In the great white cave of an art deco Odeon, its rake and seats removed, sits a glowing glass box that contains a smaller cinema, at about the height where the balcony used to be. At one end the old proscenium frames red steel galleries and stairs serving a new theatre of up to 900 seats and a 150-seat studio. Beneath the glass box, at ground level, is a “Levantine” restaurant serving “light, vibrant, colourful” food. Insinuated into the spaces between them are shelves and shelves of books, labelled and sheathed in plastic in the manner of libraries, not bought-by-the-metre literary wallpaper but things you are encouraged to take down, read and borrow.
This is the Storyhouse in Chester, designed by the architects Bennetts Associates, a brave and intriguing attempt to take some things that aren’t what they used to be – public libraries, giant old cinemas, regional theatres – and give them new vigour by bringing them together. Local government finances – something else not in the best of health – might also benefit.
The project, says its energetic artistic director Alex Clifton, is “nobody’s good idea” but the product of “opportunism” and “evolution”. It started as a feeling by the local authority that it might be nice to create a prestigious cultural centre, but without a clear idea of who might fill the venues. This could have been disastrous, but a theatre company came into being, putting on successful summer seasons of outdoor performances, which helped inform the shaping of the new place.
A site was considered away from the city centre, by the river Dee – another questionable idea – before it was decided to remodel and extend the old cinema, which stands conspicuously at the end of one of the streets that the Romans laid out, close to the cathedral and the ornate Victorian town hall. It was decided to relocate a public library there, from premises just down the road. There was some expediency here – there were cost savings to be had in moving the library – and according to Clifton there were tears from the librarians, but there was also a positive intent: to make connections between one use and another, such that someone coming for a show might leave with a book, or a school party visiting the library’s education rooms might also see some acting.
The project’s makers keep saying it’s about community and diversity, and about reaching young audiences who wouldn’t otherwise dream of going to the theatre. Librarians are now called the “engagement team”. They use these words so much, indeed, that they can sound like Blair-era creative professionals on autocomplete, but there’s every sign that their pursuit of their ideals is serious and will be effective. They are working with local challenges to create job opportunities for disadvantaged young people. There are gender-neutral toilets. They will programme the cinema to include screenings for autistic audiences and people with dementia. The theatre has a ticketing policy in the style of easyJet, whereby prices depend on how early you buy, not on a hierarchy of posh and less-posh seats. And, in the shared space of the various cultural uses, they have made something that is convincingly multifarious and accessible.
At its centre is the hybrid zone formed by the meeting of the old Odeon and the new work. It is theatrically charged, a place where films can be projected and speeches made from the galleries, and where, in a less grand echo of Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera and Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre, the audience members might become players. The restaurant is prominent, with the intention of celebrating food as “a social act”. This zone also breaks down into smaller spaces, in various degrees contemplative and lively. As Clifton puts it, they have a human scale, but “flashes of epic” when you encounter a piece or ornament from the past.
You have a choice of entrances – either a new glassy one or the striped plywood entrance lobby through which 1930s audiences went to see Garbo and Gable – and the hope is that visitors to whatever part of the complex will use both. Barriers are where possible removed. There is no box office – you buy tickets online, from machines or from the bar – and no security for the library. You are simply trusted not to steal books. The hope is that everyone benefits. The library, for example, will be open from 8am, when the restaurant opens for breakfast, to the end of the performances at about 11pm. As libraries generally are also now encouraged to hold events, this one will benefit from having ample performance spaces attached.
Amid all this liveliness, Bennetts Associates, who also worked on the Royal Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Hampstead theatre and the Old Vic in London, mostly play it straight. They bring to the project intelligence in deciding what goes where, and with the theatre consultants Charcoalblue they have taken on the challenge, often thought impossible, of making an auditorium that can be configured two ways, as either end-stage or thrust. Their palette is what might be called well-made classical modernism: glass and steel, plus bricks that match those of the cinema, plus materials of recognised good quality, such as timber and patinated copper.
This range potentially has its limits when applied to theatres – it could be too factual and un-fantastic, too precise, with too little of greasepaint about it – but these criticisms can’t be levelled here. The main auditorium, steeply proportioned, with a lot of dark-stained wood, has both intimacy and dramatic potential. It has the feeling of a single room shared by performers and audience. On the exterior, Bennetts nicely reinterpret in new materials the old cinema’s balance of verticals and horizontals. Layers of opacity and translucency intimate the life inside.
To Bennetts’ relatively sober canvas, Clifton has added some flourishes of his own, however: statues of peacocks, mirrors laminated with historic views of Chester, and wallpaper and soft furnishings in bedazzling patterns. “Being theatre-makers,” he says, “we’re never knowingly understated.” It’s all part of his idea of drawing in people usually put off by institutions of high culture. Which is all good, except that there’s not much rapport between the different ends of the aesthetic spectrum at which he and his architects operate. There are also a few moments – a bit of inelegant trim here, an unwanted column there – where, despite Bennetts’ best efforts, their craft was compromised by the form of building contract under which the project was procured, which gives supremacy to the building contractor. Occasionally there are unwelcome notes of multiplex, but not so as to overwhelm the big idea.
No performance space can be fully judged until it has been running at least for months. Only then do things like its acoustics and the dynamics of users and players become known. But there is every reason to believe that the theory of the Chester Storyhouse – that it will be a communal space that shelters multiple forms of cultural life – will become reality.
It is also remarkable for the fact that it is proceeding with relatively little controversy. The local authority, Cheshire West and Chester Council, has put up £33m of the £37m budget, yet there are few of the cries that usually accompany cultural buildings, that the money would be better spent on more urgent needs. “I’ve got all my arguments lined up about its benefits, but I haven’t had to use them,” says Clifton. In the past decade Chester lost its last cinema and its last theatre, and most of the city can see, he believes, how badly it needs to get some culture back.
