Leicester: a new theatre and no boundaries

A city with a population of fewer than 300,000 has just taken delivery of a theatre whose technical sophistication equals, and may even surpass, the National’s in London.

Leicester’s box-fresh Curve Theatre is aptly named: in setting out to create a new kind of performing and theatre-going experience, its architect Rafael Viñoly has given the Sheffield Crucible and Birmingham Rep, those apparently inviolable bastions of Midlands repertory excellence, serious pause for thought. The Curve’s architecture is, quite literally, a coup de théâtre.

But this is not just an architectural story. When a city no bigger than Ipswich commits £61m to a single arts building, one takes notice. And when the design process, involving one of the world’s most celebrated architects, survives not only the usual dreary anti-architectural vicissitudes of value-engineering but also four changes of council leadership, we see just how important theatre can be to a city’s psyche and cultural ambition.

Leicester is a very suitable case for theatrical treatment. In the 1960s the city supported two vibrant theatres, the Haymarket and the Phoenix. While the Phoenix is still going as an independent cinema, the Haymarket closed in 2006, following financial difficulties that forced it to go dark briefly in 2003. The Curve is billed as the Haymarket’s replacement and will also be run by the Leicester Theatre Trust. The opening season includes Cinderella: A Musical, the only performances of in-i, the dance piece starring Juliette Binoche and Akram Khan, outside London on its international tour, and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, starring Marc Warren (last seen in the BBC’s Mutual Friends).

The new Curve Theatre’s sweeping lines, accentuated by a four-storey glass façade striated with metal louvres, confront the chunkily bird-limed G-Spot club and 147 snooker hall directly opposite, in Rutland Street. The theatre’s architectural brio has nothing to do with the rather engrossing 19th-century architecture around it: the Curve may be bookended by walls of Leicester stock brick, but this is beam-me-down-Scotty architecture; a 21st-century building that challenges the city’s unfortunate motto, Semper eadem – “always the same” – and lights the touchpaper for urban regeneration in the St George’s conservation area. Leicester, whose textile and shoe industries once gave the city one of the highest per capita earnings levels in Britain, is now generating new economic momentum through engineering and food production.

If the Curve were stripped of its louvres, its glazed form and urban position would recall Norman Foster’s fabled moment critique, the 1974 Willis Faber building, a through-the-glass-darkly architectural cuckoo in the nest of Ipswich’s medieval street pattern. But there the comparison ends. The glazed envelope of Foster’s remarkable building is inscrutable because its brown glass is only semi-opaque. Despite the Curve’s louvres – the dominating feature in daylight – Viñoly and his project architect, Nick Gibbs, have delivered a building founded on a more successfully transparent concept: an inside-out theatre. Had the arc of the Curve’s main façade not been south-facing, Viñoly would surely have created a seamlessly glazed über-Willis Faber form; and had he been able to do so, the theatre’s inside-outness would have been stunningly expressed.

But even louvred, the Curve has plainly set a new benchmark in terms of how a theatre is perceived. The architecture does not so much demonstrate the modernist form-equals-function mantra, as act it out. At the Curve, the usual demarcations between on-stage and backstage, promenade spaces and operational spaces, actors and punters, have been erased. It was unsurprising to learn that Viñoly’s original sketches for the theatre amounted to theatrical, public and operational spaces divided only by curtains.

Those conceptual curtains have morphed into a plan, and operational arrangements, of radical simplicity – and effect. Imagine a giant, concrete-floored space under a huge, 1,000-ton horizontal steel lattice resting on four legs, from which the building’s glazed façade is hung. Now, in that clear space, imagine two brightly coloured, full-height pods – the main auditorium and the studio theatre – linked by a central block that contains the Curve’s massive stage, subsurface storage and set-lift zone, and a technical rig with 60 point-hoists and 183 flying bars controlled by the very latest software from a small stage-side desk.

The Curve’s technical superiority is admirable; Leicester City Council and Leicester Theatre Trust may allow themselves to feel smug about it, not least because Birmingham’s impending modernisation of the Rep is unlikely to equal it. But all smugness, as Herodotus almost said, is fleeting. Far more significant, and lasting, will be the innovative nature of the theatrical experience that the Curve provides.

Viñoly’s architecture delivers two theatres, one with 750 seats, the other with up to 350. Yet this is a theatre where the phrase “curtain up” applies to a great deal more than the stage aprons and arches. The “curtains” that informed Viñoly’s early vision for the scheme exist, after all. Despite weighing 24 tons, the lower portions of the side of the main auditorium pod facing the street can be raised; passers-by can see stagehands at work. Getting productions in and out of the theatre? No problem: part of the side of the building lifts up, the pantechnicon reverses in across the public floor of the building, passes through an electrically raised section of the pod wall, and Bob’s – or perhaps, after Orton, Joe’s – your very naughty uncle.

Nobody, least of all the actors, escapes this uncompromising inside-outness. The make-up department is an open shelf on the building’s back wall and can be seen from the ground floor and the promenade levels of the theatre pods; to get to the stage from their dressing rooms, actors walk across a public section of the ground floor. There is no permanent formal separation between front-of-house and back-of-house, or between creative and operational; much of the process of performance is itself revealed.

And the potential for what is given, theatrically, is considerable. By manipulating the various “curtains” of the stage and pod walls, and by adjusting stage aprons and seating, the Curve can deliver proscenium, traverse or theatre-in-the-round performances. This ability, coupled with the fact that the main rehearsal room is the same size as the big main stage, will clearly give the theatre regional pre-eminence, and pulling power.

Is this building an original? In terms of British theatre architecture, certainly. In a broader sense, it reiterates aspects of the sweeping formal bravado of Viñoly’s Tokyo International Forum, and takes its self-dramatising cue from the showstopping glazed barrel-vault of the Kimmel Centre for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia.

The Curve is also Viñoly’s first completed building in Britain. There are more on the way: a new arts centre in Colchester, a tower in the City of London, and (if the outraged shrieks peter out) a vast carbon-neutral scheme next to Battersea power station, surmounted by a transparent carapace and a 1,000ft glass chimney.

The Curve, very nearly improv street-theatre in architectural form, is therefore Viñoly’s calculatedly brilliant audition to the British scene. It is perhaps too clinically virtuosic in parts (those glib, streamlined louvres!), yet is undoubtedly a remarkable mise-en-scène that throws down a serious challenge to the Curve’s artistic director, Paul Kerryson. He’s got what he wanted, a theatre without boundaries; what will he do with it?

www.curveonline.co.uk or contact the box office on 0116-242 3560