There is a wonderful holiday snap of the great modern architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe near the end of his life, sitting on one of the concentric rings of stone seats at the theatre of Epidaurus. Designed by Polycleitus and built between 350 and 330 BC, this 13,000-seat semi-circular Greek theatre has never really been bettered. Its acoustic is pretty much perfect, its elemental design and natural setting mesmerising.
Mies strived for half a century to achieve this level of architectural purity in his designs for modern houses, offices and art galleries (but never a theatre). He almost got there.
Before and since Mies, many inspired architects have visited Epidaurus, not least Denys Lasdun, architect of the National Theatre in London, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this week. (A memorial service was held yesterday for Lasdun, who died earlier this year.) And, yet, for all its weather-boarded concrete majesty, this powerful building, sited like some ancient fortress or unexpected urban geological outcrop on London's South Bank, was considered flawed when it opened in 1977.
From the outset, there were mechanical problems with complex revolving stage machinery, while actors declaiming from the massive stage of the cavernous Lyttleton Theatre found themselves divorced from audiences.
The National's public spaces were given a respectful, if surprisingly controversial makeover at the end of the 1990s by the architects Stanton and Williams, although only veteran audiences and the eagle-eyed would have noticed much difference.
Meanwhile, new theatres - none that big, but none that different, and none as radical and as sophisticated as Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre - designed by Levitt Bernstein in the 1970s, have made their various entrances up and down the country. It is only, perhaps, the small and unexpected ones that, since then, have proved to be innovative successes - the Royal Court in London's Sloane Square and the garage-style Almeida at King's Cross spring to mind.
Has theatre design really got anywhere since Epidaurus? In Britain, in the 25 years since the completion of the National, results have been patchy. No one seems to know quite what theatre ought to be - the stuff of bands of roaming players and minstrels, or a fixed repertoire point in the fast-turning world of towns and cities, housed in more or less grandiloquent buildings? Few come as grand as the Royal Shakespeare Company's 69-year-old Grade II listed theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. A mighty art deco construction, the 1,500-seat theatre appears to masquerade as a contemporary Cunard ocean liner berthed on the banks of the Avon.
Inside, despite attempts in the early 1960s, and again 30 years later, to engage its audiences more closely with life on stage, it looks and feels like one of the grandest 1930s cinemas. And now this grand duchess of a building is under threat. Adrian Noble, artistic director of the RSC, wants to create a new "theatre village" at Stratford. Future visitors arriving by car or coach will be taken on boats from outside the city gates into a new themed world of Shakespearean theatre.
This is unlikely, however, to be folksy, or Shakespeare as an urban theme park experience, as the RSC's principal architect is the forward-looking Dutchman Erick van Egeraat, and the company is in the process of being rebranded by the dynamic New York literary agent Andrew Wylie.
The RSC is busy raising money in the US; Noble's £100 million sterling plan to transform Stratford is very likely to appeal to potential US audiences, although it is guaranteed to upset traditional domestic audiences. Half the money is to come from the Arts Council, the remainder from private patronage, much of it probably American.
The whole point is to open up the experience of theatre-going, and to make a real Shakespearean day out of visiting Stratford. Noble's idea is that visitors will take part in various theatre-related experiences during the day, slotted in between lunch, tea and interval drinks. These might include watching fight-scene rehearsals - or even joining in. The Noble plan, no matter how controversial, is all of a piece. It includes taking the RSC out of its home at the Barbican and spreading its productions across venues in and out of London. In this sense, the RSC is destined to become something of a touring company. It might as easily end up playing on the street or on a beach as in a grand old theatre.
Finding an ideal architectural setting for theatre has been a quixotic quest for centuries. Epidaurus was perfect in its time because it matched and mirrored the art and culture of the society that created it. The Greek theatre was the chorus of the city it served, its performances rituals that saw poetry, drama, costume, movement, spectacle and architecture working in harmony. At the beginning of the 21st century, the theatre is not like this. But there remains a divide between the expectations of traditionally minded audiences and those of inventive theatrical companies.
Going to see a play in a theatre like Stratford is much like going to the cinema. Actors play on a distant stage, framed by heavy curtains, screens and coats-of-arms. This is a very long way from the kind of theatre promoted since the 1950s by director Peter Brooke. Brooke's audiences might find themselves almost anywhere in a city. The two experiences are quite different, require different architectural settings and, to date, seem to have appealed to different audiences. Noble's Stratford village scheme could be a way of bringing the two together.
It can, of course, be argued that the Stratford theatre could be adapted rather than demolished. It was, after all, Theatre Projects Management (the team working with Noble's RSC) who advised on the planning of the Royal Exchange, which involved building an ultra-modern and still admired space-pod theatre inside a Victorian civic palace. Innovative theatre can also be adaptive. Noble might also look at what Nicholas Serota has achieved at Tate Modern: the conversion of a redundant power station (which happens to look rather like the RSC Theatre) by imaginative contemporary architects Herzog and de Meuron, has led to the creation of the most popular art gallery in Britain.
Like the RSC Stratford, the National Theatre is concerned that its audience is too old and too middle-class. It aims to move in the direction of cinema's multiplexes to attract younger and broader audiences. The plan is to divide up the 950-seat Lyttleton auditorium: a Royal Exchange-style "pod" (a 650-seat theatre-within-a-theatre) will sit on the existing stage, while a 100-seat studio theatre will be installed in the Lyttleton foyer. During its first six months, this will be exclusively for the use of experimental theatre companies and young writers. Ticket prices will be cut.
An Internet cafΘ will be opened. There will be barbecues on the National's hallowed terraces. Just in case these innovations hurt rather than please, this grand plan devised under the direction of Trevor Nunn, outgoing artistic director of the National, is said to be a temporary measure. If successful, however, it may well become permanent.
For his part, Noble may not be able to please all the audiences and all the critics all the time. We must wait to see the quality of architectural ideas at Stratford. In the meantime, all artistic directors working in a messy, pluralist world can take comfort from the fact that their predecessors have been struggling with the problem ever since ancient audiences abandoned the concentric stone seats of Epidaurus - and left architects as great as Mies wondering how to connect such purity of design and purpose with the values of later, far less inclusive societies.
(Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001)
