The Sunday Times

15 March 2004
by Hugh Pearman

At long last, Hammersmith's Lyric theatre has a presence on the street, says Hugh Pearman

There are famous conservation victories, there are notoriously insensitive redevelopments and, from time to time, you get the two combined: an unearthed Shakespearian playhouse or a fragment of Roman city wall buried in the basement of an ugly office block, for instance.
At the Lyric Hammersmith, things have gone a stage further. There, you get three layers of history in one. You have the pioneering conservation victory wrapped up in lowest-common-denominator developer's floor space, with, to redeem it, a £2.6m piece of classic, orthodox high-modern archi- tecture, opening on April 2. It is an object lesson in the purest architectural pragmatism.

If you've never been to the Lyric, that might well be because you couldn't find the entrance. A few minutes before curtain-up, the ticket office commonly receives anguished calls from patrons lost on the street outside. You are directed down an unlikely passageway between two shops. You rise through several seemingly endless levels, via what seems like some kind of student-union bar, until finally you are in the broad, bland 1970s vestibules of the theatre.

So you go in, and - as if in some hallucinogenic spy movie of the period - suddenly you have time-warped into late-Victorian London. People come: the theatre's reputation is high.

That has been the Lyric experience to date, interesting in its crackpot way, but not exactly a refulgent dialectic between the architectural mores of the 19th and 20th centuries. It comes as no surprise to find that the building is one of the more humdrum works from the practice of that nonpareil commercial architect of the post-war boom, Richard Seifert. Nor that it is built of the cheapest possible materials: a concrete block made of concrete blocks. The final non-surprise, again very much in period, is that the whole development - shops, offices, car park, council flats, theatre - was part of a vaster plan for Hammersmith, inevitably involving high-level walkways, and equally inevitably abandoned before the high-level walkways were built. Which left, high up in the air, inside its utili-tarian grey overcoat, the interior of Frank Matcham's 1895 Lyric.

It's Matcham's year, all right, Matcham the architect of the restored Hackney Empire and London Coliseum. The late-1960s battle to "save" the Lyric - a victory that in fact meant the demolition, in 1971, of all but the rococo auditorium interior, which was put into storage to be clipped back together years later - nonetheless marked a turning point in attitudes towards the popular theatres of the Victorian and Edwardian efflorescence. Suddenly, they were seen as perhaps having a value. Rather as Victorian pubs were incongruously left marooned amid council-estate wastelands, so the patrician planners of the time decided that the people should be allowed some remnants of their treasured culture, sanitised, of course, and with a modish "studio theatre" added. So the Lyric remained, borne aloft in a calcareous concrete embrace, until enough lottery money came along to allow a bit of architectural payback. Thus, Rick Mather, architect to many an art gallery and university, restaurant and private residence, has brought the Lyric back down to earth and given it a street presence again.

Mather's is one of the first names on anyone's list when it comes to stitching damaged bits of urban fabric together. "Giving something to the street" is practically the motto of this urbane, London-based American architect, the author of the most credible masterplan to date for the South Bank cultural quarter. Although the Lyric is a tiny job by his standards these days (the $100m expansion of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is occupying his studio greatly at present), it bears a particular hallmark of his: it's so simple, so apparently obvious.

The 1970s block had a big, useless elevated outdoor terrace, doubtless originally envisaged as a modern Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a verdant street in the sky, by the Brylcreemed walkway planners of the 1960s. All Mather has done is to take a section of this redundant space, giving onto a newly pedestrianised square to the side of the building, and splice in a new building. This gives you, in one, a new entrance foyer and cafe on the ground, a curving stair and a lift to the upper level, an education room, a big new rehearsal room and some offices. It is a sizable chunk of a larger Mather rescue scheme going back several years, but it works as a set piece in its own right. Mather has worked his horizontals and verticals, slyly subverting the lumpen lines of his base material, transforming it into a building that, with its bright, internally illuminated glass walls, acts as a great big sign saying: "Theatre!" The next stage, starting immediately, is for the square outside - just a big bit of leftover road space - to be given some character by the excellent Edinburgh-based landscape architects Gross.Max. Upon which this long-vandalised corner of London (weep at the devastatingly banal, gargantuan 1980s Hammersmith Broadway development a few steps away) will show some small signs of returning civilisation.

On one level, the story of the Lyric might seem to be about nothing more than a neat little extension to a fine producing fringe theatre by an undeniably clever architect. On another level, it is a parable. It contains within itself the history of British cities over 40 years, from megalomaniac "comprehensive redevelopment" to New Urbanism, from Car Is King to Car Is Crime. The Lyric is consequently not insignificant. Its story is a big one, and it is by no means over yet.