“It will be seen that the Theatre we propose would be a National Theatre in this sense, that it would be from the first conditionally - and, in the event of success, would become absolutely - the property of the nation."

William Archer and Harley Granville-Barker "A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates", (London: Duckworth & Co,1907), xvii[1]

When Albert Finney walked onto the Lyttleton stage for its inaugural performance as Hamlet on 16th March 1976, it marked the start of a new era in the life of the National Theatre Company, as it moved into its purpose-built home. For many, the work was a success: ‘I have never seen such a totally satisfying blend of actor and concept,’ Billington wrote in The Guardian,[2] but the transfer of the established production to the new National Theatre brought enhanced scrutiny and a fresh context; and the sparse staging, use of regional accents and the almost animalist rage Finney gave Hamlet was not reviewed positively by the press as a worthy first offering on this new national stage. The tumultuous production reflected the political context into which the National Theatre was launched: there was widespread anger at the worsening economic situation and extensive industrial action in both public and private sectors. [3] London was in the grip of a protracted housing crisis, inflation was rampant [4] and deindustrialisation was promoting rising unemployment as the economy moved away from manufacturing to service sectors.[5] The building had cost £19 M against an initial first agreed budget of £7.5M and this had been widely debated in Parliament[6] and given extensive media coverage.[7] The nation had finally been given a home for its premier theatre company, but was this an appropriate use of government funding? Did the nation even want it? As Lord Birkett summed up ‘No sooner had the delay in the opening of this building been announced and made public, than a swarm of crows settled upon the future of the National Theatre with great cries of dismay and alarm and, indeed, almost ill-will towards it.’[8]

The National Theatre had had the most protracted of births, opening a full 72 years after the scheme of estimates was presented to Parliament. The ebb and flow of National Political, Social and Cultural life had been violently disrupted by 2 world wars, shelving and stalling the project until the location, size and budget were unrecognisable from the initial William Lyon Somerville scheme of 1924, included in the 1930 reprint of Granville-Barker ‘A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates’.[9]

Ultimately, it was after the initial rush of post-war regeneration of London that the project was finally both funded and fully supported and the National Theatre Company was founded in 1962 with Lawrence Olivier [10] appointed as director. Construction labour shortages and rampant inflation caused funding problems, and so the build phase was elongated to 8 years. By 1976, those born in the wave of post-war optimism were now young adults grappling with the realities of a poor domestic economy and a new theatre may not have felt like a good use of public resources to much of the population. During this period Internationalism had also bred the corporate glass towers that were multiplying across the world; the World Trade Centre in New York had been quickly and efficiently constructed and opened in 1973, London’s Nat West Tower was taking shape and promising to revolutionise the landscape of the City of London, and the post-modern Pompidou Centre in Paris was nearing completion. But the National Theatre looked away from the cutting edge of high-tech construction, and back towards an era that for some had marked a low water mark of architecture. Benedict Nightingale wrote a front-page editorial in the New Statesman in 1974 under the heading ‘The National Theatre Tragedy’ evoking Churchill and comparing the building to a cumbersome Great War battleship and saying that it should ‘excite us as much as the launching of the Dreadnought.’[11] Sutherland Lyall contrasted the National Theatre with the earlier buildings of the South Bank by describing it as a ‘safe’  and ‘sterile’ design with none of the visionary qualities of the Festival Hall or the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the time they were built.[12] The building proved divisive for years, famously being described by King Charles IV, then Prince of Wales, during a speech in 1986 as ‘a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting’[13] and later being voted ‘the runaway winner as worst building in the country’[14] by Observer readers in 1989.

The National Theatre may not have been universally welcomed by the public or the press on opening night, but it had been conceived with egalitarian objectives even from its first detailed proposal in ‘A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates’[15] in 1904 with public ownership of both the building and theatrical agenda on an equal footing with the need to perform Shakespeare’s canon more fully. The same democratic thread ran through the debate surrounding the project in 1962, and this thesis traces the original intention of the building through the funding, design and launch phases and then examines the extent to which the National Theatre is a ‘the property of the nation’[16] today.