Sentimental Education at the National Theatre

While many theatre organizations these days—particularly the publicly-funded ones—are obliged to promote themselves in centrifugal terms, along the lines of an educational rhetoric of "outreach" and "access" and "bridging the gap" between the theatrical stage and the "new audiences" out there who should be ripe for persuasion towards this particular form of entertainment, the buildings in which these organizations are housed tend to work according to a different logic. This latter is a centripetal logic, a "school" logic say, a logic of calling and gathering, which aims to bring several things (people, representations) together under the one roof for a certain amount of time, a logic according to which stuff is "put on" and the public "go" to the theatre, to encounter this stuff in its proper place. In a city as big and diverse as London, with so many theatres (and so many sorts of theatres—always so much "choice") competing for our time and our money, this tension that seems to accumulate around the building-based theatres can be acute.

Hardly anywhere in London, I feel, is this situation more evident than at the Royal National Theatre. Maybe it is something to do with the National's proximity to reasonably reliable public transport links, or the seemingly unsurrounded prominence of its prospect on the south bank of the Thames, or the rather cheesily multicultural live jazz that always seems to be playing in the foyer on show nights (and which spills onto the Thames walkway on summer weekends), but the National has long seemed—to this particular theatregoer—more "accessible" than any other London theatre. And, to a certain extent, I'm happy with that; my life (as a theatregoer) is that much easier. I always, though, when I go to the National, feel just a little unsure. As if the crossing of lines, the stepping over a threshold between the theatre of the world and the world of the theatre weren't just a little bit too easy. I've been wondering: is that the National's "fault"? Or mine? Or is it something to do with the state of relations between the world and the theatre, each of which—like partners in a rather selfish sort of modern relationship—has more going on than either is prepared to allow for in the other?

Maybe it is the theatre building itself, the way it provokes affection, an affection for something one used to do but sometime since grew out of. In a mini-feature in the Guardian newspaper performance artist Franko B offers some admiring words on Denys Lasdun's 1970s National Theatre building.¹ He says it is his "favorite building in London." For Franko, it is in part a local thing, being as he is a resident of that part of London packed in between the Waterloo rail terminus and the complex of nominally "royal" and "national" or otherwise venerable arts palaces—the Royal Festival Hall, the National Film Theatre, the Tate Modern, Shakespeare's Globe and so on—arrayed along this bank of the river, the National itself marking a point (for north Londoners, I imagine) where the metropolis shades off already towards the suburbs, or where (for those of us who travel in from the other side) south London, as it were, "comes into town." Franko's phrases do a nice job of catching the architectural appeal of the National, the way for many a world citizen of a certain age its angular concrete masses remind one of the buildings that were growing up alongside us when we were younger, an architecture that will always exemplify "our" modernity. He speaks also, though, of the way the building sustains a sort of analytical appeal that works over a distance, not so much for one who lives nearby, but rather for one who is crossing the river, going in the other direction, over Waterloo Bridge—into town and...