- 272 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
In this lavishly illustrated hands-on account of the creation of new theatre spaces spanning a century, Iain Mackintosh offers a compelling history that is part memoir, part impassioned call to rethink the design of our theatre spaces and the future of live theatre. As the originator of theatre designs as diverse as the Cottesloe in 1977, Glyndebourne in 1994, the Orange Tree Theatre in 1991, the Martha Cohen Theatre in 1985 and the Tina Packer Playhouse in 2001, he discovered why the same show worked in some theatres but not in others. It is this unique blend of experience that informs this account of many of the best-known theatre spaces in Britain, besides many international examples including the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis and the Oslo Opera House. Running throughout is a consideration of factors which have shaped design thinking during this time and which demand attention today. After the long theatre closures driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, Mackintosh argues that now is the time to discover the routes travelled over the last century. Published in partnership with the Society of Theatre Research, the book features a foreword by Sir Richard Eyre, Director of the National Theatre, 1987–1997.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-Title Page
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Foreword by Sir Richard Eyre
- An introduction and a summary
- Act I Pre-1920: Setting the scene and some early pioneers
- 1 Theatre is ephemeral while buildings endure. Some necessary background
- 2 Richard Wagner, Adolphe Appia and the spreading of the fan
- Act II 1920–1976: The march of modernism
- 3 The Festival Cambridge, Stratford-upon-Avon and early days of the National
- 4 Guthrie’s thrust stages
- 5 Germany’s building boom and Anglo-American Shakespeare
- 6 The Olivier, the Lyttelton and the Barbican theatres
- Act III 1976–2020: The past informs the present
- 7 The Cottesloe and other courtyards
- 8 Worthy scaffolds: Brook’s empty space and spaces found by others
- 9 Regenerating the old offers an antidote to modernism. Part One: English theatres of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- 10 Regenerating the old offers an antidote to modernism. Part Two: A couple of twentieth-century Scottish theatres reborn – one in Edinburgh and the other in Florida
- 11 New opera houses from Glyndebourne to Dallas. Elsewhere some starchitects upstage the performers
- 12 Learning from the Netherlands, Berlin, Brazil, Australia and from Indian and Chinese cultures
- 13 2010–2020: Some new builds, two renovations – one at Stratford-upon-Avon and one in London – and diversions on in-the-round and the open air
- Act IV 2021: The future
- 14 Unforeseen consequences of seventeenth-century plagues, of the arrival of the talkies and the more recent dangers of the pandemic and of ‘virtual theatre’. Some central themes restated
- Bibliographies
- Acknowledgements
- Theatre index
- Person index
- Copyright