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| Metropol theatre Tarragona, Josep Maria Jujol, 1908 Jujol was a follower of Antoni Gaudí who, sometimes blessed with smaller budgets than the great man commanded, produced works that were less excessive but equally inventive. His Metropol theatre, created for the Workers’ Guild School, combines a spare structure with outbreaks of utterly original ornament. The imagery is maritime – waves, fishing equipment, keels of boats, fish – to support his idea that the auditorium was a ship sailing its audience towards salvation. If you don’t want this much religion with your drama, you can still enjoy the hallucinatory lightness of the space. |
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| Teatro del Mondo Venice, Aldo Rossi, 1979 Created for the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Teatro del Mondo was a floating structure that could glide serenely through the city. Its tower-like form was a simplified version of Venetian structures, having something of both the 17th-century customs house and the church of the Salute, near which it was moored. Its interior was steep and vertical, like a renaissance theatre, and defined by the exposed steel structure from which it was made. Only intended as a temporary structure, it no longer exists, but for its brief life it managed to make the city’s over-familiar monuments look new. |
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| Castle theatre Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic, 1682 and 1766 A work of extreme baroque artifice, including still-surviving stage machinery, devices for sound effects and sets portraying a forest, a temple, a military camp, a hall and so on. Barley-sugar columns or pairs of trees recede into a false-perspective distance. The auditorium is not much less theatrical than the stage, centring on the curtained box in which the aristocratic owners for who the theatre was created would take their seats. Invites comparison with cabinetry and confectionery. Small, inward-looking, almost claustrophobic, relieved by illusionistic sky in the ceiling. |
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| National Theatre London, Denys Lasdun, 1976 The idea was to celebrate the “fourth theatre” created by the audience as they move about the stairs, foyers and balconies and head towards the three designated auditoria. It works. The structure frames human life and views of the river and city outside, which are more powerfully experienced for this concrete embrace. The theatre broods, which is an underrated quality in architecture, but is also uplifting. The first thing a child would notice might be that the concrete looks like wood, as it bears the imprint of its timber moulds, which adds a subtle level of illusion. |
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| Grosses Schauspielhaus Berlin, Hans Poelzig, 1919 If the Nazis felt obliged to cover up an architect’s work as an example of degenerate art, as happened to the stalactite vaults of the Schauspielhaus, it suggests that the architect was doing something right. In the case of Hans Poelzig, one of the most original of German architects, he was doing something spectacularly right, creating a mesmerising interior with the qualities of both circus tent and cave in response to the director Max Reinhardt’s dream of making a theatre accessible to all. Now destroyed, not as might be thought by bombing, but through neglect. |
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| Great theatre, Epidaurus Greece, Polykleitos the Younger, 4th century BC It’s easy to get carried away with the natural simplicity of Epidaurus; the ancient original would, with costume, decoration, rituals and other contrivances, have been more artificial than it now seems. But it is still magnificent to find a structure that brings together performance, audience, landscape and sky with both geometrical simplicity and ineffable grandeur. And having legendary acoustics. In all of these respects it is helped greatly by being open and in a warm climate. Theatres with roofs can be beautiful, but they can never recapture the ancient directness of Epidaurus. |
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| Teatro Scientifico Mantua, Antonio Bibiena, 1769 La Fenice, La Scala, Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza… northern Italy is not short of great theatres. Bibiena’s theatre in Mantua captures with particular force that idea that a theatre is like a miniature city, in which both performers and audience are citizens, who are encouraged to communicate and interact with each other. Boxes are stacked up in four tiers of arcades, as in a multi-level town square, which are then wrapped with voluptuous curves into a bell-shaped plan. Sightlines are as much across the auditorium, at other spectators, as at the stage. |
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| Hackney Empire London, Frank Matcham, 1901 In many ways the opposite of the National theatre’s robust and naked structure, the Hackney Empire is all stucco and gilt, with make-believe drapery and historic styles pillaged for their ornamental effect. Taste, propriety, historical accuracy and structural honesty are all irrelevant. Architectural greasepaint creates both a bubble of illusion and a strong rapport between both stage and audience and between one part of the audience and another. Originally a variety theatre, and one of many put up at high speed across the country by the prolific architect of such things, Frank Matcham. |
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| Radio City Music Hall New York, Edward Durell Stone and Donald Deskey, 1932 Edward Durell Stone was the architect for the high-minded, elegantly plain Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also created, in partnership with the designer Donald Deskey, the colossal 6,000-seat Radio City Music Hall at the Rockefeller Center which, with its concentric orange-lit circles and radiating lines, was supposed to represent a sunset. The museum looked towards the European Bauhaus, the theatre to Hollywood. The one that convinces most is not po-faced MoMA but the exuberant, opulent, stadium-scaled, magnificent-in-its-stairs-and-foyers Music Hall. |
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| Teatro Oficina São Paulo, Lina Bo Bardi, 1991 A long, narrow, street-like space in the burned-out shell of a former theatre that is watched by a wall of galleries built out of scaffolding. Built to serve the orgiastic performances of the theatre’s creator Zé Celso, who has claimed that the idea for the open plan came when, on an acid trip and running from the police, he found himself trapped against a solid wall. Teatro Oficina has challenging sight lines, hard seats and is very much not the shape theatres are meant to be, but is all the more intense for that. |
Source: The 10 best theatres
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