A LIVELY THEATRE

By Richard Pilbrow

There's a revolution afoot in theatre design, believes architectural consultant RICHARD

PILBROW, that takes its cue from the three-dimensional spaces of centuries past.

The 20th century has not been a good time for theatre architecture.

In the years from the 1920s to the 1970s, the world became littered with overlarge, often
fan-shaped auditoriums that are barren in feeling and lacking in intimacy--places that are
seldom conducive to that interplay between actor and audience that lies at the heart of the
theatre experience. Why do theatres of the 19th century feel so much more "theatrical"?
And why do so many actors and audiences prefer the old to the new?

More generally, does theatre architecture really matter? There are some that believe that
as soon as the house lights dim, the audience only needs to see and hear what happens on
the stage. Perhaps audiences don't hiss, boo and shout during a performance any more,
but most actors and directors know that an audience's reaction critically affects the
performance. The nature of the theatre space, the configuration of the audience and the
intimacy engendered by the form of the auditorium can powerfully assist in the formation
of that reaction. A theatre auditorium may be a dead space or a lively one. Theatres
designed like cinemas or lecture halls can lay a dead hand on the theatre experience.

Happily, the past 20 years have seen a revolution in attitude to theatre design. No longer
is a theatre only a place for listening or viewing. There's a new recognition that theatre is
also a place of feeling, emotion and participation and that the architecture must play a
critical role--in a way that our ancestors took for granted.

TWO NEW/OLD THEATRES FOR DRAMA

Two new drama theatres have opened this year in New York and London. They are both
restorations. In July the Selwyn, built in 1918, took off as the American Airlines Theatre,
home to Manhattan's Roundabout Theatre Company. Last February, London's Royal
Court Theatre, housed in a space that dates back to 1888 and home to such trailblazing
English drama as Look Back in Anger, re-opened. Both represent high points of
American and British theatre design.

And they exemplify some key differences between playhouses on the two sides of the
Atlantic. Many theatres in London's West End (where my career began as a stage
manager), despite their limited stages, have auditoriums that are miracles of compacted
humanity. On my first visit to New York in the early '60s, 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 feet 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 a balcony very
close to the stage. To the sides, angled, step-down boxes are a ubiquitous feature of an
American theatre, as opposed to the horizontal boxes of the West End.

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 1918 the action of
a play presented at the Selwyn 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 side
boxes on both orchestra and mezzanine levels that had been removed in years past have
been restored and the orchestra rake improved.

The new Royal Court is a tiny gem. Its proscenium opening is only 21 feet 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.

Their differences notwithstanding, these two theatres perfectly exemplify the intimacy
and subtlety of design that has becometypical of the finest theatres at the dawn of the 21st
century.

SIR LAURENCE & THE '60S

In the 1960s 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 that time--that balconies were a bad thing.
Postwar British society believed in social equality, so "good" theatres had to have seating
all on one level. Balconies only represented an outdated class system. Boxes with their
bad sight lines were supposedly only for upper-class ladies to display their charms!

This was the atmosphere that surrounded the three great drama theatre projects of the
20th century, the National Theatre of Great Britain, the Barbican Theatre for the Royal
Shakespeare Company and the Vivian Beaumont Theater at New York's Lincoln Center.

The National had been a dream since the time of George 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, the two Peters (Hall and Brook),
George Devine, Michael Elliot, John Dexter, William Gaskill, 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." 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 the subsequent one. 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 visited several West End theatres (like the Royal Court) withSir Laurence
and a group of actors. Sir Laurence and the rest of us ran up and down with tape
measures and tried to work out how far away one could be from the stage and still
experience great theatre. Sir Laurence formed the opinion that he couldn't act to anyone
seated more than 65 feet 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 completely 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 visited to
establish this one measurement were complex and curvaceous. Most important, their
design was focused less upon the distance to the furthest seat and more upon how much
of the audience could be placed how close to the stage. Intimacy--both physical and
emotional--was their predominant characteristic.

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 longtime scene
designer John Bury. They completed a model that was given to the architect to faithfully
realize. They were aware of the need for 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.

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 Jo Mielziner led the development of its design. He argued against an adaptable
thrust/proscenium compromise, but was overruled. The wonderfully intimate drama
theatres of Broadway were ignored. The resultant Vivian Beaumont shares many of the
problems of the Olivier. It's too 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? What occurred
that such braveand important--attempts could be so flawed?

A SKIRMISH THROUGH HISTORY

A quick skirmish through theatre history might be instructive.

Conventional theatre history begins with the Greeks. Theatre then 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
performances took place before vast crowds.

Of course these huge buildings are the ones 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.

How, in fact, 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. 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 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 triumph. 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.

Elizabethan theatres were created to nurture the plays of Shakespeare, but also those of
Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd 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, as Lope de Vega, Pedro Caldern de la Barca and Molire created their
timeless drama. Even further afield, China, Japan, Persia and India all experienced
periods of great 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. And great
playwriting was always the outcome.

These courtyard theatres seem to represent the essence of lively theatre, bringing together
actor and audience. Theatre, after all, is a place not for just looking and listening, but for
participation, for joining in the creative process, for meeting. In live performance, the
audience plays 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
his or her audience. Only when the audience is in the house can one have any real idea of
a play's impact. As a stage manager, I vividly remember standing in the prompt corner as
an actor would exit. The response would either be: "Where did you get that lousy crowd
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 principal difference.

For 400 years theatres gradually evolved. They moved indoors. Commercial pressures
demanded more seats; even in the popular world of Italian opera, theatres grew to 2,000
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 principal
action took place within 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 speaking, as theatres grew larger, driven by the ever-
proliferating urban audience, the demand for realistic spectacle also grew. As 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 encapsulated performer.

Only in the latter decades of the 19th century, with the development of the cast-iron
cantilever, was it possible to bring balconies closer to the stage than in the traditional
horseshoe-shaped opera house. The diminished forestage and advancing balconies (with
the constant imperative of bringing the audience as close to the performer as possible) led
to the development of the West End theatres of the late Victorian age and their early-
20th-century Broadway equivalents.

But let's take one step back--and to the side--to Germany to look at a concurrent
development: Just as theatre was reaching its zenith of popularity as a universal
entertainment form, Richard Wagner came on the scene. Wagner was a revolutionary in
politics as well as in music. He saw his mission as the artistic merging of music and
drama. He seized the opportunity to build a theatre for the performance of this merger, or
Gesamtkunstwerk, in Bayreuth. He wished his orchestra to be invisible, so it was lowered
and placed partly below the stage. But those in the boxes could see down into this pit, so
he decreed the boxes' removal, an action that also satisfied his social objective of
eliminating class snobbery and visual distractions. Finally, in order that the spectator's
concentration be complete, Wagner decreed that 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 U.S. toward the end of the 19th century, serious devotees of theatre
were growing frustrated with "popular" theatre, symbolized by ever-more-realistic
scenery (Herbert Beerbohm Tree even opted for real rabbits in his Midsummer Night's
Dream at Her Majesty's Theatre, London) and multi-level balconies and boxes. This
dissatisfaction, coupled with the emergence of the director's coherent control of
production, led to the desire for a new playhouse. Some sought a return to a simple,
Shakespearean open platform; others were fascinated with the purity of Wagner's vision.
In The Theatre of Today by Hiram Kelly Moderwell, published in 1914, the author
dismisses with "utter contempt" the ordinary "horseshoe" theatres that "make the stage
partly or wholly invisible." He hails the new Wagnerian theatre, in particular the Kunstler
Theatre in Munich, in which "there shall be no bad seats; there shall not even be any
worse seats." This "amphitheatre 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. But 50 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. These
deficiencies will be remedied in the two new theatres for the Goodman that are about to
open this fall in Chicago.

Soon 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. Intimacy is achieved with the close-up. A twinkle in the eye may be 30 feet in
width, totally unlike that of the living human actor. The vestigial side boxes, still popular
in the vaudeville houses that were used as early cinemas, were replaced by exuberant
decoration. The triumph of movies helped the fan-shaped auditorium, with as few levels
as possible (to ensure "modern" democratic seating), become ubiquitous from the late
1920s to the 1970s, 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 theatres. This came to be coupled with the then-
fashionable simplicity of the modern architectural movement. The result has been many
theatres that today seem quite dreadful: vast auditoriums with the majority of seats to the
rear, entirely lacking in any intimacy or "theatricality," and with poor acoustics to boot.

THE SECOND REVOLUTION-BACK TO THE FUTURE

But parallel to this deadening of theatre design into a cinema-like form with the audience
confined to the passive role of spectators, a movement was afoot to break out from
behind the proscenium. Beginning in the 1880s in England with William Poel, in France
with Jacques Copeau and in Russia with a burgeoning avant-garde, experiments
proliferated with thrust, arena and other forms of "open stages." These were later taken
up in the U.S. by Nina Vance in Houston and Zelda Fichandler in Washington, D.C.,
leading to the establishment of the Alley and the Arena Stage.

But it was the English director Sir Tyrone Guthrie who brought the thrust stage to
greatest prominence. In 1936 after an outdoor performance at Elsinore of the Old Vic
Company's Hamlet was "rained-off" and quickly restaged in a ballroom, Guthrie 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 Festival in Ontario, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and in Sheffield,
England. His influence was to be profound, although his original vision was almost
inevitably modified and compromised.

Guthrie had an aversion to excessive scenic or lighting effects--he believed in text, actor
and costume taking the stage. But few of his followers held such a puritanical view. And
Guthrie, too, was a man of his time. He 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, in 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 multi-level courtyard--the RSC's Swan, Chicago's Shakespeare Theater and
Manchester's Royal Exchange--combine an "open" stage within a three-dimensional
auditorium.

It was the restoration of the Theatre Royal Nottingham that opened my eyes to an
alternative to the fan-shaped auditorium. It was 1978. The National had just opened and
was an immediate cause for disappointment. By chance I attended the opening night of
An Evening with Ken Dodd (a popular English comedian) at the Theatre Royal, a
Victorian ruin with two balconies that had undergone a major restoration. Only as I
watched the play unfold did I realize that this was a fantastic theatre! It was typical of all
those West End and Broadway theatres in which I had 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 Theater in San
Francisco and the New Amsterdam in New York are both supreme examples of exciting,
reborn theatre spaces.

But nobody wants an antiquarian revival of the past. Of all the arts, theatre, music and
dance are the ones most intimately wed to constant change and development. 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, particularly in that
crucial zone where stage meets auditorium.

The 500-seat Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, a very intimate theatre, is a perfect

example. Its form is "American-classic" (very reminiscent of the Selwyn), but as befits
the gritty style of the company, it is finished in steel and raw concrete. The main acting
area is the forestage within the auditorium, but the whole floor of forestage and stage is
demountable to allow any shape or level of acting area to be created. Similarly, the new
500-seat, two-level San Jose Repertory Theatre has a highly flexible forestage zone
where floor, overhead and side boxes may all be reconfigured.
At the end of the 20th century, theatres around the world are returning to the principle of
clustering audiences as closely to the stage as possible--not as slavish imitations of the
past, for sightlines must be improved to modern standards, but nevertheless bringing
audiences into a vivid, lively relationship to each other and the stage. If theatre is to
survive and flourish, it must offer audiences some unique quality--and it can: Liveliness,
the interaction of live actors and living audience, is the one element that theatre alone
possesses in the face of all its multimedia competition. While there is no ideal form of
theatre, every type, from proscenium to experimental open-stage studio, will benefit from
a dynamic relationship between actor and audience that fosters the work of playwright,
composer and performer.

Peter Brook put the proposition clearly in his book The Empty Space: "The science of
theatre-building must come from studying what it is that brings about the most vivid
relationship between people." Our ancestors knew this to be true, and today we can once
again build lively theatres for lively performance based upon their inspiration.

September 2000 American Theatre by Theatre Communications Group, Inc.