RSC puts its house in order

Which other group of strolling players could pull off an expensive stunt like this? That’s £100m all in, which includes £6m for the temporary theatre. It is the last of the great cultural lottery projects. Moreover, which other troupe would have the nerve to open a venue not with a crowd-pleasing favourite, or with any of its established, Hollywood-friendly stars, but with the demanding Henry VI trilogy and a relative newcomer, Chuk Iwuji, in the title role? This, it seems, is the template of Michael Boyd’s RSC. For him, the ensemble is the thing. An ensemble system now operates on the design side, too.

The Courtyard is designed by the architect Ian Ritchie; the design for the rebuilt RST is by Bennetts Associates, known for the far tinier Hampstead theatre, in London. Both architects are working with the theatre technical consultants Charcoalblue. The RSC’s executive director, Vikki Heywood, oversaw the highly successful transformation of the Royal Court, London. So there is a lot of feedback happening all round.

Outside their relative auditoriums, however, the two designs could not be more different.

The former artistic director Adrian Noble wanted to demolish and rebuild the RST. That plan failed. The architect Elisabeth Scott’s relentlessly bricky 1932 theatre was dubbed the “jam factory” when opened, but it had enough deco details in it, especially its cramped foyer and staircase, to bring the preservationist lobby out in force once it came under threat. I think Noble was right: it would have been better to start again. Backstage, in particular, conditions are terrible. Front of house is ludicrously cramped. And everybody knows the auditorium in between is rubbish. It should be a no-brainer. But we English have a make-do-and-mend culture. Thus, the ugly carcass of the 1932 playhouse must remain while fundamental rebuilding goes on in and around it.

Ritchie’s Courtyard is a simple — but artful — metal box, dropped, like some jumbo shipping container, right next to the RSC’s existing studio theatre, The Other Place (TOP). TOP has been transformed into the Courtyard’s combined front and back of house, providing all the bars and toilets and dressing rooms a theatre needs. Once the Courtyard closes, probably in 2010, TOP will revert to being a studio theatre. All clear so far? Ritchie selected Cor-Ten steel, the sort that rusts without going into holes, to clad the Courtyard. This sounds strange until you see it in context. The weathered old bricks and timbers of Stratford coalesce into a russet brown. The rapidly darkening rusted steel does exactly the same. There are no architectural flourishes. It’s all to do with the interior, and this feels very good indeed, the thrust stage coming right out into the centre of the intimate stacked circle of seating. After much experimentation, the stage dimensions turned out to be remarkably similar to those of the Rose theatre, the Globe’s Elizabethan precursor on Bankside. Moreover, Henry VI, Part One, was performed there. Uncanny, eh? It does not feel remotely temporary inside. It is solid, well insulated and ventilated, lined with light plywood, with comfortable red fabric seats. There’s nothing second-rate about it. And the viewing distance from the farthest seat to the stage is half as far as in the RST. I sat in the equivalent seat in both spaces, and the improvement is enormous. You’ll feel physically involved, sharing the room with the actors.

In redesigning the main house, the architects Rab Bennetts and Simon Erridge have performed heroically. They have actually managed to make sense of the place. By pulling the stage forward into what is a smaller, tighter auditorium, they will make more backstage space. Because the new auditorium will be broadly circular, that frees up the corners of the old room to make more audience spill-out areas. They have found a way to combine the foyers of the main theatre and the Swan for the first time, with a shallow extension on the north side. They will make more space on the roof. They will clear away clutter along the riverbank. And — in search of a 21st-century touch, as Bennetts cheerfully admits — they want to add a romantically pragmatic viewing tower to the northeast corner, by a new entrance. At 108ft, this is about the same as the long- vanished campanile of the Victorian theatre that now houses the Swan. It went after the fire that gutted that building in 1926.

This is a clever move. Stratford is all about places associated with Shakespeare, yet for 80 years there has been nowhere you can see them all from. Meanwhile, most of the tourists who come to Stratford never visit the theatre, which turns its back on the town. With the viewing tower, the theatre becomes part of the tourist trail. It’s great. Please don’t let the spoilsports cut it out on grounds of cost. Over the years, it will spin money and goodwill for the RSC.

All of which is interesting in design terms: but what does it mean for the actors? As the player kicking all this off as Henry VI, the Nigerian-born, US-educated Iwuji, 31, bears a heavy responsibility. He has inspected the Courtyard and he’s happy. “When we walked in for the first time, there was an audible gasp,” he says. “It’s so high, like a cathedral of theatre, but then you notice how close the audience is. The space is big, but they’re right there. In something like Antony and Cleopatra, you have this sweeping epic, but it’s very domestic. That’s the impression I get of the place. It’s a perfect example of marrying the epic with the domestic and personal.”

Iwuji wants to play Antony one day, Hamlet, of course, and, more unusually, Petruchio, tamer of the Shrew. He, like the Courtyard, is the face of Boyd’s new RSC. We’ll be seeing a new generation of stars emerging from the new place. And with any luck, they won’t have to shout as loud as the old guard.

Henry VI trilogy, RSC Courtyard, Stratford-upon-Avon, from July 7