Sir Nicholas Hytner: My vision for the National Theatre

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Sir Nicholas Hytner10 April 2012

The recession has claimed many victims but the London theatre hasn't been one of them. Audiences have continued to flock into theatres big and small, and there has been a remarkable amount of extraordinary work on London's stages.

Companies and theatres as diverse as the Royal Court, the Royal Ballet, the Bush, Sadler's Wells, Punchdrunk and the Donmar have been triumphantly on form during the last couple of years.

Goodness knows what happens next. Sustained investment in the arts over the past 15 years has released a torrent of creativity which has, in its turn, had a transformative effect on London and on the millions who visit it. It has been educationally transformative too: schools all over the country have been the beneficiaries of new links between arts and education which have limitless potential.

I suppose it may all be jeopardised for the sake of saving a low multiple of Fred Goodwin's pension, but like all my colleagues I live in hope that the new Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt will carry the day as the Treasury addresses the deficit. It must be a good idea to continue to support the London arts community's innovation and entrepreneurialism, which have been of such dramatic economic benefit, and so exciting to be part of.

In 1976, when the National Theatre's South Bank building opened, the economic climate was similarly bleak. It didn't stop Laurence Olivier, the National's first director, and his successor, Peter Hall, realising the vision described by Harley Granville-Barker in 1904, who foresaw a "visibly and unmistakably popular institution making a large appeal to the whole community".

The same vision informs the National Theatre today. There seems to be a greater hunger than ever for live theatre and we have worked hard to respond to it. NT Live broadcasts plays from the National Theatre live or nearly live to cinemas throughout the world. Fifty thousand people each time saw our broadcasts of Racine's Phèdre and Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art, and we're confident that, before too long, we can get out to many more cinemas and many more people. We are now open seven days a week; and more than a million people have bought Travelex £10 tickets since the scheme was launched in 2003.

It's sometimes hard to remember that architect Denys Lasdun's South Bank landmark used to feature on lists of the most hated buildings in London. It now regularly features on top 10 favourite lists and I am not surprised, because I love it. Twenty-five years ago, it was a love that dared not speak its name but I, like all my colleagues, am now proudly out of the closet.

Audiences seem to love it too, but the world has moved on, our environment has evolved, and the demands made of us have changed; so we have developed an ambitious £70 million scheme called NT Future to rise to the challenge of the next 50 years.

Like all good architectural projects (this one is designed by Haworth Tompkins), it's really about what we do rather than bricks and mortar. When the building opened in 1976, we were at the far eastern corner of the South Bank. We were literally the end of the road: you couldn't walk past us and Lasdun expected you to arrive from Waterloo over one of our terraces. Twelve million people now walk past us every year and the world around us is buzzing with activity. We need to unlock what can be a forbidding exterior and let both light and the public flood in.

Metaphorically, we need to break down the National's walls.

The spiritual heart of the project is a new education centre, allowing 50,000 more people a year to engage in learning and training activities, including participatory workshops, masterclasses, seminars and study days. We are going to transform the Cottesloe theatre and its foyer so that we can equip the National for the first time in its history with integral education spaces and facilities to engage audiences young and old, hungry to know about what goes into making theatre. During the day we're going to use the Cottesloe to teach practical skills, and there'll be a public walkway through the workshops and backstage areas, linking for the first time the Cottesloe to the main foyers.

We are going to refurbish the Cottesloe itself entirely, to extend capacity (creating over 10,000 new seats a year), while improving access and comfort. Windows to the auditorium and the education centre will animate for the first time the currently lifeless eastern flank of the building.

Our river frontage is half-good, half-abominable. The approach through Theatre Square on the Waterloo Bridge side has long been terrific and the Watch This Space seasons, of free summer open-air theatre, draw tens of thousands every year.

Walk a little further along the South Bank towards Tate Modern, and you'll find one of the best pieces of river frontage in Europe occupied by our goods-in entrance. We want to relocate the service yard, and replace it with a splendid new café-bar. Judging by the popularity of our small coffee bar and of the Southbank Centre's tremendous complex of bars and restaurants, this should prove a nice long-term revenue earner.

There will be a new glass-fronted production building to the south of the National, which will include a modernised paint studio, offering passers-by dramatic views of scenic artists at work, and sets being built. This building will provide vital space for our writers, directors and actors to collaborate on innovative work, as well as dedicated suites for digital production and experiment. The National is unique in London in having on site all its scenic, props and costume workshops. We want to allow the public to share in the process and observe its internal life.

Above all, we want to make the National more sustainable, both environmentally and financially. Everything we're doing is designed not just to improve the public realm and engage more people and new audiences, but to drive costs down, and to reduce energy consumption. We've made great strides, particularly through our partnership with Philips, to use less energy.

We're going to continue this work and at the same time we want literally to green the building. It wouldn't be going too far to say that we want to make a new London park out of our terraces.

It would be all too easy, as we look hard times in the face, to recoil in horror and assume they will never end. But they will pass, as they always have, and we think now is exactly the time to be planning for the next 50 years. The theatre has always had one eye on tradition and the other on what is coming next; and through this plan we intend to connect our past with our future.

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