It is a shame that this theatre - which was a competition winning design, the first significant building in the UK to be designed by a female architect, who was also a member of the high-achieving Scott architectural dynasty- should not have turned out better. As it is, it is a curiosity rather than a classic. And this was pretty much how it was viewed right from the start. Go to the Architectural Review of the time, and you find a somewhat patronizing study of the building that tries hard to find good things to say about the place. The AR’s writer, J.C. Squire, describes the theatre as: “in spite of its size, homely and pleasant, and, in spite of its modernity, completely neighbourly.” However, Squire cannot help reality creeping in here and there.

He slyly quotes other critics describing it as a “Soviet Barracks” and a “Jam Factory”. He is ever so slightly waspish about the interior décor: “worthy of Stockholm Town Hall”. And even then, even in 1932, he finds the front-of-house and back-of-house accommodation unduly cramped. The bars are too small, he says, and so are the dressing rooms, cloakrooms and so on. It was true then, and it is embarrassingly true now, despite ad-hoc alterations and extensions down the years.

It’s interesting to see how much like the later Bankside Power station (now Tate Modern, by Giles Gilbert Scott, another member of the dynasty) the architecture is. Interesting, too, to read Squire laying into the original Shakepeare Memorial Theatre of the 1890s, which had burnt out to a shell, hence the competition for a new theatre. The old theatre, though Romantic to a fault, is very pleasing to our eyes today, being so clearly influenced by (though not actually from the hand of) William Burges. But for Squire, it was “that bogus, half-timbered, fretted, fretful affair which was pathetically meant as a tribute to Stratford’s antiquity…The new building is honesty set against well-meaning fraud.”

And yet - Squire goes to view the ruins, which were screened by a new Scott loggia, and finds, not well-meaning fraud, but “a severe, an austere, circle of good, solid, smoke-streaked brick which would do credit to the Forum of Rome, and would be officially opened by Signor Mussolini…”

So: Fascist architecture in the Italian mode. Who knows where Squire’s political sympathies lay in 1932, but, that fascinating innuendo aside, he is saying that the fire has cleansed the building and that all it needs is a serviceable roof to make it function well. Otherwise, he says, leave it as a noble ruin. In a hundred years, he predicts, people will love it. Revealing sentiments: for the old theatre was indeed rescued and re-roofed, but it did not take until 2032. In 1986 it re-opened as the Swan. Though whether Squire would have approved of Michael Reardon’s Jacobean-model galleried timber theatre, very successfully built within its smoky walls, we shall never know. As for the experimental black-box theatre of The Other Place - the RSC’s third auditorium, a short walk down the road - that was not the kind of theatre that happened, in those days