In theatre, architecture always affects the art. Some stages have sweet spots, others have potholes. While a great stage won’t fix a bad play, a bad one can scupper a perfectly good script. Every auditorium has its own acoustics, every theatre its own dynamic. So how do directors and designers handle the problems presented by four of the trickiest spaces in the UK?

The Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon

“There’s nowhere to hide in the Swan,” warns director Maria Aberg. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s second space is an intimate thrust stage, a peninsula significantly deeper than it is wide, with the audience up close on three sides. And in a theatre with only 426 seats, there’s no ignoring the audience. “You have to have the courage to look over your shoulder, make eye contact and interact,” says Aberg. “It’s a scary thing, but the Swan puts the actor right in the centre. It makes them the most important thing – always.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Doctor Faustus, directed by Maria Aberg, at the Swan in 2016. Photograph: Geraint Lewis/Rex/Shutterstock

Not every actor suits that setup, and Aberg’s always deemed casting critical. Actors such as Sandy Grierson (Doctor Faustus), Kirsty Bushell (The White Devil) and Pippa Nixon (King John) pull audiences into the present. “You can make eye contact with everyone in there – it’s not like you don’t know if they’re asleep. … You can do something really small, like lighting a match at the start of Doctor Faustus, and the whole room can feel it.”

Thrust stages have nightmarish sightlines (“Unless you’re super-conscious about blocking, someone’s staring at an actor’s bum”). The trick is to keep things moving, and use the vomitorium (two diagonal walkways downstage) to get actors on and off at pace. Soldiers can storm the Swan stage. Bodies can block its exits. The plays themselves help, explains Aberg: “Most are written with quick entrances and exits in mind, so there’s a lot of movement in the texts already.”



But that poses its own problems. Text is still sacrosanct in Stratford-upon-Avon. Words rule supreme and movement, if unfocused, can get in the way. “Vocally, stillness and rootedness is very useful,” says the RSC’s head of voice, Kate Godfrey. “It’s a very good acoustic space, the Swan, but you have to make a virtue of being on the move.” There is, she says, a secret: the seven-second rule. “You have to move slightly every few seconds, so as not to block somebody’s view, so you need to find reasons to move and define it.”

That, Aberg says, keeps a director on their toes. “The Swan’s a great sparring partner. It forces you into creativity.”



Lyttelton, London

“The Olivier and the Cottesloe are triumphantly original,” wrote the former National Theatre director Peter Hall. “The Lyttelton is merely large and acceptable.”



When Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre designs came up for discussion, Hall only wanted two spaces. It was Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Tynan who pushed for a proscenium. How else would the National revive 18th and 19th-century classics? Where would they invite the Comédie Française to play? There was, Hall believed, no aesthetic need. “Nobody was desperately for it, and I think this is revealed, now that it exists, by its largely impersonal nature.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Suicide at the Lyttelton theatre in 2016. Photograph: Johan Persson

Proscenium stages are, in themselves, fairly straightforward – not simple, but standard-issue. The Lyttelton is the exception. Designer William Dudley called it “extremely audience-unfriendly.” For Richard Eyre, “the proportions are inhumane”. Its stage is almost impossibly wide, says regular NT designer Bunny Christie. “People feel its vastness makes it difficult to achieve a human scale.”



But Christie is a fan. “If you get it right, it can feel intimate,” she argues. “It has a kind of CinemaScope quality.” Plays seem to expand in there. For Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep, she built a life-size Glasgow tenement flat, then added the floors above and below. It was kitchen-sink realism stretched to a state-of-the-nation scale.



“The danger is that the actors get minimised,” Christie points out. “They can feel very small in that big space.” Designers have to find tricks round the scale, breaking up big spaces with porches and corridors, say, or building in almost cinematic detail. Lighting’s key, and she cites Vicki Mortimer’s impeccable designs for Katie Mitchell, lit by Paule Constable, as major successes. “You feel like you’re looking into a whole other world.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alan Bennett’s People at the Lyttelton theatre in 2012. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Eyre has identified the central difficulty. It is “completely flat,” he wrote in 1994. “There’s no curvature, no attempt to embrace the stage. You’re left struggling to focus the action.” His staging of Amy’s View by David Hare found a solution. It used black panels as a frame to zoom in and out. Christie repeated the trick in The Red Barn, in essence turning the theatre into a giant camera lens. Rupert Goold and Katie Mitchell have turned the stage into a panorama, squeezing the proscenium down to a strip.



This, says Christie, is the Lyttelton’s big advantage. It’s a box of tricks. There are elevators, traps and automated overhead flies. The entire stage can tilt, rake and even drop to floor-level. “It’s not perfect, but it’s full of surprises.”

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London

The particular difficulties of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse are plain to see. It is a replica Elizabethan indoor playhouse, lit entirely by candlelight. Director Adele Thomas, who staged the second show there, Francis Beaumont’s 17th-century pastiche The Knight of the Burning Pestle, remembers endless candle workshops, flammability tests and safety briefings ahead of rehearsals. “I thought, I’ve got to have a gag where someone sets themselves on fire.” It opened the show: two stagehands were reverently lighting the vast candelabra when – whoosh – one went up in flames.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, where only a third of the stage is visible all-round. Photograph: Geraint Lewis/Rex/Shutterstock

This, Thomas says, is the trick to the Wanamaker. Either you play with it, or you play against it. The opening show, Dominic Dromgoole’s The Duchess of Malfi, was reverent – “tailored to show the space off as this beautiful jewelbox”. The next, Thomas’s Pestle, took the other tack. “Duchess of Malfi pushed open the door to the space. Knight of the Burning Pestle kicked it right off its hinges.”



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The theatre has plenty of entrances – two upstage, two down, with a vomitorium through the audience pit and a balcony overhead – but sightlines, particularly from the circle, are almost impossible. Only a third of the stage is visible all-round. “Are you supposed to stage everything centrally?” Thomas wonders. “Maybe back in the day, without time to rehearse, the most important character just stood in that spot and everyone else arranged themselves accordingly, but that just doesn’t wash today.” Besides, she says, it’s a minuscule playing space: “One big bloody Jacobean dress and that’s the whole stage taken up.”



It does, however, give you a lot for free – not least the candlelight. “It’s amazing. Your eye adjusts to the darkness and the whole space comes to life.” Made entirely out of oak, a material chosen to reflect as much light as possible, the whole auditorium feels active. “You spend a lot of time, as a director, trying to take a black box and transform it. The Sam Wanamaker is what it is. You have to obey it.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest L’Ormindo at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2015. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

That can be counterintuitive. “In reality, it’s an amazing climbing frame,” Thomas perks up. “You can clamber all over it.” For The Knight of the Burning Pestle, actors raced round the outer galleries, fights spilled into the audience, set-pieces knowingly “broke” this precious new theatre. “We pulled down bits of candelabra to batter each other and ripped curtains off the wall.” One actor even crashed through the ceiling.

The aim was to bring the Globe’s spirit into its sister space. “There’s nothing dignified about the Globe,” says Thomas. “The danger with the Sam Wanamaker is that it feels too precious – and theatre can’t afford to be precious.”

Royal Exchange, Manchester

The Royal Exchange is arguably the most singular theatre space in the country: a three-tiered in-the-round auditorium in a unique, 150-ton module made of steel and glass. “It’s like a spaceship crash-landed in a 19th-century civic building,” says designer Fly Davis, whose shows there include A Streetcar Named Desire and Rona Munro’s Scuttlers. “It forces you to see a play in a completely new way.”

Since Sarah Frankcom took sole control in 2014, the Royal Exchange has refined its house style. Low-key naturalism has been all but banished. In its place: big, brassy plays with bold, conceptual designs. “The space doesn’t really work with real things,” Frankcom says. “It needs a strong visual metaphor. You’re never not in a theatre in there.”

That is as much about audience as architecture. “When it’s full, you end up with a wall of people,” Davis explains. “You can’t ignore the audience. They’re your backdrop.” For all it seems futuristic – a lunar module of a theatre – it has more in common with Jacobean stages. It is, above all, a playing space. “Everything’s about the relationships between human beings,” says Frankcom. “You’ve got one person in the middle of 700 others.” Unusually, the theatre’s doors double as its stage entrances – “a wonderfully democratic gesture, but every time they open, the energy goes out of the room.” The real world floods back in.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maxine Peake in rehearsals for A Streetcar Named Desire at the Royal Exchange in 2016.

Proximity doesn’t work in the space, says Frankcom – “The closer the actors get to one another, the more they shut the audience out” – but great Royal Exchange performers open up to the audience. “Actors get a real workout in there. If you’re not in the moment, if you’re dialling it in, audiences find you out very quickly.”



It’s another nowhere-to-hide space, not least because it’s so inflexible. “Your configuration is dictated to you,” says Davis. It’s down to designers to solve the space. Davis covered the glass in graffiti for Scuttlers, pulling the play’s Victorian gangs into the present, and made the metal frame into a giant musical instrument, clanging and banging like the old cotton mills. It was almost immersive theatre.

“You have to wipe the slate clean and pare things right down, she says. “What’s key? What’s necessary? It forces you to use the audience’s imaginations. You have to be in their brains.”

