Richard Pilbrow
Sir Laurence Olivier’s lighting designer and theatre consultant for the National Theatre
In the mid-1950s, a young man called Richard Pilbrow decided to make his life in the newly-establishing profession of lighting design. He formed a company called Theatre Projects, renting lighting equipment to productions he designed. This put Richard at the centre of British theatre at a remarkable time. He got a phone call from Laurence Olivier, asking him to help out with lighting at the newly formed Chichester Festival Theatre. From there, in 1963, Olivier asked him to become the lighting designer for the newly formed National Theatre company.
That put him in the room when discussions about the new National Theatre building began.
At first, he would just offer suggestions and advice on technical questions. But as he sat through those meetings, informally at first, then as part of the Building Committee Olivier established of the leadings theatre minds of the day, then eventually as the National's theatre consultant, he would offer counsel to both Olivier and the architect, Denys Lasdun, and in doing so ultimately helped shape the very building itself - the distinctive flytower of the Olivier Theatre which dominates and defines the building came from a sketch by Richard. When the building opened in 1976, it contained a series of remarkable technical advances designed by Richard and his Theatre Projects team.
But at the same time, Richard came to fear that for all the remarkable technological advances it contained, the National's two main theatres presented serious challenges to directors, designers, performers and audiences alike.
He spent the next fifty years learning from that - identifying just what it is that gives some spaces that magical ‘sense of theatre’, and working with architects to design new performance spaces to achieve that magic. You'll have appreciated his work if you've been to theatres from London to Los Angeles, Singapore to Olso to China.
A Sense of Theatre is Richard's attempt to share that lifetime of analysis, exploration and experience.
It presents the history of how the National - both the building and the company it provides a home to - came to be, including the discussions that led to the design of the building from the never-before publicly seen minutes of that Building Committee.
It looks at the building’s working life over the last fifty years: the shows that have been created in it, the people who have worked there who have taken those flaws as challenges to overcome – often to spectacular effect.
It looks at the lessons to be learnt, and how those lessons have sometimes (but not always) be learnt in the generation of performance spaces that have followed the National.
And it reveals how ultimately even Denys Lasdun came to realise that theatres are magical places that need understanding and special care in their creation, becoming the first superstar architect to turn to Richard Pilbrow and Theatre Projects to help design a theatre, for the proposed new opera house in Genoa, Italy – a route since followed by architects such as Foster, Gehry, Piano, Safdie and Myers.
The book is not Richard’s voice alone: it features conversations with countless people who have worked in the building – directors, designers and performers alike.
This is a book that has truly been eight years plus a lifetime in the making, beginning with the first show at the National in October 1963 when Richard was just 30, ending sixty years later when, with the book written, Ricahrd passed away on 6th December 2023, aged 90.
Read about Richard in The Guardian newspaper
