The Arts
Lost Among the Committees
By TERENCE BENDIXSON
WirniN five years there is almost certain to be a National Theatre on the South Bank. As long ago as 1949 Parliament authorised the Treasury to contribute £1 million to- wards it. Since then the LCC has given the site and promised £1.3 million. A company of players is already in existence and planning its first season. A committee called the South Bank Theatre and Opera House Board has been ap- pointed to get things built. An advisory panel is sifting evidence submitted by architects in order to draw up a short list of men capable of designing suitable auditoria and of super- vising a big and complex building contract.
A neat tally such as this gives the impression of a smooth-running military operation. It hides the snags and the uncertainties that must be negotiated before a National Theatre Company that is an inspiration to players, playwrights and directors is housed in the best theatre in the coun- try and set so ingeniously on the South Bank that people go there (as they may go to West- minster Abbey) as much for the pleasure of wandering around it as for going inside. A snag that is capable of dogging the theatre at every stage of its development is the separa- tion of the National Theatre Company (the players and directors) from the South Bank Board, the people who—because they control the purse-strings—will make the ultimate de- cisions about what sort of theatre should be built. A representative of the Company does sit on the Board, but he is outnumbered by able administrators, politicians from the LCC and representatives of Sadler's Wells. This makes it Possible that decisions will reflect time-honoured Practice rather than any ideal. Yet it is mainly because of its potential for aspiring after the ideal, and its freedom from the pressures that beset and numb the West End stage, that the National Theatre is significant.
For example, there is a danger with the exist- ing committee structure that the size of the larger theatre (it is whispered there will be two) will not be determined solely by what actors can best play in and audiences best respond in, but by desires for prestigey bigness and a con- ventional return on capital. Innumerable de- cisions about other matters fundamental to the excellence of the theatre will also be decided by a body of predominantly lay opinion. Stratford's proscenium cum apron stage illustrates the danger of compromise: an adaptable theatre, its modern equivalet\t and potentially a jack of all trades and master of none, is the sort of result one can expect from too great a spirit of compromise in the South Bank Board.
The decision not to hold a competition but to invite five experts to nominate a short list of suitable architects has been strongly con- demned. The official explanation is that the exact requirements 'of the theatre are undecided and it is expected that the architect will be able to give helpful advice. If this is true, it is a disaster. If the National Theatre Company, the National Theatre Board and the South Bank Board could not decide what they needed a few months ago, there is no reason to expect an architect will be able to help them make up their minds. Sir Basil Spence has already re-
corded, and Coventry Cathedral is, a memorial to, the tribulations of an architect whose clients did not know what they wanted. Possibly the real reason for the South Bank Board's behaviour is money. At present about £2.3 million are available for a theatre and an opera house. Assuming each building will be roughly as ex- pensive as the £21 million Festival Hall, more is obviously needed. Although the South Bank Board could not say so publicly, as would have been necessary when advertising a competition, they may have an inkling that a larger sum will eventually be forthcoming. This would explain their desire to discuss their requirements with a chosen architect who will be able to design with this figure in mind. The drawings could then be published and the need for the larger sum of money justified.
Not that this is certain to result in the best possible architecture. A clearly stated set of re- quirements and an open competition.would have given architects, young and old, an equal chance. The inexperience of younger ones in managing big contracts could have been discounted by stipulating that they accepted assistance. As it is, the South Bank Board is almost certain to plump for an established architect, even if their ad- visory panel gives them a chance to do otherwise.
The advisory panel itself is a curiosity. It con- sists of three prominent architects plus John Piper, who is experienced in designing sets, and Norman Marshall, a man with long theatrical experience. Yet because of the dearth of recent theatre building in Britain only abdut half a dozen architects at the most can have sent in drawings of completed ones. The rest of them must have fallen back on fanciful 'sketches and drawings of non-theatre work intended to show general competence. It is impossible to think of any group of men particularly suited to evaluat- ing such evidence, which, while not disqualifying Piper and Marshall, reflects no credit on the committee who gave them the responsibility.
However, even if the South Bank Board does extract a clear set of requirements from the National Theatre Company, the building com- mittee and its overlord the National Theatre Board, and a comparably precise statement from Sadler's Wells; and even if it chooses the best of all possible architects, the problem of creating urbanity in the windy wasteland of the South Bank will remain.
During the Festival of Britain,the South Bank, both up and down stream of Hungerford railway bridge, was transformed into a unified and magi- cal micro-city of different levels and contrasting spaces. It revealed the possibility of a new in- formal urbanity as delightful as—but quite different from—the classicism of eighteenth-cen- tury squares and vistas. Since then the Shell Centre has risen' in the place of the exhibition pavilions, and the County Hall end of the site has sunk to looking like the worst kind of provincial civic centre—a loose collection of big, free-standing buildings. Only next to the Festival Hall, where • the lower Shell buildings act as a sober backcloth and where the LCC's small, chunky recital hall and exhibition galleries are now under construction, is there any reasonable hope of achieving tension and cohesion. The National Theatre will have to be worked in among Ralph Knott's Hawksmoorean County Hall and the improbable Shell Centre. The huge amorphousness of this site poses architectural problems utterly different from those involved in designing a theatre such as the Haymarket. Given the discipline of streets, Nash, like some other eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century architects, was able to trot out a time-honoured trick and secure a certain success. He lined his building up with the axis of a cross street and projected a striking portico from it.
The' National Theatre site is more like the campus of a small mid-western university on which a building has been erected whenever a donor offered some money. This is a very prag- matic and Anglo-Saxon approach and such a campus, suitably laced with majestic elms, can look picturesque. Put down in the centre of London and sited on a prominent bend of the Thames it is a different bag of cement. A master architect with several buildings to juggle with might have designed a group of independent sculptural monuments such as Le Corbusier's government buildings, at Chandigarh. But with the unrelated battleships of County Hall and Shell moored firmly in place, and with the site lacking any definition except the embankment, a jumble of buildings will be hard to avoid.
A single cause for optimism, even though the theatre and opera house may be built years apart if more money is not forthcoming, is that one man may be made responsible for design- ing both of therm This would give him a range of forms complex enough to hold their own against the surrounding buildings. Apart from this there is Bacon's wishful thought that 'adver- sity doth best discover virtue.'
What the two buildings should look like is beyond the scope of a critic to say, although the Greek temple structures into which the new Metropolitan Opera House and Philharmonic Concert Hall have been forced in New York and the eye-catching concrete spinnakers that disguise the Sydney Opera House show the equal dangers of extreme conservatism and flashy modernity. Yet irrespective of its appearance the National Theatre is bound to become a sym- bol. Its silhouette will appear on thousands of posters, its outline at the top of articles on the state of British theatre. It is partly because of this that it is so important for it to be both dramatically and architecturally. inspiring. It could be a Crystal Palace, not just a shelter from the elements but an open sesame.
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