What we do know is that today, the Swan, in the once-despised Victorian building, is regarded as near-perfect, even for modern theatre; that The Other Place provides the kind of flexibility many directors and actors crave; while Scott’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre of 1932 is regarded as almost wholly imperfect. And as the RST and the Swan adjoin back-to-back, there’s a problem.
So I go to Stratford to meet the RSC’s director, Adrian Noble, and his development director, Jonathan Pope, and we walk around the site, this unique theatrical campus. “The bottom line is that the theatre doesn’t work,” says Noble. “We know why it doesn’t work, and what needs to be done about it. Since 1986 when the Swan opened, that has been our most popular theatre, not the main house. We need the new theatre to be as tight, as hot, a place as possible. I want the walls to be lined with humanity.”
The Swan does this very well. For the new main house, the task is to make a 1,050-seat auditorium - smaller than the 1250 of the present house - that can work with a Shakespearian thrust stage as well as a conventional proscenium arch. The interior layouts now being drawn up show the audience wrapped round the thrust stage, very like the original Globe. Noble and his team - including Iain Mackintosh, the theatres specialist also involved in Glyndebourne, the rebuilt Royal Court in London, and the Lowry complex in Salford (two brand-new theatres, one large, one small, placed back-to back - sound familiar?) are starting from the stage and working outwards from there.
The problem is this: in the present theatre, actors and audience are effectively in two separate rooms, divided by the proscenium arch. You cannot remove that arch because it is structural: it holds up the theatre. As Scott designed the auditorium seating, those in the stalls have the further handicap of not being able to see the floor of the stage. It gets worse. Because of the layout of circle and gallery, the audience in the different areas cannot see each other. There is no sense of shared experience. Noble has done the best he can by building the stage outwards a little beyond the proscenium, and by altering the rake of the stalls as far as possible (the theatre for years had a raked stage instead, which created its own problems, not least in transferring productions elsewhere).
But today, the aim of directors from Peter Brook to Stephen Daldry is for actors and audience to share the same space, breathe the same air: in contrast, the present theatre is more like a big cinema. And then there are the well-documented problems of tiny front-of-house and backstage spaces. The Swan, for instance, has no backstage area at all, and the main house very little.
The footprint of the 21st century new house is now established, but not yet, Noble and co categorically state, its external appearance. But we have an idea of the way Van Egeraat’s thoughts are going. The rough sketches that won him the RSC job in a 1998 competition show a distinctly Elizabethan assemblage of Globe-like cylindrical forms, linked by a pitched-roof rectangular building reminiscent of a timber-framed mansion of the period. The idea is also to reinstate the riverside walkway in front of the new theatre, and throw a pedestrian bridge across the Avon to the water meadows (and car parks) opposite. There are also plans to calm the rat-run of the road that runs past the theatres. Another problem: because so much of the economy of the town is tied up with Shakespeare, it would be economic suicide to completely close down during rebuilding.
If Noble can win over the conservation lobby (which is already making growly noises), then the first step will be to build the enlarged, adaptable Other Place - with 650 seats or more, making it bigger than the Swan, which will not close. This is a radical shift in emphasis between the three houses, and no doubt partly reflects Noble’s desire to transfer productions to West End theatres of similar capacity, now that the RSC has withdrawn from its previous London home at the Barbican.
Originally just a tin shack, The Other Place is growing into a big theatre by stealth. Nobody will pay a blind bit of notice to its design, good or bad. And with that in place, demolition can begin on the main building. Its replacement, in contrast, will come under intense scrutiny. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be another grandiose architectural mistake.
