Is Manchester’s new theatre a white elephant or a rose?
Round a central stage unfurls a spiral of septagonal galleries, encased in a skin of glass and supported by a web of steel tubes, the whole 150-ton superstructure being suspended on four one-foot-square points within a vast marble-pillared Victorian hall. This is the Royal Exchange Theatre in the former Royal Cotton Exchange in Manchester which was opened this week by Lord Olivier. It is the culmination of a 20-year-old dream by Richard Negri, former director of the theatre department of the Wimbledon School of Art, which has been realized by Levitt, Bernstein, Associates, a small London firm of architects. The 750-seat theatre claims to be the first in this country to be entirely built in the round, and the most intimate of its kind in the world. No member of the audience is farther than 35 feet from the centre of the stage. Predictably the whole enterprise is already surrounded by controversy. “No one ever quite believed it would happen: it was such a weird thing”, said David Levitt,
