Rising with solemn gravitas on the South Bank of the Thames, the Royal National Theatre—designed by Denys Lasdun and completed in 1976—remains one of Britain’s most controversial and compelling works of Brutalist architecture.
Unapologetically monumental, defiantly abstract, it stands not as a relic of the past but as a lingering provocation to the present. From its inception, the building was steeped in tension: between public expectation and architectural vision, between theatrical spectacle and structural clarity. Lasdun, with no prior experience in theatre design, approached the commission as a conceptual performance in its own right. His selection in 1963 surprised many—a solo appointment without a specialist team. Yet this seeming naiveté became a virtue. He imagined the theatre not merely as a venue, but as a civic landscape, a layered terrain for cultural encounter.
What emerged over thirteen years is a concrete composition of remarkable formal discipline and expressive ambition. The building unfolds as a sequence of bold horizontals and articulated masses—its twin fly towers anchoring the scheme like sentinels, rising from a base of cascading terraces that seem to dissolve into the riverside. From Waterloo Bridge, it appears less a building and more an urban promontory—geological, deliberate, otherworldly.
Prince Charles famously derided it as resembling “a nuclear power station,” a critique that reveals more about his own anxieties than about the theatre’s ambition. Indeed, Lasdun’s design resists conventional beauty; it demands a slower reading. The language of raw concrete (béton brut) is not brutal but sensitive—board-marked, sculpted, animated by shadow. The play of surface and void mirrors the dramaturgy within.
Internally, the complexity deepens. The complex hosts three primary performance spaces: the Olivier Theatre, a vast open-stage inspired by ancient amphitheaters; the Lyttelton, a classical proscenium stage; and the Dorfman (formerly Cottesloe), an intimate studio space. But the theatre is more than its auditoria. A constellation of foyers, rehearsal rooms, education spaces, a bookshop, restaurants, and a riverside bar are threaded together with intentional porosity. These elements do not compete—they converse. The plan, expansive yet deliberate, offers moments of compression and release, forging a public interior that functions as both agora and labyrinth.
As architectural historian Kester Rattenbury observed, “The National Theatre is one of the last great buildings of the age of public sector architecture—of a really ambitious public facility which sought to be itself, not a poor copy of commercial work.” It is precisely this refusal to imitate that grants the building its enduring power.
The images accompanying this piece were taken by photographer Rory Gardiner in collaboration with Studio Esinam, as part of a visual series titled Utopia—a fitting lens through which to reimagine Lasdun’s audacious civic dream.
