The National Theatre building celebrates four decades in operation

By J.W.S.W.

FORTY years ago, the architecture correspondent of this newspaper assessed the newly-opened National Theatre building in London:

Those who regard the South Bank as something of a cultural concentration camp might be dismayed at the NT’s embattled silhouette. With its drab battledress of grey, very grey, concrete, its array of lift shafts and fly-towers punching upwards through heavily stratified decks, the NT certainly gives off a strongly militaristic flavour, rather like an aircraft carrier in collision with a Norman keep.

On its 40th anniversary, most would agree that our critic’s appraisal has aged less gracefully than the building itself. Seen from the other side of the Thames, the two fly-towers are monumental, standing at the corner of a bend in the river like the uprights of a giant concrete henge. Softened by weathering, its walls turn a radiant gold at sunset. The NT is an indispensable part of London’s skyline now, but its completion was the product of a 70-year gestation period, during which it went through five suggested sites, as many different designs and 13 years of construction.

Many of those who now fill the NT’s foyer cafés in the afternoons, sipping flat whites and tapping at laptops, are too young to remember how different the South Bank looked in the 1940s when the project was conceived. The Blitz had eradicated most of the warehouses, wharfs, power stations and timber yards that had provided the soot-infused lifeblood of the area, leaving behind a wasteland that melted into a foul, polluted river.

But London was swept up by post-war optimism. Along with the foundation of the welfare state came the idea that culture—encouraged, subsidised and even initiated by the state—could revitalise British society. It was in this heady atmosphere that the campaign to build a National Theatre, stalled for decades, finally began to gain traction. London County Council announced a plan to reconstruct the South Bank as a “showpiece of civic development”, with a “cultural complex including a theatre”, and in 1949, the government passed the National Theatre Act, confirming state support.

This same wave of idealism buoyed up a small but passionate clique of British Modernist architects who had largely watched the burgeoning continental movement from the sidelines. The functional aesthetic of Modernist architecture was rooted in the principle that buildings should exist to better the lives of everyday people, an idea that resonated with the political zeitgeist. As such, concrete schools, concrete housing estates and concrete hospitals began to spring up in Britain’s bombed-out cities. Denys Lasdun was one of the poster-boys of the movement, having designed the concrete ziggurats of the University of East Anglia. He presented his pitch to the NT committee with characteristic chutzpah, proclaiming that “the essence of designing a theatre is a spiritual one”. “Oh my dear”, Laurence Olivier, chair of the committee, would later say; “We all fell for that. We knew we’d got by far the most suitable man”.

The process of designing the building was less straightforward than that of selecting an architect, partly because of the project’s wildly ambitious scope. On a 100 metre-squared site (“not a big building, a piece of city”, as Lasdun put it), there were to be three spacious, state-of-the-art theatres. Taking cues from sources as diverse as the Spanish corrales and the ancient Greek amphitheatres, each would aim to consign the cramped and creaking auditoria of London’s airless West End playhouses to history. Once the plans of the theatres had been decided, the structure was designed around them, to be built in Lasdun’s beloved concrete. The earthy mixture of clay, lime, sand and water was poured into specially-built Douglas fir moulds; the unique wood-grain of each plank is still visible on the NT’s walls, leaving the surfaces organic and tactile. Every component of the building was hand-crafted in wooden negative, mostly by highly skilled Sikh joiners using traditional handsaws and augurs.

Unsurprisingly, progress was slow, and as the economic woes and industrial disputes of the 1970s took hold, it ground almost to a halt. Like other large, high-profile projects, the NT building was plagued by strike action. The thousands of people that crossed Waterloo Bridge every week saw a formless, half-finished concrete hulk, surrounded by clusters of picketing workers warming their hands on smouldering coals. By the time the building opened in 1976, Britain’s national mood was far removed from the utopian idealism that had kick-started it.

Architectural fashion, too, had moved on. The childish colour and playfulness of Renzo Piano and Richard Roger's Pompidou centre replaced the austere formality of Modernism, which by then had become associated with crime-ridden housing estates and crumbling hospitals. The opening plays were poorly received, partly because strike action by stagehands meant they were sometimes, bizarrely, performed in sets built for other plays. It took decades of nurture from a series of driven artistic directors to develop the NT into the world-class institution it is today.

In hindsight, the scale and ambition of the NT seems recklessly vast. It is hard to imagine today’s British government offering, as it did then, a generous capped grant, before increasing the cap twice and finally removing it altogether. As Patrick Dillon says in “Concrete Reality”, his book on the building, we “no longer make buildings like the NT”. Despite the disdain of The Economist’s architecture correspondent, it has been to the benefit of millions of British theatregoers that, once, we did.