Curtain up: The Bridge Theatre opens its doors

published 17 October 2017

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I ran the National Theatre with Nicholas Hytner for 12 years, he as artistic director and I as executive director, and we thought it would be interesting to bring what we had learned there to the commercial theatre space. At the National we were responsible for productions such as War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, and had taken a real pleasure in broadening the work outside of the National Theatre – taking it into the West End and onto Broadway ourselves – so we had gained quite a lot of experience in how commercial theatre works.

We were struck by the rising popularity of theatre – audiences in London have increased by 25 per cent since 2000 – and so we decided it could be viable to start a new company, one that was particularly focused on new plays, and occasionally new musicals; but we’d have to find new spaces for it because West End theatres are in short supply. We also realised that if we started from scratch we could build theatres that have more flexibility than the Victorian and Edwardian theatres of the West End, beautiful though most of them are. So we founded the London Theatre Company and set about finding a home for our new initiative.

We teamed up with the architect Steve Tompkins of Haworth Tompkins, who won the 2014 Stirling Prize for the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. I have worked with him on numerous projects over the past 18 years, and some years ago we started talking about what a new commercial theatre should be like. At the end of 2014, just after I’d left the National Theatre and we were searching in earnest for a location, Steve and his colleague Roger Watts began to explore what an ideal auditorium would be like, what the relationship between the actors and audience should feel like, and how best to arrange the seating to achieve comfort, proximity and a range of ticket prices. And then, just as they began the study, Katrina Gilroy (our technical producer) and I were shown One Tower Bridge.

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We couldn’t believe what was there – a space like an aircraft hanger sunk into the ground in the middle of the residential development, with an entrance from Potters Field Park and the room for a spacious foyer overlooking the River Thames. It had been intended for cultural use, although not specifically for a theatre, and it suited our purposes wonderfully well.

Our initial business plan for our new enterprise had started by simply saying: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if it was really enjoyable to go to the theatre.' If not just the show on stage was great, but the whole experience from walking through the door – the drink was good, the seat was comfortable, the service was excellent and the number of bathrooms was sufficient so you didn’t have to queue up in the interval. In the past couple of decades there has been such a revolution in the service and experience we expect from the retail and leisure industries, so why not the theatre too? With The Bridge, we’ve had the opportunity to consider the whole experience of going to the theatre from the audience member’s perspective. Then we took that mindset backstage and thought about what we wanted to create for the actors, directors and designers. We worked up the ideas for The Bridge with all this in mind.

The auditorium has been made in precision-engineered steel, painted a deep chocolate brown with oak finishes. The seats are rust-coloured with leather trimmings and their angle can be adjusted to give the best view of the stage. We wanted the auditorium to feel urbane and warm, the modern-day equivalent of red velvet, plasterwork and cherubs if you like.

We also made the decision not to have a fixed stage and seating, so the auditorium is wonderfully adaptable. Our opening show Young Marx is in the conventional end-on format, but for the second, Julius Caesar, we’re flooring over the auditorium and creating a big promenade space with seating in galleries all the way round. And for the third, Nightfall, the audience will sit around a stage which thrusts out into the auditorium. We’ve achieved this adaptability by partnering with Stage Technologies, a UK company, and their US parent, Tait. They’ve built the auditorium, which is the first of its kind, and have supplied the staging, which is beautifully engineered and goes up and down very quickly.

But the most important thing was to create an experience where a large number of people are all in the same room and feel that they are breathing together, so you get the proximity and the electricity but also have comfort, decent leg room and a good view of the stage. And then, from the actors’ point of view, you want them to be able to have every member of the audience easily in his or her eye line. So the room has to have sufficient scale to be able to hold 900 people, but also be intimate enough that the actor can speak close to their natural voice. When people see the space, they are really delighted by how beautiful it is and how intimate it feels.

Theatre is particularly good at stimulating empathy; there is something primal and enjoyable about sharing a live experience with others in the same space. The more online our lives, the more people seem to want to come together for the shared experience. I think that must be the underpinning reason for the rise in popularity of live entertainment over the last 15 years. It harks back to something primitive, I suspect; a basic delight in storytelling. A show can be highly technological, or decidedly low-tech, it really doesn’t matter. Actors in a room, telling a story to a group of people who are witnessing it – I don’t think its appeal will ever leave us.

Young Marx, the debut production at the Bridge Theatre, runs from 18 October to 31 December; bridgetheatre.co.uk