Young Vic set for bold new drama

Architects and theatre directors are not usually best friends. Perhaps it is because their temperaments are too alike - big egos marshalling others to achieve their vision - or because their goals are too different: the eternal monument for one, the dazzling moment for the other. But those theatrical buildings most admired for their architecture (the Sydney Opera House, for one) are rarely those most beloved by directors.

Over the past half-century the most purposeful directors, such as Peter Brook (who also maintains close links with the Young Vic), liked to seek out spaces that had not been designed by architects at all, or had been designed as warehouses or industrial buildings rather than theatres.

The success of the old engine shed that is the Roundhouse, or the Almeida theatre's occupation of the semi-derelict brick box of the Gainsborough Studios, show the enduring power of the undesigned and the sometimes barely standing.

For architects, meanwhile, the words "stage set" or "theatrical" are insults, meaning false, insubstantial and not serious. It wasn't always so. In classical architecture of both the renaissance and ancient times, theatre architecture was consciously used as a test-bed for more permanent buildings, but over the intervening centuries this rapport has been lost.

The rarity of ententes in the enmity between theatre and architecture is the reason why last week I found myself in room made of painted concrete blocks, with beige benches and black metal, a construction built for £60,000 in the Seventies and only intended to be temporary, which has been respectfully rescued and reconditioned, as if it were a famous Tudor wreck brought up from the bed of the Channel.

This room is the main auditorium of the Young Vic, and it owes its reverential treatment to the unusual fact that it was designed by architects to be a theatre, and theatre people like it.

"When we were debating whether to demolish it, we asked ourselves if it would be sentimental and feeble to keep it," says David Lan, the Young Vic's artistic director, but he also describes this unassuming box as "the best 20th century architect-designed theatre space".

The qualities of the new theatre - which reopens next week after a two-year closure during which 22 productions were performed in other venues - include the density of its seating, which now gives room for up to 600 in a space that still feels intimate, and the ability it gives to talk conversationally from stage to gallery, or from one side of the auditorium to another "It's about detail," says Lan of performances here, "every gesture registers." It is also flexible, allowing directors to put the stage, and its entrances and exits, more or less wherever they want.

It has what Steve Tompkins, architect of the renovation, calls "a rough and provisional quality" that gives room to the imagination of the performers and audience to complete the picture with their own imaginations. As the theatre designer William Dudley said, "Don't finish the story". New theatres that are too perfect and too well appointed to become "manipulative", leave no room for interpretation. Lan says the Young Vic also has the "dimension of time". Built on a site originally "cleared in an evening" in a wartime bombing raid, it was created in 1970 with a planned lifespan of five years. Yet it stayed, became a popular "part of the London consciousness", aged, decayed almost to the point of no return, and now has been renovated and extended. And "theatre-is about time," he says, "it is where time is condensed."

Time was also present in the concept of Bill Howell, architect of the 1970 scheme, when he decided to make the entrance to the theatre through an old butcher's shop that still stood on the site, with its ornamental tile work becoming an unconscious mimic of the decorative foyers of Victorian theatres. The architectsof the £12.5 million renovation, Haworth Tompkins, have retained this shop, as well as the original auditorium, while adding new layers in the form of an enlarged foyer, two new studio spaces seating 160 and 80, offices and extra back-of-house.