The South Bank's big experiment

If you go down to the South Bank today, you'll be sure of a big surprise. What last week was Denys Lasdun's austere concrete bunker is now the hippest, most happening place on London's arts scene. Or that's what the National Theatre's outgoing artistic director, Trevor Nunn, wants you to go away thinking.

The National has undergone a facelift and next week starts a five-month season of new works in two new spaces - a rejigged Lyttelton has lost its proscenium arch, a third of its 890 seats and is now described as "an enveloping womb-like space for cutting-edge drama", while the 100-seat Loft has been created out of an unloved and mostly unused circle foyer space.

The season, costing £1.5 million, is called, aptly enough, Transformation. Its success or failure depends on its artistic director, Mick Gordon, 31, an energetic and engaging Northern Irishman who ran the innovative Gate Theatre in Notting Hill for several years during the 1990s.

Eighteen months ago, Gordon was taken on as associate director of the National to combat criticism of the theatre as predictable in its programming and unwelcoming to people under 30. He and Nunn decided that the way to attract new, younger audiences was with cheap seats (some as low as £6 for this season) and new writing on unexpected subjects.

Roy Williams's play (see below) about racism among football supporters opens Transformation in the Loft, where it previews from Monday. Deborah Warner's adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's novel The PowerBook is the first production of the season in the Lyttelton space, opening on 9 May.

"I was able to draw on excellent new material from existing commissions, the National Theatre Studio and writers on attachment," says Gordon. "In tandem with that, my interest in theatre that is not necessarily reliant on a play already existing was ideal for the revamped Lyttelton space. So, we have five new works using masque, dance, circus and the novel as their inspiration."

It's a unique position for an artistic director to be in. Was Gordon like a kid in a candy store with his new commissions? "A candy store with lots of rules," he says. "Asking people - artists and crew - to change their way of working, adapting processes in place for years to accommodate 13 world premieres and then five very difficult pieces in one space had to be done carefully." In fact, Gordon has negotiated new working practices for the National's technical and backroom staff, which must augur well for incoming artistic director Nicholas Hytner, who takes up his post later this year.

Will Transformation, a one-off season, have any other lasting effect on the National? "Yes," says Gordon, "because having done it once, no one will ever be able to say, 'That can't be done.' And artists will be pushing for more challenging work to be performed here, or indeed for this experiment to be repeated."

Why, though, has the National gone to so much trouble and expense to create new spaces when it already has a small theatre, the 350-seat Cottesloe?

"The Cottesloe was already programmed for one thing," Gordon says, "but it's also hugely critically exposing to put new writers in there, as critics have an expectation of what should be performed on its stage. Housing a group of younger writers in a new space that has no critical expectation - and a far lower financial burden - allows them to take greater risks."