In London newspapers they’re debating who’ll take over directorship of the National Theatre next year, when Nicholas Hynter leaves, the same way New Yorkers might talk about who’d take over the Yankees if Joe Girardi left. The fuss brought my attention to the National’s remarkable facilities, a sprawling, Brutalist complex at the south end of Waterloo Bridge designed by architect Denys Lasdun that opened in 1973, just a few months after the Theatre’s founding director, Laurence Olivier, retired. For a structure housing a revered national cultural institution, the building is deeply aggressive, modern, and discordant, not stereotypically British. When it opened Prince Charles observed, smartly, “The National Theatre seems like a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting." Of course today, after the success of the Tate Modern, we’re all tremendously fond of power stations.
Yet I can’t get over how unattractive the National Theatre comes across in photographs. The structure is an immense one that encompasses three individual theaters, as if the three central theaters at Lincoln Center had been built under one roof. It’s composed as a jumble of skewed square towers and street-length floor balconies, all in poured concrete, unrelieved by openings or plantings, as if two cruise ships had collided with the aforementioned power plant. The National is too much building, broken into too many bits. Brutalism isn’t about being pretty, but this building doesn’t hold up well when compared with other monuments imagined in the same style. Its forms lack the the compressed sculptural drama of Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale, the hippiesh elan of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ‘67, and the hopeful, idealizing geometries of Peter and Alison Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens. I can’t help but believe that the British theater is indebted to its language, one of precision, lyricism and economy. What a shame that this building doesn’t reach for any of that.