Geometry and Atmosphere

Theatre Buildings from Vision to Reality

C. Alan Short, Peter Barrett, Alistair Fair, Monty Sutrisna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351934091
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Drawing on detailed design, construction and financial histories of six prominent Performing Arts buildings with budgets ranging from £3.4 million to over £100 million, Geometry and Atmosphere presents unique and valuable insights into the complex process of building for the arts. Each theatre project, from tailor-made spaces for avant-garde companies to iconic and innovative receiving houses, yields surprising and counter-intuitive findings. For each of the six projects, the authors have interviewed all those involved. Combining these interviews with exhaustive archival research, the authors then provide cross-case analysis which is distilled into guidance for all stakeholders as they transform their initial vision into built reality. In particular, the book challenges the technical focus of existing design guides for the Performing Arts by suggesting that current practice in briefing and design does not serve the Arts community especially well. It shows that there is a need for an approach in which the focus is firmly rooted in the delivery of the driving artistic vision. As well as being of interest to architects, urban designers and those involved in theatre studies, this book will be useful to other sectors where public money is spent on major building projects.

1. ‘Almost as important as jobs, housing and education’: the Context of the Publicly Funded Arts in Britain

Alistair Fair

The theatres featured in this study received contributions towards their capital costs and to their ongoing running costs from central government sources and from local authorities. This brief chapter summarizes the history of public subsidy for the arts in Britain as an introduction to the case studies.¹

In essence, the practice of public support for the arts was established in Britain during the Second World War, when the potential of cultural activities to engender solidarity in the face of adversity was recognized by the creation of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) in 1940.² CEMA’s remit was varied;³ in the case of the theatre it included the provision of financial support for professional touring productions.⁴ Such productions received a wide audience, if only because other forms of entertainment were lacking,⁵ and prompted thinking as to how the idea might be extended into peace-time. On this subject, some, including the economist J.M. Keynes, had already advocated a role for the state in supporting the arts.⁶ The eventual result was the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain, granted its Royal Charter in 1946. The Arts Council operated on the basis of an ‘arm’s length’ process, in which it acted as an independent distributor of the money provided by the government. Its initial remit in the case of theatre was largely limited to subsidy for companies and productions, rather than contributions towards new buildings or the refurbishment of existing ones, not least as the sums available were relatively small.

One consequence of the establishment and gradual expansion of public subsidy for the arts was that the dominance of the commercial touring theatre circuits was challenged. Arts Council policy in the 1950s and 1960s favoured non-profit-making theatres with resident Repertory companies for whom even limited revenue grants could provide a useful degree of stability.⁷ Such Repertory theatres usually comprised a group of actors who originated and presented their own productions. They had developed before the First World War in cities including Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow, and some had experienced considerable success between the wars.⁸ Subsidy was often perceived as a ‘rubber stamp’ of approval. For example, at Sheffield, the receipt of Arts Council subsidy from 1960, together with the granting of formal association in 1963, prompted the Repertory Company to increase their operations and ultimately led them to commission the new Crucible Theatre, which opened in 1971.⁹

In 1956, the Arts Council supported some thirty companies, by 1970 around fifty, and the amount of money available increased seven-fold between 1952 and 1963, facilitating longer rehearsal periods and a better standard of production (fig. 1.1).¹⁰ The director at Sheffield, Colin George, noted that no longer would the term ‘Repertory’ be associated with theatres whose stage sets fell apart during productions,¹¹ while at Leatherhead, Hazel Vincent Wallace commented that ‘the old regime of “tatty rep” has gone for ever, killed by the competition of television and the higher standards … demanded by a far more discriminating public’.¹²

Fig. 1.1 Arts Council revenue grants for selected regional theatres, 1958-72 (based on figures given in the annual reports of the Arts Council)

A belief in the improving nature of the arts was sincerely held by some in government, notably Jennie Lee, who, shortly after taking up Ministerial responsibility in 1965 noted that

we have accomplished only half a social revolution.
… Too many people are culturally semi-literate, through no fault of their own … The opportunity to enjoy art has been mostly restricted to people with money and leisure. I believe it is one of the duties of a Socialist government to change that.¹³

Between 1963 and 1971, the size of the Arts Council’s annual grant was trebled, from £2.73m to £9.3m.¹⁴ One beneficiary of this funding increase was the increasingly battered touring sector. In 1970, the Arts Council took over the Dramatic and Lyric Theatres Association, reforming it as an in-house operation under Jack Phipps that supported travelling groups such as Ian McKellen’s Actor’s Company and the Prospect Theatre Company (which had been co-founded by Iain Mackintosh).¹⁵ The results of this particular development were mixed. The number of major touring venues had already declined from 255 in 1920 to some 24 in 1964,¹⁶ and the advent of support for a limited range of touring groups in some ways actually harmed those operating on a commercial basis in that overall guarantee and fee levels were lowered across the sector.¹⁷ It was only during the late 1970s and 1980s that commercial touring enjoyed a real renaissance, with such productions as the ‘blockbuster’ musicals of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber contributing greatly to the success of groups such as Apollo Leisure, which expanded from a single Oxford theatre to become a major force.¹⁸

More significant in terms of this particular study was the Arts Council’s growing interest during the 1960s in the buildings in which the arts were housed. CEMA’s wartime tours had already highlighted the paucity of adequate venues for drama around the country,¹⁹ and Arts Council reports on the subject in 1959 and 1961 showed that matters had not improved.²⁰ Partly this state of affairs was the result of post-war austerity, in which building for the arts was unlikely to be a major priority when houses and businesses needed to be reconstructed after wartime damage, and partly because, with television in the ascendancy, the mood was very much one of ‘theatre in crisis’.²¹ The Local Government Act of 1948 had, it is true, permitted local authorities to impose a sixpenny levy on the rates for the support of the arts,²² with it being possible to spend the money not only on what were termed entertainments’, but also buildings, including concert halls and theatres. Yet while these provisions could produce impressive results, such as in Coventry (where the left-wing city council’s concern with the cultural well-being of the local population anticipated Jennie Lee’s later views and led to the establishment of the Belgrade Theatre as the first all-new professional theatre to be built since 1939),²³ in practice few authorities ever availed themselves of anything like the full sixpenny rate,²⁴ not least because funding the arts was often contentious. Sustained debates in the Coventry press in the 1950s reveal the opposition of some councillors to the principle of the subsidized arts,²⁵ while in Nottingham, the then part-built Playhouse (fig. 1.2) was almost sold by the city authorities to a commercial theatre group in the early 1960s.²⁶ The 1959 and 1961 reports recommended that the Arts Council adopt a greater role in offering support for building projects as one way to improve conditions. The result was the ‘Housing the Arts’ programme, initiated in 1965.

Like Arts Council subsidy generally, ‘Housing the Arts’ was a responsive programme. Grants were awarded to a wide range of projects, from small improvements to existing buildings to whole new theatres. Schemes hoping for awards were assessed on the basis of various factors, including the applicant’s proposed artistic policy, the functional suitability of the projected building or alterations, the applicant’s ability to raise capital funds from other sources, the revenue subsidy implications of the scheme, and the need for the Arts Council to ensure an approximate balance of provision around the country.²⁷ By 1972, some £2.5m had been spent on theatres.²⁸ The sums available to any project were capped at a maximum of a third of the total cost and clients had to look elsewhere for the balance of their funding – to local authorities, charitable foundations, business, or the local community.²⁹ In the case of the Crucible Theatre, for example, ‘Housing the Arts’ contributed some £300,000 towards the total, which was then one of the largest grants it had made.³⁰ As with revenue grants, capital funding through the programme was again effectively limited to the non-profit sector, though commercial organizations could receive money for improvements that would allow them to host Arts Council-supported companies.

Fig. 1.2 Nottingham Playhouse, workshop in 1963

By the 1970s, a wide variety of theatre groups received regular revenue funding from the Arts Council. Indeed, the so-called ‘fringe’ scene owed much to the existence of subsidy from the late 1960s onwards.³¹ An early beneficiary was the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 40% of whose income came in the form of Arts Council subsidy in 1966.³² For some, this kind of funding was the key to lever further money out of local authorities: this was the case for the Wakefield Tricycle Company, which was helped in 1980 to locate and fit out a permanent home in Kilburn by the London Borough of Brent. Brent’s arts committee under Councillor Terry Hanafin was no less concerned with issues of bringing theatre to a wider audience than Jennie Lee had been more than ten years before.³³

‘Housing the Arts’ itself was wound up in the mid 1980s as part of a more general shift in arts policy instigated by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, which increasingly encouraged the arts to seek partnerships with private sponsors and placed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Plates
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Almost as important as jobs, housing and education’: the Context of the Publicly Funded Arts in Britain
• 2 ‘A means of unlocking future opportunity’: The Lowry, Salford
• 3 ‘Defining the essence of the organization through architecture’: Contact Theatre, Manchester
• 4 ‘An exercise in knowing abstemiousness’: Poole Arts Centre – ‘The Lighthouse’
• 5 ‘Making something extraordinary’: Belgrade II, Coventry
• 6 ‘Turn the theatre inside out’: Curve, Leicester
• 7 ‘So fabulously theatrical you can almost chew on it’: Hackney Empire
• 8 ‘Many a theatrical scheme has come to grief because it put bricks and mortar before drama’: Some Familiar Issues, 1926-1996
• 9 An Architect’s Photographic View: the Design and Life of the Theatres
• 10 Emerging Themes
• 11 The Internal Dynamics of the Projects
• 12 Conclusions
• Select Bibliography
• Index