Magazine

Presidential Address

The Crest of a Wave
This is going to be a thoroughly optimistic assessment of the current state of the Matcham legacy, but I want to start off in a quite different vein. Every artist knows that bright figures always look better set against a dark background, so let me start off with a brush full of gloom.

We all know - or we certainly ought to know by now - that at least five sixths of Frank Matcham’s total theatrical output has been destroyed or, at best, mutilated beyond recall. Out of the120 major creative works that he packed into 35 years (these, of course, are round figures - some would put the figure as high as 150, but I am erring on the side of caution) only 28 now remain in more or less complete condition. Of these, 25 are theatres (and one of them - the Lyric Hammersmith - is a modern re-creation rather than a survivor).

These depressing figures are not really surprising when viewed against the rate of loss of theatres in general. The Curtains survey estimated in 1982 that 85% of all the theatres existing in 1914 (most of them then active) had been demolished. Seen in this light, the survival rate for Frank’s theatres is slightly better than average, but it still amounts to a devastating wastage.

While we are into sad statistics, let’s have a few more. Run your eye quickly down the long list of Matcham losses in the Theatres Trust Guide. Strike out absolutely every case where you know or have reason to suspect that there had been a complete rebuilding or massive alteration before the recorded demolition date. You will still find it easy to identify between 40 and50 Matcham theatres of real quality that, if they were standing today, would be prime candidates for revival and restoration. The saddest cases are, of course, those where the places concerned now have no well-designed theatres at all, ancient or modern.

But I can make this background darker yet. Losses in the inter-war years were numerous, but somehow they were less painful than what was to follow. In the thirties cinema boom, if you lost a theatre, you might mourn the loss of the gaudy rococo of the Matcham school, but there was a fair chance that you would get a riot of Art Deco in return.

But there were no such compensations after the war. Fine theatres that stood in the way of the property development juggernaut were simply scythed down. No one in the 1950s and 60s time saw old theatres as cultural assets. Film and television were the future. Live theatre was dead on its feet, everyone knew that. The very idea of listing and preserving any of these useless old relics would have been considered laughable. Most of them weren’t even thought to be worth the bother of photographic recording before they were demolished. It was as if the leaders of the greatest theatre-building boom in history had never existed. Frank Matcham? Bertie Crewe? W G R Sprague? Never heard of them.

The great building boom of 1885 to 1915 was matched between 1950 and 1975 by the greatest theatre massacre ever seen. In that 25-year period, in Greater London alone, 35 theatres were demolished. Of these, 20 were by Matcham. And experience in the rest of the UK was much the same.

Now let’s switch on the lights. The rehabilitation of Frank Matcham and his contemporaries in the last twenty or so years has been little short of astonishing. Britain’s boom theatres are now looked upon as an extraordinary inheritance in world terms. Matcham may have been looked down on by the architectural establishment in his lifetime. He may have been instantly forgotten after his death and he may have been ignored by most architectural historians in the post-war years, but he is now accepted without question as being our greatest theatre architect, setting standards against which all the others are judged.

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