Medieval Canterbury now has its second tallest building, after its cathedral, in the shape of a contemporary theatre that sits comfortably among the historic roof tops

Details

Client: Canterbury City Council
Design: Keith Williams Architects
Size: 4,850 sq m
Completion time: 29 months
Cost: £25.6m

Project Details

We’re so used to public building projects in the UK being labelled ‘controversial’ that it almost seems worth celebrating when a major public building is completed on time and within budget, as Canterbury’s new Marlowe Theatre has been.

Designed by Keith Williams Architects, the lean, modern building with its light-filled foyer has also been largely admired by architecture critics, though the real success has to be in the increased numbers of theatregoers.

The old Marlowe Theatre, which occupied the same site, had been crammed into a converted cinema dating from the Thirties, and the space was too small to accommodate large touring shows. The brief for its replacement also asked for a second, smaller performance space.

The practice’s proposal, which Keith Williams describes as ‘radical’, was to knock down most of the existing building and replace it with a modern and purpose-built theatre.

Though being named after the famous Canterbury-born playwright and Shakespeare contemporary Christopher Marlowe, the new building makes few concessions to history: an architect could easily have been intimidated by Canterbury’s famous cathedral, which looms over the theatre site, or the Friars, a medieval street in front of it, but Williams’s unashamedly modern design captured the imagination of Canterbury Council, whose head of culture Janice McGuiness has called it ‘striking, bold and brave... The Marlowe is that very rare thing – a major new contemporary theatre building within a magnificent historic cathedral city’.

The new theatre’s exterior has been called ‘collage architecture’ because it makes use of so many different materials, from the steel-mesh skin cladding the new fly tower (which makes the Marlowe the tallest building in Canterbury after the cathedral) to the steel, stone and glass-fronted foyer, but Williams says this slightly eclectic treatment is actually in keeping with the city. ‘The thing about Canterbury is that it’s not a formal place,’ he says. ‘As you move around, views open up and change. Canterbury is a very dynamic city in that regard.’

Described by its architect as ‘essentially a complex pavilion’ because of the way it sits alone at the centre of its own ‘piazza’, the building has been designed to enhance the experience of ‘going out to the theatre’. Visitors cross a forecourt paved with black granite then pass through an 8m-high colonnade cast in white Dolomite stone before entering the double-height foyer.

From here, unless they have seats in the stalls or are visiting the smaller performance space downstairs,they ascend an unsupported scissor staircase towards the main auditorium. As they climb, the glass facade allows them to look out over the rooftops of the city, and also to be seen from outside.

The main staircase, a steel structure clad in black-painted plasterboard, has handrails of stripped steel with recessed strip lights. The stairs themselves have treads of black American walnut, a material that has become something of hallmark of Williams’s projects, not least the Wexford Opera House. ‘I think this journey from street to seat is very important,’ says Williams. ‘After all, a big part of going to the theatre is about hanging around with a drink.’

Several bars and cafes have been designed not as individual, enclosed spaces but as a continuation of the foyer. These areas feature chairs and tables by Vitra and barstools by Patricia Urquiola. ‘What we didn’t want to do was create different themes for the bar and café areas,’ says Williams. ‘Instead they read as part of the main space.’

The main event, a horseshoe-shaped auditorium set over three levels, seats 1,200 (some 200 more than the old theatre did) and has more black American walnut, this time arranged in vertical strips on its walls. Despite its name the wood actually has a dark-red, almost golden hue, and to set this off Williams chose to upholster the seats in fiery red-orange leather.

‘I think it works well as a contrast to the shiny dark red of the timber, so that you get these arcs of colour which sort of slice through the darkness,’ he says. ‘I think people on their first visit, having passed through the foyer with its fairly restrained palette of materials, are really quite surprised to find something so rich and warm and dynamic internally.’

The second, smaller, performance space, seating up to 150, is set 6m above ground level so that part of the foyer ‘flows’ underneath it, giving views out to the River Stour and also the cathedral. The interior of the second performance space is essentially a black box with black-painted walls and ceiling, and seats upholstered in charcoal-coloured fabric. Seating can be retracted and redeployed at the touch of a button so that the space can also be used as a rehearsal room.

As Williams explains, increasing the capacity of the main auditorium was not simply a matter of selling more tickets. A greater capacity means that the Marlowe can now attract larger touring performances from the West End and Glyndebourne. And despite the size of the new theatre building, Williams says he’s very pleased with the way the way it fits into its surroundings. ‘It’s great seeing how comfortably what is actually a very big building seems to fit within the context of the buildings that surround it,’ he says.

When it comes to public buildings it’s impossible to please everybody, but the reaction from architecture critics have been broadly enthusiastic, with one, Owen Pritchard of our sister magazine Blueprint, writing that the building’s ‘calm exterior acknowledges the character of Canterbury and provides a model of how to build in a contemporary style in the city’.

‘I think the reaction has been extremely good,’ says Williams, ‘and I think what this project has shown is that it is possible to do a highly contemporary building in an ancient, historic city and to pull it off. The real success, though, is how it plays: watching people go in there for the first time, sitting open-mouthed, is quite a thrill.’

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Lighting:

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• Thorn - thornlighting.com
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• Erco - erco.com
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This article was first published in fx Magazine.