The New London Theatre on Drury Lane was always one of the West End’s biggest white elephants, one of those awful civic-like lumps of modern theatrical architecture that was unresponsive to most of the shows that attempted to play there. Until Cats, of course, took the gamble and utterly reinvented it; suddenly, and for the next 21 years, Cats finally put it on the map in every sense, proving once and for all that any theatre can work as long as those putting a show on there know how to respond to it, as director Trevor Nunn and designer John Napier made this show tumble beyond the stage and entirely inhabit the entire auditorium, even pressing the “moving platform” that the stage is built on into the action.
After Cats departed, however, it looked like it was doomsday, again, for this theatre: not just that it’s seating was falling apart and barely touched, but also that attempting to use this space in a prosc arch configuration simply does not work. But last week I finally caught the RSC transfer of Trevor Nunn’s production of King Lear from Statford’s thrust-stage Courtyard Theatre, and once again I was thrilled to discover a theatre exactly meeting the needs of the show playing there.
The RSC have found the perfect parallel West End home for productions to transfer to, and should immediately sign a long lease to make this their permanent London home. (Unfortunately, Nunn has got there first, in the immediate instance – his production of Gone with the Wind is taking over after the current runs of King Lear and The Seagull end the weekend after next).
Not only have the landlords, the Really Useful Company, finally renewed the seating – and have been surprisingly generous with legroom and comfort in both – but also there’s something about the warmth and intimacy of this auditorium that makes it special, too. True, the public spaces – though generous overall – are still rather higgledy piggledy, full of tight little corners and with human traffic jams building up around the theatre’s confusing array of numbered entrance doors and corridors leading to them (especially around the ladies loo), but they’re worth persevering with. (Now if only the management could deal with the smell of stale urine as you head up the left hand entrances, that would be great). There’s also that rather magnificent glass frontage, not dissimilar to New York’s Minskoff Theatre, that gives the theatre a view onto the outside, too, though without the corresponding views of Times Square.
But the stage is the thing, of course, and no London auditorium, even including the Olivier, has a thrust-stage capacity like this one, and it is perfect for the RSC. Mind you, even if the space is great, not everyone is sure of Nunn’s sense of place for these productions. A friend of mine took a Russian friend of hers, the poet and restauranteur Shura Shivarg, to see The Seagull, and she told him before the play began that King Lear had been set in Russia. At the interval of The Seagull, he turned to her and said, “Darling, is this one supposed to be set in Russia, too?”
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