Theatres seem so important, so permanent. People agonise over their design. There's a mystique attached, a sense that those who get them right are party to a secret knowledge, and anyone else might as well not bother. But there's a different approach. Treat the theatre as a kinetic object rather than a sacred relic, spend $180m (nearly £100m) on it, and bung it inside a hotel next to a casino in Las Vegas. Job done. 
Of course, all this depends on what you mean by "theatre". This is not about Broadway or the National Theatre or the Royal Court. We are in the realm of spectacle. The theatre in question, designed by British architect Mark Fisher, is for the latest knock-your-socks-off show by the giant, international French-Canadian art-circus conglomerate Cirque du Soleil. It is a 1,950-seat theatre designed specifically for one new production, named KĄ, which has to run ten times a week for at least ten years, to cover its costs. Previewing now, it opens for business on Feburary 3. So there is a lot riding on Fisher's industrial-baroque design. The show and the theatre, the set and the action, are essentially all the same thing.
Fisher doesn't design buildings: he does action. You'll find his name these days on shows by the likes of Robbie Williams and Shania Twain, but it's the swashbuckling earlier stuff he's best known for. He did The Wall and Division Bell for Pink Floyd: Steel Wheels and Bridges to Babylon for the Rolling Stones; Popmart and Elevation for U2 - all ultra-ambitious touring sets that moved around in various extraordinary and sometimes explosive ways.
A shame that there wasn't more of that vigour - and money - behind a little show he devised with Peter Gabriel in 2000, the forgettable central spectacular of the Millennium Dome. All I can remember is lots of people in picturesque rags waving their arms a lot, and acrobats performing so high up it defeated the object: you could hardly see them. But let's not be beastly about that. After all, committees of civil servants and politicians are capable of knocking the creative spark out of anything. They are not out of the same box as Cirque founder Guy Laliberté and KĄ director Robert LePage.
Fisher - a man with a satisfyingly mad-scientist appearance, all high shiny pate, unruly sideways-sprouting hair, and giant round spectacles -works out of a converted garage next to his house in London's Pentonville. Though lately he's been mostly in Vegas, totally gutting and rebuilding the theatre in the MGM Grand hotel, sourcing his extraordinary mechanical devices from Canadian mining companies, persuading the management to let him have more space by getting rid of casino slot machines which each make up to $1m a year. Not easy.
Fisher takes me through the design. He's very matter-of-fact, but occasionally allows himself a wry chuckle at some particularly outré coup de theatre he has achieved. Such as his main concept: stage, what stage? There isn't a stage. Instead, you get a big black hole, into which the players - and their props - not infrequently fall, from great heights. "It's all done with these decks that are presented in free space. People fall off them. It really does look amazing. How do you drop people 80 feet? You can't quite credit that it's really happening."
Fisher's playing surfaces don't stay still. There are two big moving platforms, plus three vertical lifts. The main platform, "the big gravity-defying gizmo", as he calls it, is 50 feet by 25 feet and weighs 50 tons. It can rise up and down, revolve, tilt. At one stomach-churning moment it moves completely vertically, changing from being a sandy beach to a cliff: in the process all the sand (actually cork granules) slides off into the abyss. Try that in the West End. When you look at the drawings, and see the kit that makes this possible, you know why the show costs so much.
Cirque's productions, which I must confess I loathe for their concept-album art-circus pretensions and corporate slickness, are not exactly narrative-driven. This one is - there is a plot and a script, some kind of loosely Asian martial-arts yarn about a twin brother and sister separated by warring factions who eventually overcome all odds to get back together again. But it's still not very important, this storyline, since there is as usual no dialogue. The aim is to have a live-action show that is as spectacular as a special-effects movie: impossible things done with real people, before your very eyes. This, I have to admit, is very ambitious.
And for that level of ingenuity, you need the why-not technical wizardry of Fisher. Apart from the hovering-stages trick, he does things like suddenly bring on a complete forest of 80-foot tall trees, made out of corrugated steel, or a huge, sinister "wheel of death" torture machine. And that's before you get to the state-of-the-art computerized light projection techniques that can turn solid to liquid to fire instantly, or even make the audience believe they are looking vertically down on the action.
Like a good rock show, KĄ is structured to start explosively and get steadily more dramatic for 90 minutes, then stop while you are still gasping. That's the idea. Other Vegas hotel-casinos are adopting the idea of such spectaculars - the ill-fated Guggenheim Museum in the Venetian Hotel has closed, for instance, and will become just such a theatre. "By April or May it's going to be like Star Wars there with all the shows," Fisher remarks.
Here's a sobering thought: the equivalent of the entire population of the UK travels through Las Vegas airport every year. And it's not just for the gambling that people flock there from around the world. It's for the entertainment. Which means a particular kind of theatre. Which is why, as Fisher points out, it might just be worth thinking more positively about the current crop of rather controversial proposals for mega-casinos in the UK. "The economic power of what is being proposed is what generates this kind of experience," he says.
Which is undeniable. And although the puritan in me would rather all this happened in Vegas rather than in a probably diluted version in some British provincial city. I'm a bit torn. Yes, Somehow I can get along without Cirque du Soleil, just as I manage without McDonald's. But if Fisher were to be given the chance to build other theatres, that would take things in a new direction. His stadium rock shows were ephemeral architecture: the KĄ project takes him into the realm of semi-permanence. What would a Fisher-designed permanent theatre of spectacle be like? Impossible? Or something entirely feasible, a 21st-century version of the grandest late Victorian and Edwardian variety palaces? Nothing of that sort on the horizon, I suspect. Still, it's an intriguing thought to play with.
www.stufish.com - let Mr. Fisher entertain you.
