In December 2005, an extraordinary theatrical event took place at the tiny Gate Theatre in Notting Hill when Thea Sharrock, then the artistic director there, and her designer Richard Hudson reconceived this ever-versatile space to site the audience above and around the perimeter of a rectangular box in which Eugene O’Neill’s rarely-seen The Emperor Jones unfolded. The production was a shock to the system, partly because of the change of perspective: I’ve never watched a play from above before. When it was announced that Sharrock and her star Paterson Joseph – but not the designer, with Hudson replaced by Robin Don – were to re-stage production at the National’s Olivier, I was shocked again: how would they bring the same kind of disorienting intensity to this strange, powerful play?
Seeing the new production open at the Olivier last night, it was amazing to see the same artists responding to the same work in a totally different yet equally compelling way. Theatrical space, of course, is never fixed – the only limit, famously, is people’s imaginations. With an auditorium like the Olivier, the vast stage may give you flexibility to define the space in different ways, but the auditorium itself is a fixed shape and size, and needs to be addressed in its entirety. Don, Sharrock and Joseph rise to the physical as well as emotional challenges of it in bold, powerful ways that replace the overpoweringly intense intimacy of what was achieved at the Gate with a no-less intense epic scale.
But its places like the Gate – and the Cottesloe, Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs and the Menier Chocolate Factory, to name just a few, where each time you enter them you wonder how they will be laid out – that have allowed artists to play with the configurations of the audience space as well as the stage one. And the growing trend towards environmental and site-specific productions keeps taking theatre out of theatres themselves. Sometimes, too, as Punchdrunk are about to do at BAC, the theatre is being taken out of the theatre, and the entire venue turned into a site-specific place.
These are deliberate, calculated interventions to change our perceptions of space; but productions, too, can play with changes of scale. It was fascinating, for instance, to watch the Watermill in Newbury’s radical downscaling of Sondheim’s most epic musical, Sweeney Todd, slowly growing again as it moved first to the West End, then to Broadway. The Menier originated production of another Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George, is undergoing a similar journey: having already played Wyndham’s, next stop is Broadway’s Studio 54 next February, where what was designed to originally be played in very close quarters will have to reach a far more physically distant audience.
