A New Treasure on the Thames

From the outside, the new home of Britain's National Theater looks like a concrete cubist fortress. Yet, looking out from its wide cantilevered terraces, one might be on the bridge of an ocean liner. Scanning the Thames from its South Bank, one sees the helmeted dome of St. Paul's to the right, and on the left, the smoothly scalloped arches of Waterloo Bridge. Within the building, the staggered lobby levels form spacious coves of unanticipated intimacy, soon to be thronged with hosts of theatergoers.

Entering the chief playhouse in this three-theater complex, the not-yet-finished Olivier Theater, is a breath-catching moment. It flares out like a fan, not quite to the width of an amphitheater, but with an uncanny resemblance in miniature to the ancient Greek theater of Epidaurus. It is as if 2,500 years of dramatic history had been telescoped into this immutable wedge of space.

When the National Theater opens its new quarters on March 16 with a production of Hamlet with Albert Finney in the title role, the occasion will mark both the end and the beginning of an impossibly protracted dream. The first serious proposal for a national theater was made in 1848 by a London publisher named Effingham Wilson. As long ago as 1938, Bernard Shaw had actually secured the deeds for a prospective national theater site.

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was present at the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone for the project in 1951 but all deliberate speed continued to prevail. The building was not actually begun until 1969. However, in 1963, Laurence Olivier was officially appointed head of the National, with the company performing at the Old Vic. Without his towering prestige and his selfless devotion of ten years of his time, it is doubtful whether the idea would have ever become a reality.

Complemented intellectually by Kenneth Tynan in the subsidiary role of literary manager, Olivier led the National to eclectic pinnacles of dramatic art. But in a decade's time, ill health and some ill-conceived productions brought about Olivier's resignation. His successor was no surprise. Between 1960 and 1968, Peter Hall had revolutionized the playing of Shakespeare, created the Royal Shakespeare Company and made it a national theater of high-styled stature. The bristly-bearded Hall--part dynamo, part diplomat, and possessed of a driving will--is peculiarly fitted to meet the challenge that lies ahead in forging a theater within the atmosphere of a nerve-shaken Britain.

Pure Vision. As the English experience shows, wanting, or even legislating, a national theater is no guarantee of getting one. When Manhattan's Lincoln Center complex was erected, many U.S. playgoers half-supposed that they were getting a kind of prefabricated national theater. The recent Napoleonic efforts of the indefatigable Joseph Papp demonstrate that without the framework of tradition, such hope was unrealistic. What is needed is the meshing of disparate elements into an organic whole. The salient factors are the physical plant, the guiding personality, common aesthetic purpose and access to the public purse, together with the mature seasoning of tradition and the ability to cope with the carpers who greet every visible defect as a disaster.

The plant on the Thames' South Bank is a marvel of sophisticated technology and congenial amenities for actors and audiences alike. For theatergoers, there are seven bars, two cafeterias and a restaurant. Backstage facilities include scenery workshops that run the full rear length of the building and rehearsal rooms large enough to contain a play's sets. For the actors, there are 135 air-conditioned dressing rooms. The playing areas of the theaters will also be air-conditioned.

The 890-seat Lyttelton, where the company will make its debut, is a traditional proscenium arch house with the subdued intimacy of a room one might associate with chamber music. No ticket holder can complain about his point of vantage. The raked, beige, tufted seats offer sight lines of geometric clarity. It is as if the air had been filtered for purer vision. The particular largesse of the Lyttelton is a side stage sealed off from the main stage by a soundproof door. A visiting company from the provinces or abroad--and Hall intends to invite them --can mount its set on the side stage during one of the National's matinees, and then slide it onto the main stage for the evening performance.

1,160 Pairs. At no point in the drafting process for the theaters did Architect Denys Lasdun consider designing for a show of pomp, reports TIME Correspondent Lawrence Malkin. The priority was to make form assist theatrical function. With the Olivier Theater, in particular, consultations occurred between Lasdun and Olivier and such accomplished men of the theater as Directors John Dexter, Peter Brook and Peter Hall himself. The concept emerged of a theater in which, as Lasdun puts it, "an actor could hold an audience in the palm of his hand, and every one of them would have him in his sight." The fan spread of the house is between 125DEG and 130DEG; that is the effective width span of human vision. In intensity of effect, this means that one actor can have an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with 1,160 pairs of eyes.

The chief playing surface at the Olivier is a 40-ft.-in-diameter revolvable drum. This is a most ingenious toy. It can split into two half-moon elevators, with one half dropping to the basement while the other half comes up with a change of setting within seconds. They can be positioned at different heights to create a split-level stage. The third theater, the diminutive Cottesloe (capacity 400) is a simple box. Wood-lined, it is 75 ft. long, 47 ft. wide and 24 ft. high. Experimental in intent, the Cottesloe gives a director the choice of how he wants to use the space and even arrange the seats.

Whoever directs, Peter Hall will rule. He may command through persuasive fluency and crisp decision, but he must also woo the paying customers and the satraps of subsidy. At least 80% of the 2,450 seats must be filled or the prevailing ratio of $2 in government subsidy for every $2 in theater receipts will go perilously awry. There has been quite audible grumbling about the $30 million that has already gone into what one sour critic has labeled "the concrete Xanadu on the South Bank." Hall has astutely muted such criticism by occupying the premises, and the government is now as unlikely to turn its back on the National as Washington, D.C., would be to turn on the Kennedy Center.

Hall will probably prevail and triumph, for he has the track record of a winner. Rarely have intelligence, tenacity, luck and skill enabled a man to fulfill so well a teen-age sense of vocation. At 14, he saw a performance of Love's Labour's Lost at Stratford-on-Avon and thought, "I want to direct that theater." At 29, he did.

When Hall was born in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, on Nov. 22,1930, his father was a railway employee and his grandfather had been the village ratcatcher. Peter was bright enough to win scholarships that eventually took him to Cambridge. His father's railway pass gave him carte blanche for Saturday-night travel to London theaters, where he sat in "the Gods"--the top balcony --and watched his gods--Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft--during the 1940s.

Two Itches. By the time he graduated from Cambridge, Hall had already directed nine plays and studied English under Scholar F.R. Leavis. Leavis hated theater, but he made a lasting impact on Hall with his scrupulous examination of a text, particularly for its ironies and ambiguities, and his conviction that any work of art must be placed in a social context. Hall more or less applied that lesson in his celebrated Wars of the Roses productions, in which the protagonists were not seen as gallant warrior-kings but as bloody power buccaneers.

Hall walks his own corridors of power with relish and agility. Says he: "Basically, I have two itches. One is creative, the other is meddling --or business management, to put it at its highest." Lord Goodman, former head of the Arts Council, which rations the annual subsidies to the National, calls Hall "a clever and subtle negotiator." Others have called him a "manipulator," a "politician" and a "cold fish." Hall halfway cultivates the Machiavelli pose and may even utilize it for self-protection. Says he: "I am very proud. I don't like giving myself away. I don't like being vulnerable."

Some critics of bigness, such as regional companies and fringe groups (British siblings to off-off-Broadway), and even the RSC itself, have expressed fears that the National will operate like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up all available talent as well as a punitive share of government funds. Hall argues the reverse: "The more theater there is, the more is created."

In any event, Hall's first round of plays in repertory would not seem to be on a collision course with most of his competitors. His selections include Happy Days, Beckett's drama of a sand-trapped, middle-class suburban matron more in love with her paltry possessions than her life, in which Peggy Ashcroft gives a wonderously luminous performance. In bouncy contrast, Plunder is a kind of Feydeau farce in which two upper-class cads (Frank Finlay and Dinsdale Landen) beat the raps of burglary, murder and Scotland Yard. Further entries include Ibsen's soul-clawing John Gabriel Borkman; Pinter's No Man's Land, with Richardson and Gielgud (TIME, May 19); and a new John Osborne play, Watch It Come Down, which combines an atrabilious war between the sexes (Jill Bennett and Finlay) with a heartfelt anathema on England.

Hall has already jolted some critics with the Hamlet that will inaugurate his tenure at the National. There is no trace of Gielgud's musical phrasing, but the uncut text is spoken with such rigorous lucidity that it dispels old mysteries and reveals new ones. The mantle of "sweet prince" nobility is one garment Albert Finney never wears. If he were not Hamlet, he could be a Renaissance hit man whom Hamlet might have hired to kill the king. Yet his is a tormented bewilderment between the warring claims of rationality and blood revenge.

Hall springs a surprise with Gertrude, whom Angela Lansbury ably depicts as a hand-wringing matron whose habit of dependence left her no choice but to marry Claudius. In that role, Denis Quilley seems born to the crown with no scoundrelly hangdog airs. When has it not been a king's prerogative to murder for his own advantage? he seems to ask. And doubling as the Ghost, he is briskly paternal, not garrulous. The tempo is all Peter Hall's doing, and he makes the play sprint the whole four hours. So is the audacity, a quality likely to become familiar at this South Bank gem in the seagirt isle of drama.

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