‘Is that a theatre?’ How Manchester built a dream space to leave the world behind | Theatre

A young man arrives in Manchester for a job interview as an assistant director. Standing before him is the Royal Exchange building – once the largest trading room in Europe, where thousands of men in top hats, smoking cigars, went about their business. In the 19th century, when cotton was king, the Exchange was seen as “the hub of the universe”. Walking up the steps and into the Great Hall the young man is confronted by a structure of glass and steel, suspended from the four central pillars of the building. Like many people, before and since, he wondered: is that a theatre?

The Royal Exchange theatre was conceived by a group of international theatre artists who first met in the UK during the 1950s. Twenty-five years later, after working in every kind of theatre, as well as television and film, they had the opportunity to create a dream theatre of their own. I was fortunate to meet all of them that day in one room. Caspar Wrede, a bearded Finnish nobleman; Michael Elliott, a hawklike son of a royal chaplain; James Maxwell, an urbane American from Massachusetts; Richard Negri, small and intense from Italian Catholic stock; and Braham Murray, a pugnacious north Londoner.

They were a motley crew of highly opinionated men who operated as a group artistic directorate. To the outside world the notion of a group in charge was confusing and a frequent source of frustration. I always treated the idea as similar to a successful band: full of strong egos with different strengths but ultimately creating a sound beyond each individual’s talent. Band members argue, scheme against each other, have rows, don’t talk for periods of time, have creative ups and down, change lineups but keep making music.

The Royal Exchange group directorate had all these things and I went through phases of frustration, anger and euphoria over many years. However, the crucial source of energy for me was the space itself – this extraordinary structure that I walked past every day to my office. I felt that the aspiration to work collectively sprung directly from this structure. The space was the beating heart of the company’s work.

Richard Negri was a theatre designer. The story goes that one day the group walked into this vast empty trading hall where Richard had a vision and then wrote “Rosebud” on a dustsheet. Richard imagined a seven-sided petal-shaped structure of steel and glass suspended from the pillars of the Victorian cotton exchange: a theatre for the future, where the audience shared the same space with the actors.

There was a dramatic climax to the design process. At the last moment, Richard was told that the theatre must have eight sides otherwise the structure couldn’t be supported. There was a meeting early in the morning in the hall to make the final decision, Richard having asked to have the night to think it over. He arrived and said the theatre had to be seven sided as it always had been. No one expected him to stick to his dream in the face of jeopardising everything. After a horrible silence, an elderly worker in a flat cap smoking a roll-up said he thought there was a way to hang a seven-sided structure. Seven is a powerful number; numerology and astrology played a strong part in how the group thought.

I was fascinated by the way Richard explained to me how, in his mind, the tubular steel and glass theatre reflected the human body, complete with legs, arms and lungs with its cream colour being that of human bone. Inside, the auditorium had three levels and was enclosed by a domed ceiling; a visualisation of the space as a giant collective brain. This was the result of a crucial decision the group made on the size of the theatre. They refused to make the seating capacity more than 750. This choice flew in the face of economic practicality, there were confrontations with various funding authorities but the group was adamant. The result was a space where the furthest seat was only 32ft (9.75 metres) away from the action; intimate and focused for performances.

The seating was a particular shade of green. Richard had rejected all existing green colours so a special dye had to be created: a forest green. He told me he wanted the audience that surrounded the actors to be in the Forest of Arden. I loved this warm, sensuous colour and the way an audience was being invited to leave their world behind and think in a playful, imaginative and ultimately progressive fashion. In As You Like It a society changes itself by escaping to a dense forest; I felt this “forest” held similar transformative possibilities.

Another vital aesthetic feature of the space was its relationship to the vast outside hall of the old cotton exchange. The group always saw this theatre as a structure within a structure. The dynamic between the intimate and the epic was important. A character in a play might be in contact with the “mysteries” of existence – gods, spirits, fates or furies – and their imagining of this bigger world was palpable in the presence of the hall through the glass structure of the theatre. Richard wanted the natural state of day and night, light and darkness, to be present during any performance (reflecting Shakespeare’s Globe). The dome of the cotton exchange was tinted which produced a beautiful diffuse blue light. This dynamic between an intimate space in the round with the vastness of the building produced a staging environment that I found inspiring.

One of the reasons the Exchange space had such power and purpose was that it consciously reflected the three great eras of western drama. First, the ancient Athenian theatre, where the community gathered annually to watch a festival of plays that dealt with the great issues of life through a mythic history. Then the Renaissance Globe theatre, where playwrights invented the modern psychological human being as the centre of a religious cosmos; a microcosm within the macrocosm. Finally, the 19th-century theatre of naturalism, where the inner workings of the human mind were revealed in all their contradictions. Thinking about and ultimately directing plays from these golden ages forged my voice and informed all my work.

I’ve frequently been asked whether there are any plays that can’t be staged in the round. Farce was sometimes mentioned since it depended on doors. Interestingly, farces were very successful in the space. The frenzied nature of the characters is what motors a farce, if the audience is engaged by a character’s desires and predicaments, technical staging problems can always be solved. Any play can be staged in the Exchange if it contains flesh and blood characters, bursting with life. Conversely, plays that depend on physical structures or mechanical special effects for their impact will never work. Theatre in the round is three- not two-dimensional and demands depth in both characterisation and storytelling.

I found this space constantly exciting from a design perspective. The inside and the outside could be wired with speakers. A helicopter could fly over the theatre, a bird could land, chirp and fly off again, a battle could be earth shattering. Sound could summon up environments that couldn’t be concretely visualised but could work on the imagination.

Lighting couldn’t rely on the usual isolated spot effects; there was no complete separation with the audience and also no complete blackout. Lighting had to concentrate on atmospheres that worked in three dimensions, suffusing the action and the auditorium alike.

Costumes were seen up close, every crease or pattern visible. The actors needed to look natural in their costumes, or “clothes” as everyone preferred to describe them. Every prop made or found needed to be individual and fully formed. As a director I found I needed to talk about the special nature of the space to my freelance creative teams and frequently set the principles of how all the elements were to be expressed. Unless a director is especially visually gifted (and very few are), I think one should create the right framework for one’s collaborators to express themselves. But working in the Exchange meant that I formulated the overall visual structure of all the plays I directed because I felt the space had to be the preeminent design element in any production.

Above all, the Exchange was conceived by the founding artistic directors as an actors’ space; plays had to be shared and stories told with empathy and skill with the audience all around. Crucially, there was no out-front direction for the actor to turn to, the audience was everywhere. This meant actors had to directly look and listen to one another. A fair proportion of the audience couldn’t see the actor’s face when speaking, so their character couldn’t live without the other character’s reactions. Which is why any actor who appears in the space has to be completely present.

Casting every part, however large or small, was for me a vital process. When I first joined it was made clear to me that many a play would only happen with the right casting in the main role, whatever wonderful directorial concepts I might have. I was frustrated at the time by these restrictions, but as I grew as a director I began to see that when playwrights create great roles, they offer a potential for something unforgettable to happen.