Elizabethan theatre, Chateau d’Hardelot review – a great view from the circle
This article is more than 7 years oldAndrew Todd has spent his career exploring theatrical space, and his new playhouse in a French castle blends timeless principles and modern construction
“If you tell a story,” says the architect Andrew Todd, “people will tend to form a circle around you.” This is one reason that the Shakespearean theatre, the wooden O of the Globe or the Rose, “is not a moment in history but a paradigm that keeps coming back into existence”. The history of theatre, he says, “is that of going in and out of the circle”.
In the grounds of a castle in France, he has had the chance to put his thoughts into practice. On the greensward of the Chateau d’Hardelot, near Boulogne-sur-Mer and in sniffing distance of the Channel, a 388-seat Elizabethan theatre has gone up to his design. The chateau, a medieval ruin converted into a Tudor-style folly by its 19th-century British owners, is a relic of the continuous interaction between this part of France and Britain and now serves as a cultural centre of the entente cordiale. Bravely, or perhaps unwittingly, and as it turned out with some poignancy, they scheduled the first public performance of this gesture of European solidarity for last Friday, 24 June, the day after the referendum vote.
The timber gives the building a provisional air, as if it might disappear in an act of Prospero’s magicThe material is timber and the form round. The auditorium is vertical and galleried, with a stage thrust into the middle, and behind it an update of a Shakespearean tiring house, the two-storey structure whose doors and balconies enable actors’ appearances and exits. It achieves the intimacy between performers and audience of its ancient models. There is no view of the stage that does not also include other spectators, which engenders the sense that everyone is in it together. The acoustic, according to Todd, “sits on the knife edge between intelligible speech and mellifluous musical sound”. Actors have to enunciate and project, but they can do so in a conversational tone.
Todd wanted to make a building that “is absolutely up to date but could be 500 years old”, by which he means in spirit rather than in detail. The building is not an exercise in thatched, half-timbered reconstruction like London’s (relatively) new Globe. There is selective use of steel and the basic structure is of cross-laminated timber, a modern technique using factory-made panels that are strong, lightweight and efficient in their use of wood.
The auditorium is roofed, but daylight is allowed in and the movement of air – with the help of some technical contrivance – is natural. “Unlike many palaces of culture,” says Todd, “it is possible to put on a show in this building literally with nothing, using only natural light from the sun and natural ventilation, the breath of the surrounding forest.”
Externally, it is an accumulation of shapes set within a cylinder drawn in the air by a skinny bamboo frame. The bamboo looks as if it might support a canopy or banners but actually has no function except to delineate the geometric shape, bring elegance to what might otherwise look lumpy, and cast shadows on it like a regularised tree. Also, as Todd explains, the choice of bamboo is “a conscious note of strangeness, just as we have a comforting view of Shakespeare – we think we know him – when in fact he wrote about gender-bending, migrants and strange magical islands”.
The approach is deliberately indirect, obliging you to stroll round the edge of the building through a grove of chestnuts and limes, pause before a fine view of the landscape and another of the castle, and turn to enter the theatre. That the building is of timber – which is not easy to achieve in a complex structure built to modern regulations about such things as spread of fire – gives it a provisional air, as if it might disappear in an act of Prospero’s magic. Shortly before the opening Todd lamented that the grass had been mown; it was meant to rise from something more meadow-like. Inside and out it has a sense of incompletion, of waiting to be remade with its performances.
This is how Todd wants it, and the project realises the experiences of a roundabout architectural career in which the stage has rarely been far away. He started off studying English at the University of Cambridge, trying his hand at student acting, realised that he couldn’t keep up with contemporaries like Tom Hollander, and then helped manage a theatrical tour, which took all the sets and trappings round Europe in the back of a coach. He eventually learned architecture in Philadelphia before working in Paris with his hero, the director Peter Brook, whose book The Empty Space had been an inspiration since the age of 18. He is still based in Paris. He is also a musician, a percussionist in a jazz band. Together he and Brook produced another book, The Open Circle, about the spaces Brook used for his productions – quarries, industrial buildings, Saharan villages, abandoned theatres. “Through the merciful association of Brook’s stardust,” he says, “I was able to start up quite quickly.” He contributed to the renewal of the Young Vic in London before working with Kevin Spacey on the temporary transformation of the Old Vic into a theatre-in-the-round. Todd has just published a further book, Common Sense, in which he translates this career history into observations about architecture and theatre. It includes a description of an inspection of a model of the Hardelot theatre by the Queen, who he describes as “the greatest performance artist in the world”.
His professional journey has given him insights that other architects don’t have. From Brook, and from his work in music and theatre he has learned that “architecture can do a lot of work in telling the story. It has to do it in such a way that it gives possibilities but doesn’t take them away.” It has to operate in a “thick zone” between being bland and being overbearing. It should bring “atmosphere, spirit, presence”. It can suggest, provoke, inspire, but not instruct or demand.
The Hardelot theatre is not a perfectly smooth work of architecture but it promises to be a starting point for future interpretation, as a building for theatre or indeed any other use should. It remains to be seen how it thrives, especially as it has also dropped into a charged political situation, being the work of the administration of the département of Pas-de-Calais, who have been narrowly holding off the challenge of the Front National.
“It will be interesting to see how it finds its level in rocky seas,” said Todd, the day before a nocturnal graffiti attack left both the theatre and the castle marked with orange tags criticising its cost. At €4.3m (£3.3m), this is in fact low and the building is designed so that performances can be put on for almost nothing. As we know, facts don’t always count for much in the extreme arguments now put forward across Europe. But it is all the more important that, as a place dedicated to shared understanding and enlightenment, the theatre at the Chateau d’Hardelot survives this onslaught.
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