Theatre

The revamped front of the building (incorporating the old Wilson Bros butchers' sign

When did it emerge that the butcher’s shop wasn’t going to come down?

DL After quite a long time. We talked to a lot of people. There was quite a strong feeling against the butcher’s shop from people with experience of building who said that it would make life easier for us if we were to get rid of it. There was also a lack of understanding from them about why we would want to keep this ridiculous building.

ST I certainly had to test that out pretty thoroughly. Just to make sure that keeping it wasn’t a knee-jerk, sentimental reaction – that something is old, so it must be good. We came to the conclusion that it was germane to the idea of the theatre along with the geometry of the auditorium. The relationship between the butcher shop and the auditorium seemed more and more like the kernel of the theatre and so we would have to have a really good reason to knock those elements down. It became the grit in the oyster for us. Feature continues

In terms of cultural memory in the street, the butcher’s shop is significant for people who were alive during the war and saw it as the only surviving fragment. As you know, it took a direct hit and people were killed. It is a significant building in that respect. It’s not a beautiful piece of architecture, but it draws its value from its history and relationship with the theatre and the fact that Bill Howell, for entirely pragmatic reasons of budget, decided to hold on to it. The more we looked at it, the more we realised how clever he had been.

You’ve raised the roof and introduced a pair of double doors. How far did you feel you could change the theatre without losing what made it so appealing in the past?

DL It was a gamble. But we got the best advice we could get in terms of acoustics and so on.

ST The auditorium was never perfect.

DL Both Frank Dunlop and Michael Bogdanov [previous artistic directors] said they would have raised the roof if they could, but they didn’t have the money.

ST Something else that Bogdanov said was that sometimes you felt like you wanted to escape the room. You needed recourse to another world. This was at a time when we’d already drawn the double doors so that was music to our ears.