Around Town

I don’t know about you, but whenever I go to the South Bank to see something specific, I always wish I had more time just to wander about and soak up the area’s brilliance as a playground for the city – the way it thumbs its nose at the killjoy edifices of work and responsibility that glower at it from Westminster and the City. If for no other reason, taking the backstage tour at the National Theatre is an excellent excuse to do just that, and to ponder, meanwhile, the sublime luxury of subsidised art and the defiant utopianism that characterised its heyday.

It ought to seem odd that our National Theatre, the mothership of British luvviedom, takes the form of a hulk of brutalist concrete, but nobody comments on it any more. For although the building’s conception was presided over by über-thesp Laurence Olivier as a hen presides over her nest, the only concession to flounce and ego is encoded in the colour of the upholstery in the auditorium named after him, which is lavender in hue – his favourite colour. Otherwise, the subservience of form to function is bracingly absolute in Sir Denys Lasdun’s building, which was completed in 1976 to predictable howls of outrage from traditionalists. Feature continues

It may have reminded Prince Charles of a nuclear power station at the time, but it’s looking very well at the start of its fourth decade. And once inside its belligerently crepuscular foyer, you are forcefully reminded that the confrontational design of the place, far from being an accident of architectural fashion, comes straight from the heart of a single-minded artistic purity that still characterises the best of British cultural life.

From the very start of the tour – which begins in the comparatively conventional Lyttleton Theatre – our guide Lauren Walker underlines the features which demonstrate the building’s fitness for its purpose. It’s when you go behind the scenes, though, that you begin to appreciate the National as a machine for theatrical production. The Lyttleton sits, we discover, at the apex of an L-shape, with massive storage areas behind and to the right. This facilitates the repertory system the National operates, with a number of different productions using each auditorium concurrently; the sets are constructed on wheeled platforms that can be moved on and off stage depending on which play is being performed that day.

Next we’re shown the prop and set-building workshops, where sculptors, carpenters, smiths and painters create everything used on stage, from silicone broccoli florets to giant chunks of polystyrene rubble. Here again the National is indebted to the vision of its creators – most other theatres have to have sets built off-site; here there is an umbilical link between the theatres and the workshops.