Intimate scene

It used to be a cowshed, and Nicoll Russell’s new Byre Theatre pays homage to its bucolic past. It is an intimate, barn-like space made up of traditional courtyard forms and modest materials.

as the name suggests, the Byre Theatre in St Andrews was originally a cowshed. It made its stage debut in 1933, when a local theatre company started performing in the space, but even after a 1970s rebuild, there were few real theatre facilities and no fly tower. So it’s no surprise that when the theatre applied for an improvement grant in 1995, the Scottish Arts Council Lottery Fund encouraged it to hold a limited competition for a new theatre. It did so, and Nicoll Russell Studios was appointed. The project was a challenge for the Dundee-based practice: St Andrews may be best known for its golf courses and university but most of the town is also a protected conservation area.
The new building has kept the original approach along a pend (alleyway), under the covered entranceway of a grade A-listed house. At the end of the pend you emerge into the green South Court, planted with cherry trees and a lawn surrounded by ancient stone walls. At the back of the theatre is Abbey Street – a main road into the town. The narrow site was augmented by the purchase of a neighbouring house, but the logic of Nicoll Russell’s elevations and the plan stem from the constricted and ‘precious’ site. The theatre has to work both as an intimate found building and an urban streetfront paying homage to an agricultural past.
To replicate the intimacy of the previous 174-seat auditorium while increasing its capacity to 220, the architect drew heavily on its experience at Dundee Repertory Theatre and on the courtyard form common in St Andrews. Low entrances open out to larger rooms to enhance the sense of space in the foyers and auditorium. The device works well and was also used outside to enclose the South Court by building a conference room across the southern approach at first-floor level. This is where the Byre is at its best, when it is most ‘St Andrews’.
But a fly tower, which is vital to any theatre, was an obstacle to gaining planning permission. Nicoll Russell’s solution was to make the tower the same height – 17m – as a five-storey building opposite on Abbey Street. To reduce the tower’s mass, the scene-shifting counterweights were sunk in a 3m pit (below the level of the foundations) and headroom at the top of the pulleys on either side was reduced so the theatre could have a pitched roof. Access to the technical grid is usually via ladders at the sides of the fly tower, but here it has been centralised and the primary access to the grid is by way of a spiral staircase, the exterior of which is glazed so it becomes a visual device on the Abbey Street elevation. The night-time lighting of the space, done to silhouette the staircase, is dramatic, but leaves you wondering whether the technicians will emerge blinking and half-blind from the darkness of the control suite.
The architect has contrived to disguise the main volume with a cluster of lean-tos on a more residential scale. On Abbey Street, a sloping pantile roof continues the line of the street’s buildings, whereas on the pend, the low roofs nod to the houses beyond. The pantiles refer to the Byre’s history – the theatre’s exterior is designed as an idealised, generic barn. The tiles are given a modern take with a simple folded aluminium gutter, while the profiled aluminium cladding gives the impression of tarred weatherboarding. The walls are built up from the stone from the site, beautifully put together and completed with odd leftover lintels and sills.
Internally, the lower entrance floor comes off the main street and flows either into a bar and cafe area with double-height glazing at the far end, or up stairs that link with the upper foyer space, interval bar and ticket office. The plan is arranged around the auditorium, an insitu concrete drum. Public spaces take up one side, while the back-of-house offices are squeezed into the south-west corner. A band of roof glazing along the edge of the public spaces brings in natural light, as does the double-height glazing facing South Court.
The drum and stairs were conceived as modern insertions, but the dull finish of the concrete (painted with mineral paint to remove some of its imperfections) and the heaviness of the blue steel staircase work against this and one is left feeling that the potential of the staircase is not realised. More interesting are the clever details such as the pipe lights that appear to pierce the drum.
In a traditional theatre, the foyer might absorb the awkward space around the drum. At the Byre, there is not enough space to do this, but Nicoll Russell Studios has kept the curve free from structure back of house, using a void to create a connection between floors so staff on the fourth floor can call down to colleagues on level one.
The offices fitted around the void are simple, but generous when compared with many back-of-house facilities. They are simply detailed with rendered walls, wooden lintels and channelled steel door frames; the protective metal mesh to the balustrade is equally robust.
A rehearsal space and the access to it also get the rougher treatment. The room is set above the auditorium within the drum. Between the edge of the drum and the pitched roof, Nicoll Russell Studios has smuggled in clerestory windows. A generous crush foyer allows the room to be used as a performance space and can also house displays.
The practice attempted to analyse what constituted intimacy and used the constraints of the site to draw in the auditorium tightly with a steep seating rake and a close-fitting back screen. Metal mesh on the concrete breaks up acoustic reverberations. The delighted reaction of artistic director Ken Alexander when he first went into the auditorium – ‘this is the Byre Theatre’ – suggests that Nicoll Russell Studios’ formula has worked.