royal Shakespeare in Stratford-on-Avon and the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis are both about to embark upon important new theatres. Have the lessons of the seventies been learned? Can new theatres be designed that will build upon our experience of the last twenty years?

Let's reflect upon Peter Brook's words:

“The science of theatre-building must come from studying what it is that brings about the most vivid relationship between people.” (“The Empty Space”)

Our ancestors knew this to be true and today we can once again build lively theatres for lively performance based upon their inspiration.