Camden's magic circle

The Roundhouse squats on the grimmest bit of the Chalk Farm Road, just uphill from the joss-sticks and Third World tat of Camden Lock. But, like some plain girl who is mysteriously never short of boyfriends, it exerts an irresistible and timeless allure. Once you're through the doors into that echoing, circular space, if you're any kind of performer, you fall in love.

Peter Brook, who turned it into an African landscape for The Ik in 1976, raved that it was a space which let the imagination soar. In its heyday in the Sixties and Seventies the most exciting talents of their generation flocked there to make magic and mischief. I remember the anarchy of Julian Beck's Living Theatre, the shamanistic rock of Jimi Hendrix and The Doors. Artangel, the promoter of installation and fruitful collaboration, crammed it with London choirs for Because I Sing.

But as Marcus Davey, its enthusiastic young executive director, says affectionately: "The Roundhouse is really a barn in a field in the middle of London."

He arrived in gritty Camden from years in the lush meadows of Dart-ington and then the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. He is hugely excited about the arrival of The Royal Shakespeare Company, which opens its production of The Winter's Tale there this weekend. Later, Ariel will fly from the roof in The Tempest and audiences will promenade around the RSC's circular stage, performers and audiences joining in a Roundhouse-inspired evening of adventure and discovery.

Davey is determined to look only onward and upward and forget the building's recent stop-start history. Decaying and desperately in need of regeneration, it was sold by the Greater London Council to Camden in 1983. Schemes for a black arts centre and then an architectural museum fizzled out. Millions were lost before it worked its charm on Bluebird Toy millionaire Torquil Norman, who bought it in 1996. The plans are for a £24.5 million refurbishment which should be ready by 2005; the building is due to close in May 2003 to prepare for its great transformation scene.

The powerhouse of the reborn Roundhouse will be the under-croft, a labyrinthine space of tunnels radiating from a central arena. Norman saw it as the perfect home for The Creative Centre, an ambitious, idealistic project which aims to use arts and arts technology to enthuse and train thousands of young people in the area.

"This is why Torquil Norman bought it," says Davey, "to take young people who've gone off track and give them skills. The project will be youth led and managed. We've started already. The idea was to start a choir which would be about celebrating different languages. We were looking for kids who'd been excluded, who were having difficulties. We started with three and it built up."

Worthy as this is, at the heart of The Roundhouse is a history of raising artistic hell on a very big scale. This over-the-top, anything-goes licence is part of its allure for impresarios, performers and audiences alike. And Davey sees it as its future as well as its past.

I'd like to see The Roundhouse become a home for developing international and physical new theatre. That's a big part of the vision. There are companies like Theatre de la Complicite. There are circuses. There are wonderful companies in southern Europe. There's a Spanish company called La Fura del Baus, who are Catalan, and they do Macbeth, with no text, lots of music and circus, big machines, blood and guts and horror. The audience is totally embraced by the performers."

If Davey's dreams come true, audiences will be able to remind themselves what it feels like to be enclosed in The Roundhouse's magic circle. When a building embraces its audience as this one does, audiences will always embrace it in return.