Iain Mackintosh
[14][4] While the National’s Olivier and Lyttleton Theatres are fixed-format, the Cottesloe can be recast into many arrangements to suit the production design.
In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the National, Director Nicholas Hytner wrote: ‘What Iain Mackintosh did when he was asked to make a theatre inside that big black empty box had a touch of improvisatory genius.’[15] In November 1973, when presenting the design concept to the National’s Director, Peter Hall and John Bury, head of design, Mackintosh coined the phrase ‘courtyard theatre’.
Its extremely simple, rectangular form, with the audience on three shallow tiers, can be readily adapted to proscenium, end stage, thrust, in-the-round, traverse or promenade form.’[18] In his review of Setting the Scene: Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Theatre Architecture, edited by Alistair Fair, Richard Pilbrow noted ‘It’s interesting to reflect that in our National Theatre the two architect-designed theatres have attracted not one single imitator, whereas the theatre-designed Cottesloe has prompted perhaps more than fifty successful clones around the world.
[19] This project led to other rectangular galleried playhouses, such as The Tricycle (1980) with architect Tim Foster, which was constructed out of builders’ scaffolding within an existing volume.
[4] The Founders’ Theatre (2001) at Lenox Massachusetts, developed with architect George Marsh of Boston, is likewise a scaffolded courtyard in an extended hut.
[20] Mackintosh’s smallest galleried space is also his only theatre-in-the-round, the 185 seat Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London (1991).
[21] Mackintosh developed two other forms of flexible theatre spaces, each holding around 450 patrons with three levels of seats around the edges enveloping the central audience area, which can be reconfigured for different stagings.
[24] Replacement of failed modern auditoria by returning to a traditional multilevel intimate house include the Bluma Appell Theatre at the St. Laurence Centre for the Arts, Toronto, Canada (1983)[4] and the Enschede Schouwburg Netherlands with Dutch architect, Onno Greiner (1988).
We all felt intimacy would be most easily achieved with the people in the audience wrapped round like wallpaper.
That’s something that neither the fan shape nor the shoebox does.’[26] Architectural critic Jonathan Glancy wrote ‘Inside the auditorium the project makes near perfect sense.
Mackintosh’s theatre forms were based on strict geometry, generally ad quadratum (ascending concentric circles within successive squares).
In 2003, on behalf of the Scottish Arts Council, Mackintosh and Sir James Dunbar-Nasmith (with whom he had worked on the Festival Theatre Edinburgh), supervised the reconstruction of the complete auditorium of the Opera House at Dunfermline, Scotland, within a new building in Sarasota, Florida.
In 1975 he was commissioned by the Arts Council of Great Britain to curate and design ‘The Georgian Playhouse 1730–1830’ at their Hayward Gallery, in the run up to the National Theatre’s opening.
[32] ‘This show on the delectable theme of the Georgian playhouse…is important artistically’ wrote Denys Sutton, editor of Apollo.
[33] The exhibition comprised 379 oil paintings, watercolours and architectural designs and attracted acclaim from both theatre and art critics.
In 2009 at the Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, Marcus Risdell and Mackintosh co-curated ‘The Face and Figure of Shakespeare: How Britain’s 18th Century Sculptors invented a National Hero’.
[21] In 2006 the Victoria & Albert Museum London acquired Downfall of Shakespeare Represented on a Modern Stage (sic) by William Dawes, 1763-1765, and asked Mackintosh to research it.
[44] His other books include ‘Pit, Box and Gallery: A history of the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds’, The National Trust, 1979 and in 2023 "Theatre Spaces 1920-2020 Finding the Fun in Functionalism"[45] Contributions to journals, catalogues and chapters in books or catalogues edited by others include:
