London is likely to get a swanky new theatre

BUILT INTO the bricks of British theatres are the aims and ideals of the ages that made them. “Social class,” says Rohan McWilliam, a historian at Anglia Ruskin University and author of a book on the West End, “was etched into the architecture of theatre.” From the gilded social stratification of Victorian theatres to the dourly democratic National Theatre (“a mixture of Gatwick airport and Brent Cross shopping centre”, as the director Jonathan Miller had it) British theatres are mirrors to their makers.

Now London is to get a new one, due to open in 2025. With 1,575 seats, the Olympia Theatre in Kensington will be the largest permanent theatre to be built in the capital since the National opened in 1976. It reflects a very different era. The National was an austerely egalitarian place, with brutalist architecture and an opening season that offered Hamlet and a strong sense of cultural purpose. This was theatre less as entertainment and more as medicine to dose an occasionally nonplussed nation. “Do the English people want a national theatre?” asked the playwright George Bernard Shaw before it was built. “Of course they do not. They never want anything.”