The (Insert Name Here) Theatre
Who deserves to have a Theatre named after them: the successful, or the daring? John Gielgud, Ivor Novello, Noel Coward, Stephen Sondheim, Laurence Olivier, David Garrick and Harold Pinter have all had the honour. Is there a case for including Terrence Rattigan among their number? It's over thirty years since his death and audiences still respond to his well-made plays full of unspoken and understated emotions.
A lot has happened to theatre in between, a fact acknowledged by the naming of the Harold Pinter Theatre, but there are many more people who dared, often against the odds, to invigorate and expand the possibilities of theatre: John Osborne, Joan Littlewood, Mike Leigh, Shelagh Delaney, Joe Orton, Caryl Churchill, Edward Bond, Arnold Wesker, Samuel Beckett and Peter Brook to name a few. Some of these names are still going strong and enjoy successful revivals too – why not name a theatre after them?
Content within the rule-bound four walls of a drawing room, Rattigan wasn't an innovative new force of theatre, but he knew a good story and had the talent for telling them successfully. I wouldn't call his work either radical or comforting, but it works and the stage is large enough to accommodate the commercial and the familiar with the fresh and the experimental – provided it works.
Only time can help to define those playwrights who are deserving of having the fitting memorial of having a theatre named after them, but this can also feel like an act of possession. Just as a part doesn't belong to an actor, so a theatre doesn't belong to any single artist, but to the team that works together to bring a text to life and to the audience who pay to come and see it. However, the name of Rattigan would feel more at home on a traditional, proscenium arch theatre in the West End than the name of Pinter, or the name of Peter Brook, who said 'I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.'
