Chris Honer, the Library Theatre Company’s Artistic Director, talks about developing HOME’s theatres…
It’s a great thing to be part of creating a new theatre: great, but also daunting because, if you get it wrong, future playgoers and practitioners will not forgive you.
Audiences told us the quality they loved most about our old home in Central Library was its intimacy. So the new theatre must have that. We also wanted to add more seats and ensure a degree of flexibility; to be able to play in both traditional proscenium (i.e. end-on) mode, and also in thrust format with the action pushed out into the auditorium when appropriate.
So here was the challenge for the architects: make it intimate but enlarge the house by over a half, and enable a changeover of formats inside three hours.
Our architect, Mecanoo. have a lot of experience of designing theatres and arts buildings, but not many have been in the U.K. So a process of mutual schooling went on. They showed us some theatres they’d built in Holland. We loved the foyers but found the auditoria functional and rather cold and certainly not intimate. We showed them the quirkier spaces we liked in the U.K.; the Young Vic for its atmosphere, the Almeida for its intimacy, and Hampstead Theatre as an example of a new purpose-built theatre where they’ve achieved an unfussy immediacy and flexibility. I also took them into the bowels of Central Library on what was for me a rather emotional journey to see a now gutted Library Theatre so that they could get a sense of its volume and contours.
Designs began to emerge, and we started to grapple with some key questions. Can you dictate intimacy by measuring the distance from the furthest seat to the stage or is it achieved more by architectural relation? How much of the audience should be above, and how much below, an actor’s eyeline for the optimum experience? Should every seat in the house have an absolutely perfect view of the stage or is it more important that you feel connected to the rest of the audience and the actors?
Excellent theatre consultants Charcoal Blue (who’d just delivered the very successful redevelopment of the Royal Shakespeare Company), pointed out that we didn’t have the funds for the technology to achieve the almost instant flexibility of format we were after. So far better to make sure that the theatre was excellent in end-on format and, if required to convert, build an extra day into the production process to accommodate it. That seemed a reasonable compromise.
In working to achieve the crucial intimacy we concluded that creating two levels above the stalls was the way to do it. This surprised me but, of course, a theatre like the Royal Court has just such a structure, and is terrific for a sense of connection with the stage in all parts of the house.
HOME theatre 2 concept. Image: Mecanoo International
There are a number of technical issues still to be resolved. We will be able to fly scenery in the new theatre, but will the system be the new power or the ancient but effective counterweight? How much LED lighting will there be? Also, we are working out the details of a second theatre space – a 150 seater ideal for studio performance, work in development, associate companies – which will support an important new strand in our work.
But I’m confident, confident as one can ever be before that nerve-jangling moment when the first actor steps onto the stage of the new theatre, that we’ve done our best to create a new theatre for Manchester which will be elegant, intimate, and, crucially, a great place to see a play in.